Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Arthur Brooks (@arthurbrooks), a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness.

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Tim Ferriss: Arthur Brooks, we meet again.

Arthur C. Brooks: Nice to see you, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: Nice to see you. Glad to see the vascularity in your arms is still visible even through the long sleeve shirt.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Because every woman wants a vascular man.

Tim Ferriss: You know, I only take my cues from the internet.

Arthur C. Brooks: Exactly. My wife, every day, she says, “I love you. You’re so vascular.”

Tim Ferriss: I could really take this a lot of directions, but I’m going to take a hard left from vascularity, and I’m going to try to pronounce — Brahma Murta?

Arthur C. Brooks: Brahma Muhurta.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Brahma Muhurta. And the reason I’m bringing this up is because I want to offer some candy, much like maybe an E.T., putting the Reese’s little pieces on the floor to lure E.T. out. I want to bring my listeners and diehards into the conversation with a morning routine. And we’ll talk about evening routines at the end as bookmarks, and then we’re going to dive into all sorts of stuff. But what is Brahma Muhurta, and could you describe your personal morning routine?

Arthur C. Brooks: 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. And 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 one of the things that I’ve found is that discipline and an understanding of your own human physiology, the biology and neuroscience, is critical for actually becoming a happier person. I have a morning routine that I dedicate to being both more productive and having higher wellbeing. 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 Muhurta. And I’ve studied 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 Muhurta, which in Sanskrit means the creator’s time.

Now, a Muhurta is 48 minutes long. So two Muhurtas, the Brahma Muhurta, is an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. And the whole idea, going back thousands of years, is you get up an hour and 36 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. And we don’t know if it’s two Muhurtas is the right number of Muhurtas, 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 4:30 in the morning, which is a lot before dawn in — 

Tim Ferriss: Who knew that Jocko Willink was such a fan of Vedic traditions? He also wakes up at 4:30. Please continue.

Arthur C. Brooks: 4:30 is a good time for a lot of different reasons. You try to retrofit your schedule the way 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 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?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What do you do?

Arthur C. Brooks: I pick up heavy things and run around.

Tim Ferriss: What does it look like?

Arthur C. Brooks: Well, the most important room in my house is the gym. 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 quiet.

Tim Ferriss: So lift heavy things that are quiet.

Arthur C. Brooks: I can’t be clanking around down there, because I’m like, I don’t want to wake up my grandchildren. But I do, generally speaking, two-thirds resistance, one-third Zone 2, but I tailor that to what my day is going to look like. So if I have a sedentary day, I’ll do more Zone 2 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 going to be walking seven or 10 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.

Tim Ferriss: What would the, let’s just say, prototypical two-thirds resistance, one-third Zone 2, or whatever 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 2 do you like? Because for instance, like with Zone 2, it’s like, I travel a lot. Stationary bikes can be a real hassle because of the fitting.

Arthur C. Brooks: Right.

Tim Ferriss: But then, all right, maybe you use a treadmill with an incline with a rucksack or something like that. I’d just love to know the specifics.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, for sure. I’m very old school. And my resistance training, actually, I learned the routines that I do when I was in my 30s. I really started lifting when I was in my 30s. And my dad died and I changed a lot of the things in my life. I quit drinking alcohol in my 30s, 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 in 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, what’s my goal? My goal is not to turn into a statue and be admired. I mean, I’d been married for a long time at that point. I mean, that was sort of done. And besides, my wife doesn’t care. She just wants me to be happy and healthy.

I wanted to be doing that in my 70s. I wanted to be healthy in my 70s. I wanted to be hanging out with my wife and dandling my 11th grandchild on my knee when I was 78 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 the shredded guys train. And now I’m the old guy. So my wife says that sleeping with me is like holding a leather sack of ropes, which I think is a compliment. I’m not sure. But I’ve been married decades, Tim, decades. But I would go to these iron gyms — 

Tim Ferriss: It’s better than a leather sack of lard, right?

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, for sure. For sure. It’s like, ropes. And so, I’d go to these gyms for 78-year-old guys who are completely shredded. They look like old roosters. And they’re working out, and I would say, “Teach me. Teach me, maestro, 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.

Tim Ferriss: And is it push, pull, legs every workout?

Arthur C. Brooks: No, it’s push, pull, legs on different days.

Tim Ferriss: Got it.

Arthur C. Brooks: So it’s not a pure bro split, but it’s near on. Making sure that you’re not getting heroic with the amount of weight. You’re making sure that you’re using dumbbells and not bars, because you can get full range of motion, but 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 20 minutes and 40 minutes of Zone 2 cardio, which I have an elliptical machine, because it’s super easy on the joints. And 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 for — 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 4:45 to 5:45 in the morning every single day. That’s the one thing I can really count on that’s always going to be good. Always going to be good.

Tim Ferriss: Do you record your workouts?

Arthur C. Brooks: Like, videotape my workouts?

Tim Ferriss: No. In any type of workout journal, or is it so intuitive at this point that you’re like, I really know, since I’m using dumbbells and dumbbells should be consistent from place to place.

Arthur C. Brooks: I can tell you what I did on this day in 2001.

Tim Ferriss: Meaning you remember it?

Arthur C. Brooks: No. Meaning it’s written down.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. It’s like, wait a sec.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, no, no, no. I’m not.

Tim Ferriss: There’s some people who are like that.

Arthur C. Brooks: Some sort of a Rain Man deal? Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Well, for instance, people you wouldn’t expect. Arnold Schwarzenegger loves chess, and when I first interviewed him, I was talking to his right hand man and 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.”

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s amazing. So no, I’m not doing that, but I can tell you, I mean, I have journals that go back. I write it down. And so, I know what’s on what day and 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 until, back to my 30s.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m the same.

Arthur C. Brooks: And now I’m 61 years old. So that’s a lot of date books.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have workouts going back to 16, and I still have all them.

Arthur C. Brooks: Just to keep them.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t know why I keep them, but I have them.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 it’s progress toward the goal. And this is a record of Tim’s progress going all the way back to 16. It’s evidence that you’re a better man than when you were 16 years old. Let’s hope.

Tim Ferriss: Certainly not as strong as I was when I was in my 20s, but still Zone 2.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Not dying.

Tim Ferriss: Things like this.

Arthur C. Brooks: No, it’s fantastic. And it’s really a great way to start the day, and there’s a lot of research, once again, 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.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, me too.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. I mean, you’re a mad scientist, which is typically — 

Tim Ferriss: I’m a poet. We talked about this last time.

Arthur C. Brooks: Oh, we did this. You are a poet. So you’re below average positive.

Tim Ferriss: Below average positive. High peak negative.

Arthur C. Brooks: High peak negative. So I’m at the 90th percentile in negative mood. And there are ways, typical ways that people 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 because the amygdala of the brain is what largely 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 fear by redirecting the activity of the amygdala.

Tim Ferriss: Sounds right. Checks out.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, but there’s good ways to do it, like you’re working, like developing your spirituality and picking up heavy things and running around.

Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to stick on the heavy things for a second here, as well as the elliptical.

Arthur C. Brooks: Because we’re not even done with that.

Tim Ferriss: We’re not even done. So we have the waking early, let’s call it 4:30. For me, early, 7:30 this morning, I was very pleased with myself after arriving from travel at close to midnight.

Arthur C. Brooks: Hey, that’s 4:30 on the West Coast.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly, exactly. It’s 4:30 somewhere. And we’ve covered that briefly. For Zone 2, are you wearing a heart rate monitor? Are you doing the talk test? How are you tracking?

Arthur C. Brooks: Talk test.

Tim Ferriss: Talk test.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s a 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 I use very, very simple biometrics and very simple health monitoring. I’m going to need to move up to something better at some point, but if I get too much data, I’m in trouble.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, it’s like having seven different drafts of a piece of writing you’re working on. Now what do you do? I mean, in a sense, there’s data, and then there’s information which you need to analyze. So there is a point of diminishing returns. 

PREROLL

Tim Ferriss: Talk test, for people, just very briefly. Peter Attia has videos on this of himself on a stationary bike, demonstrating it on social media if you want to try to find them. But in effect, and please tell me if I’m off base with you approach it, you are able to, while you’re in this Zone 2 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: Right. That’s exactly right. Zone 3, you’re too out of breath to have a normal conversation. Zone 4, you’re gasping for air. So I mean, Zone 1 is just, you’re strolling, is kind of what it comes down to. And your heart rate to be in the Zone 2 is usually around 120 beats per minute. And I’ll also do some periods of some intervals in that. I’ll do two or three intervals during a half hour Zone 2 cardio session. So I’ll take it up to 160 beats per minute for a full minute, then bring it back. I’ll do some of that HIIT training while I’m doing it. But 120 beats per minute is a really, really easy thing to ascertain, because I’m an old musician. That’s the speed of a Sousa march.

Tim Ferriss: A what?

Arthur C. Brooks: A Sousa march. That’s 120 beats per minute. That’s how you know.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, when you put out your elliptical e-course, I think this is the lead in-music.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s my bump music, man.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Actually, 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 120 or 130 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 120, versus 130, versus whatever it might be.

All right, you have your workout. After the workout, what is your morning routine?

Arthur C. Brooks: 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, to say, “Everybody’s got to go to mass!” And that’s not going to be effective, because that’s not for everybody. But 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 opportunity, because 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 I’m home. But 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 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 the day at 6:30 mass, the two of us do. That’s very important for us.

Tim Ferriss: How long is mass?

Arthur C. Brooks: Half an hour.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Arthur C. Brooks: Daily mass is half an hour. Sunday mass is an hour, but daily mass is half an hour. During the week, after 30 minutes, no souls are saved. According to science, no. So we do that, and that’s a period of prayer and reflection. Some people prefer Vipassana meditation. Our friend Ryan Holiday does a lot with actually studying the Stoic philosophers, but you need what the ancients would call the holy hour. And they would be a full hour. 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.

Tim Ferriss: So I want to bookmark, just to give a shameless plug for our first conversation.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: For people who are like, “Oh, yeah, okay. Well, I didn’t grow up Catholic.” You didn’t grow up Catholic.

Arthur C. Brooks: I didn’t grow up Catholic.

Tim Ferriss: Your parents thought that your conversion was an act of youthful rebellion.

Arthur C. Brooks: Which it might’ve been.

Tim Ferriss: It might’ve been, but it stuck.

Arthur C. Brooks: Fair is fair.

Tim Ferriss: But it stuck.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So if you want the backstory, including some wild stories, then listen to our first conversation.

Arthur C. Brooks: So I’m basically the equivalent of like a freaked out hippie who went to India and got converted and practiced an exotic religion for the rest of my life. But my exotic religion is Catholicism.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, depending on where you start, it’s pretty exotic.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So you have the holy half hour.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, our routines have a lot of similarities, although the flavors are slightly different. We could talk about that.

Arthur C. Brooks: Probably the neurophysiological effects are the same.

Tim Ferriss: Very, very similar, I would imagine. So after the holy half hour, what happens?

Arthur C. Brooks: After the holy half hour, now I’ve taken no nutrition except for salty water with some high dose, I take high dose creatine hydrate with my workout drink.

Tim Ferriss: What’s high dose?

Arthur C. Brooks: High dose for me is 15 to 20 grams a day.

Tim Ferriss: That is a lot. Okay.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. So the first five is for muscle protein synthesis or volumization of muscles, which is really good for your workout. The other is 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 I’m a crummy sleeper. And 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 trying to bank, neurologically, four hours of concentration, and it’s mostly creativity. So 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. I’m taking no caffeine.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Arthur C. Brooks: This is important. I don’t take any caffeine to wake up. Huberman’s right on this. And this is very contested in the literature, about A2A 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. And this will give me, this is just modafinil. At this point, this is just vacuuming. This is going to vacuum — 

Tim Ferriss: Be careful with actual modafinil, kiddos.

Arthur C. Brooks: No, no, I know. I’m saying like that. So it’s vacuuming the dopamine into the prefrontal cortex. So 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 20s, I was a smoker, and I don’t want — I mean, I blew it.

Tim Ferriss: 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, then those micro doses become something along the line of mezzodoses, and then before you know it, you’re addicted to nicotine.

Arthur C. Brooks: Pretty soon it’s all nicotine, all the time.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly.

Arthur C. Brooks: And caffeine is highly addictive as well, but as a psychostimulant, it’s better studied. It’s much, much easier to self-manage. I get usually about 380 milligrams of caffeine.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s decent.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s decent.

Tim Ferriss: Holy cow. All right.

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s a venti dark roast from Starbucks. I grew up in Seattletown.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, 380. For a lot of people, if you have moderately strong coffee, that’s going to be almost four cups of coffee.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: That’s power.

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s 20 ounces of good — and again, the darker roasts have less caffeine, but I like them better because I grew up on the north side of Queen Ann Hill in Seattle when there was one Starbucks. And so I’ve been doing that since I was in eighth grade.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So you have the holy half hour.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then after the holy half hour, you haven’t had any caffeine up to that point.

Arthur C. Brooks: And now it’s 7:15 in the morning.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Arthur C. Brooks: So I’m back from mass.

Tim Ferriss: Now what do you do?

Arthur C. Brooks: I brew the coffee.

Tim Ferriss: All right.

Arthur C. Brooks: And I know how to brew coffee.

Tim Ferriss: Now, do you have the 380 in a megadose, or is that titrated over time?

Arthur C. Brooks: No, that’s in a megadose that usually it takes me about 45 minutes to drink.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God.

Arthur C. Brooks: Half an hour to 45 minutes to drink. I know. Well, part of it is I’ve got this grizzled adrenal system. My HPA axis is like, it’s like a building falling down at this point.

Tim Ferriss: You just have to donkey kick your adrenals.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it. So then you brew the coffee and sit down to — 

Arthur C. Brooks: Then I make my first nutrition of the day. And the first nutrition of the day is 60 to 70 grams of protein. And protein is really important, especially with a tryptophan-rich source of protein for mood management. And I’m not going to eat, and I’m not eating a turkey leg or something like that. I’m not like Henry VIII for that. It’s mostly whey protein powder mixed in with non-fat, unflavored Greek yogurt, which is great. And there’s so many — and it’s like, anymore, I just read that the three most, the fastest growing foods in America today are cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, and whey protein powder. Which is extraordinary, extraordinary when you think about it. But you and I got to this much earlier, back when it was harder to find Greek yogurt. And I put a little artificial sweetener in it, because I’m not afraid of artificial sweetener. And I get more micronutrients in it with putting in walnuts and blueberries and 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 everyday. I’ve been taking a multivitamin for decade after decade after decade. And there’s 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. Sometimes I’ll take a good multivitamin in the morning. Sometimes I wait later in the day and take AG1. But you need a good multivitamin. Almost everybody does.

Tim Ferriss: So a few — not persnickety, but detail questions, because that’s how my mind operates. Why no fat Greek yogurt instead of something with fat?

Arthur C. Brooks: And fat would be better for me, to be sure. It’s that the fat bothers my stomach. So just, I don’t like it. It fills me up too much. It’s hard to get to 65 grams of protein when you’ve got that much fat in the yogurt, because you’re just going to be just falling asleep. I only do that because it’s uncomfortable to have the fat.

Tim Ferriss: Got it. And I’ll add just a footnote for some people listening will say, wait a second, I thought you could only absorb 30 grams of protein at a sitting. That is not quite — 

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s old school research.

Tim Ferriss: 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s not true.

Tim Ferriss: 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: Right, that’s correct. And I’m completely persuaded by the 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’ve 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-10 body fat. 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, me too. I’m kidding.

Arthur C. Brooks: But it’s just because of my genetics.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve been trying to get there since I was 14.

Arthur C. Brooks: Well, if the genetics don’t want it, then they’re going to go against it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ve got to battle dwarf genetics.

Arthur C. Brooks: No, man, if I had your frame, I mean, I would love that. I would be able to lift heavy. But the way to do that for me is to stay at 200 grams of protein a day. So to keep moderate calories in 200 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, is 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.

Tim Ferriss: So you get your colossus of caffeine that can follow the holy half hour, just to keep up with the narration.

Arthur C. Brooks: And not everybody has to drink 380 milligrams of caffeine.

Tim Ferriss: You have your 60 to 70 grams of protein as described, and then you are sitting down to write. What are you doing?

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, then I can sit down and write. If I’m at home, 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 kind of it. And I’ve got a very quiet place. I’m not looking at email. I’m not answering text messages. I’m not reading the Wall Street Journal. And to do this, 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’re getting up when the sun is warm and you’re having the nice big, three espressos to try to wake up, and you’re not optimizing your brain chemistry appropriately, you’ll get two hours of creativity, max.

Tim Ferriss: Max.

Arthur C. Brooks: And that’s why Hemingway used to write for two hours.

Tim Ferriss: I was just going to bring up Hemingway, also because he would leave things unfinished. He would basically end 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 ChatGPT, 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 write?

Arthur C. Brooks: To begin with, you need to know what you’re going to do the next day, the day before. You need to make a list of the things you’re going to do, in priority order. And the priority order is not what you like the most, but what actually requires the most concentration and creativity. So the thing that you need to hit immediately, which will be the last 10 percent of that page you were writing. That’s a really good protocol to procrastinate that last 10 percent, because your most creative, most productive, your best quality stuff is first. And so, you want to leave It lasts to be the first the next day. And that way you’ve got consistent creativity. If I’m writing a column, for example, and I’m on deadline every single week for a column, and it’s 1,200 words a week of science about human happiness —

Tim Ferriss: Sounds stressful. Sounds like a way to make yourself unhappy.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, no, I’m hunted. But doing that, if I sit down and write it, the kicker is always going to be worse than the lead. And so, the kicker is always the first thing in the morning, some day. So the kicker is as good as the lead, or better, because I’m leaving it so that my brain chemistry is optimized to the product that I’m trying to create. 

That was a very good protocol from Hemingway. His problem was, he was a drunk. And when you’re a drunk, what you’re doing is you’re borrowing tomorrow’s dopamine tonight.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you’re borrowing, as a friend of mine put it also, you’re borrowing happiness from tomorrow.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. And the reason is because your dopamine is going to be below the baseline and you’re going to have anhedonia in the morning. Anhedonia is the characteristic of clinical depression, which is a deficit of dopamine, meaning an inability to feel pleasure, and is below the baseline when you’re hungover, below the baseline when you’ve popped it really hard and you’re getting the trough the next day. So 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.

Tim Ferriss: So that’s why he had two hours of productivity.

Arthur C. Brooks: I’m going to bed sober.

Tim Ferriss: 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 Oura 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: Your sleep architecture is so messy.

Tim Ferriss: It’s just — and for me now, for whatever reason at this age, I’m 48, even one — I had one martini with my brother. I don’t see him that much. We went out to a nice speakeasy, I had a drink, and just shattered my sleep. It was shocking to me. Kind of embarrassing, honestly.

Arthur C. Brooks: The older you get, the older you get. And 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 20s and 30s. 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, it’s neurotoxic. And you have to be careful applying neurotoxic substances to yourself, because you’re going to pay a price for that.

Now, there’s a cost/benefit analysis to anything. I don’t drive the safest car. 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. It just isn’t.

Tim Ferriss: So, your routine, I’ll just pause us there, is very, very similar to mine.

Arthur C. Brooks: Tell me more.

Tim Ferriss: Well, right now I’m day three of segueing into ketosis. We’re always producing ketones, but I’m probably, just because I’ve done this a lot, I’m probably at right now 1.2 millimolars in terms of blood concentration of beta-hydroxybutyrate after — 

Arthur C. Brooks: You like ketosis? You like how it feels?

Tim Ferriss: 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, let’s just call it four to six weeks of nutritional ketosis once, or twice a year to appear to be very cheap insurance.

Arthur C. Brooks: Oh, what’s your APOE profile?

Tim Ferriss: APOE3-4.

Arthur C. Brooks: You’re 3-4?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 3-4.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And there are other risk factors. I also have relatives who are 3-3, 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 30 grams of protein within 30 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 2:00, or 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon. But when I wake up, like this morning, I woke up at 7:30, 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: Nice.

Tim Ferriss: Just enough under three grams of net carbs.

Arthur C. Brooks: Because you’re keeping your net carbs to 30 a day probably, right?

Tim Ferriss: I’m keeping my net grams to, for me personally, right now under 10 grams.

Arthur C. Brooks: Under 10. That’ll get you into ketosis fast.

Tim Ferriss: Under 10, yeah. Especially if I am already adapted to intermittent fasting so that I’m doing 16 to 18 hours of fasting with a short six to eight hour window of eating. Once you get to 16 to 18 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 — 

Arthur C. Brooks: And you don’t take exogenous ketones?

Tim Ferriss: 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 segueing into ketosis. I think my natural production is roughly where I mentioned. My natural production right now is probably around 0.9. I took, let me just back up. So, I wake up at 7:30, I have the cacao plus some cacao butter. Then I sit in a — 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 10 minutes with an app, The Way app. Henry Shukman is my spirit animal. Amazing. Mindfulness/Zen-focused practice. Did that 10 minutes, that’s it. Got out. It is pretty chilly right now in Austin. Gets down to, I think last night it was 37 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. No interruptions. Then — 

Arthur C. Brooks: There’s non-trivial similarity to what I’m trying to do neurocognitively.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. And then on the way here, about 15 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 code cold brew from Starbucks, and about 15 milliliters of exogenous ketones. In this case, it’s BHB bonded to one three butane 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 four days of segue into nutritional ketosis, I will use exogenous ketones sometimes as a boost, and that’s it. So that was the moment.

Arthur C. Brooks: And it’s working great for you. And here’s the big takeaway, I think. You got to that through experimentation.

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Arthur C. Brooks: You didn’t get that by getting it off the internet. You learned a lot about these different variety of protocols, and you tailored it, and tried it, and over a number of years came upon what worked best for you. And that’s exactly what I’ve done, too. And everybody watching needs to treat their life like a lab. Experimentation is king. And so information, 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.

Tim Ferriss: 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 2 training.

Arthur C. Brooks: In the morning.

Tim Ferriss: Right, exactly. So, after the meditation — 

Arthur C. Brooks: Before you eat.

Tim Ferriss: Before I use — 

Arthur C. Brooks: You like fasted cardio?

Tim Ferriss: After the meditation, I do like fasted cardio.

Arthur C. Brooks: I do, too.

Tim Ferriss: Especially when I’m trying to get into ketosis, or intermittent fasting, because it’ll help me deplete 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 zones —

Arthur C. Brooks: Because your stress hormones are — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you’re already going to 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: At this point in the cycle of getting into ketosis, do you have headaches?

Tim Ferriss: 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 intermittent fast, 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 ’99, that was an amazing system for cutting weight, getting lean, but also maintaining, or adding some muscle mass. In any case, people can look it up.

Arthur C. Brooks: You’re just confusing your system in a cycle, right? You’re staying out of equilibrium in a way, right?

Tim Ferriss: 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. Mauro Di Pasquale with the anabolic diet. There are different names for it. Dan Duchaine 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 for, let’s call it 15 hours, something like that. And you are really piling in carbohydrate, and you are leveraging insulin as a storage hormone, and anabolic signaling sort of pathway to ensure that you can pack on some muscle while you are in, on average, ketotic state, which is very, very hard to do otherwise. So, that was, I don’t do that anymore because it’s just too much brain damage, frankly.

Arthur C. Brooks: Well, that’s a lot to think about. That becomes a full-time job. The protocol becomes the full-time job.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which is not the point. In my case, I’m sure, in your case, it’s like the protocol is in service of life. Life is not in service of the protocol.

Arthur C. Brooks: The protocol is supposed to work for you. You’re not supposed to work for your protocol.

Tim Ferriss: And I mean, we’re not going to belabor this point, but in a world, and people, there’s a great Chuck Palahniuk quote that I don’t want to get wrong. People can look it up, but basically says, “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 — 

Arthur C. Brooks: Not using pharmaceutical grade psychostimulants?

Tim Ferriss: You’re in an elite group. 

Arthur C. Brooks: You’re an absolute elite group, and you absolutely can do it with proper health, and exercise disciplines. 

Tim Ferriss: And also, I’ll just say to your point, managing the physiology, had a great conversation with Dave Baszucki recently, who’s the 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 — 

Arthur C. Brooks: That stuff’s super interesting.

Tim Ferriss: Ketosis for me, it is like taking modafinil, and all of the kind of short-term powerful but long-term penalty drugs that I’ve tested over time.

Arthur C. Brooks: Have you ever taken a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, an SSRI?

Tim Ferriss: I have never taken one for antidepression. I have taken what is similar. It’s not exactly an SSRI, but I have used Trazodone for sleep.

Arthur C. Brooks: Oh, Trazodone is a monocyclic, right? It’s a really early, early generation antidepressant.

Tim Ferriss: It is effectively a failed antidepressant because it put people to sleep that was repurposed as a sleep drug is my understanding. 

Arthur C. Brooks: Like Unisom was supposed to make you not sneeze, and doxylamine succinate actually was supposed to make you, was an antihistamine that was repurposed as a sleeping pill.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there you go. So, that is it. But why do you ask about SSRI?

Arthur C. Brooks: The reason I ask 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.

Tim Ferriss: 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 peak, and trough type of way, I have found nothing better than the ketogenic diet.

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s interesting. So, for mood management, this is fundamental for you?

Tim Ferriss: It is. It is without exception the number one with no close second.

Arthur C. Brooks: So poets, take note.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, poets take note. And maybe you should just — we have to revisit this. People are like, “What is this math scientist poet stuff?” You want to just explain what we’re talking about?

Arthur C. Brooks: So 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.

Tim Ferriss: You have high highs, and low lows.

Arthur C. Brooks: I’m all about it’s great, or it sucks. And it’s impossible to be married to a mad scientist. 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 are 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 who’s going to be like, “Eh, I can take that out.” Or nuclear power reactor operators, or something who are really calm.

Tim Ferriss: Low low means low positive, low negative.

Arthur C. Brooks: Low positive, low negative.

Tim Ferriss: Got it. Their side wave is flatter.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that is involved in your rumination when you’re depressed. Ruminative depression, ruminative sad depression is a heavy activity of the ventrolateral 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, because you’re falling in love, and that’s why poets tend to be depressive, creative, and romantic. Tim Ferriss, my friends, this is Tim Ferriss.

Tim Ferriss: That’s me in a nutshell.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 people can go to my website, and take a test, and figure out who they are, which profile you are. And then you got to 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, fear, but you want to manage it so it’s not dysregulating. So, it’s not exaggerated. And there are lots of techniques for doing it, but you got to 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.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would say for folks who may fit the poet profile, or who are 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 50 percent of my negative, and bumps my positive baseline up 20 percent.

Arthur C. Brooks: This is really interesting, because this might be the poet’s protocol. Ketosis might be the poet’s protocol. For me, it’s what I eat, how I 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.

Tim Ferriss: 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I love stimulants.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s great.

Tim Ferriss: I have to be very careful.

Arthur C. Brooks: I know.

Tim Ferriss: If I start later, guess what? What an incredible sleight of hand trick. I consume less. Why? Because I started later.

Arthur C. Brooks: Right. And no crash.

Tim Ferriss: 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 60s, and they’ll be like, “I’m sleeping. I sleep like crap because I’m old.” It’s like, probably because you have an espresso after lunch. And when you were 30, you could metabolize the caffeine effectively. The half life was probably eight hours, and now it’s probably 14 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 8:00, or 9:00 in the morning. It’s like magic.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it is incredible. I’ve actually, I reserve coffee, caffeine like a nitro cold brew for days like today.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And then otherwise I’m using yerba mate, or cacao, or pure tea, or some combination thereof.

Arthur C. Brooks: You like yerba mate? You like what it makes you feel?

Tim Ferriss: I love it.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s very smooth.

Tim Ferriss: I love it.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s a smooth buzz, as we used to say in high school.

Tim Ferriss: It really is the smoothest of the smooth.

Arthur C. Brooks: I know.

Tim Ferriss: It’s just also the most inconvenient. I like to drink it the Argentine way with the sipping —

Arthur C. Brooks: The wood cup, and the metal straw that gets really hot.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Yeah. Which is probably a great way to give yourself throat cancer, side note, or mouth cancer.

Arthur C. Brooks: We’ll find out.

Tim Ferriss: But, yeah, we’ll find out. Track the Argies, people are looking at that very closely. All right. We probably should talk about the meaning of life, small topic.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s just a little thing. It’s what I’ve been thinking about for five years.

Tim Ferriss: I want to know why, after your many books, author of 15 books, right? You have 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?

Arthur C. Brooks: So, when I came back to academia, I was gone for a long time. I’m sort of a lifelong — 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 20s, but it sucked me in. And so this was my natural habitat, but I left for almost 11 years, because I was the CEO of a big think tank in Washington DC called the American Enterprise Institute. And when I was gone, I wasn’t paying attention to academia. I left at the end of 2008. I came back in 2019. My memory of my academic experience, going back 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 loved college. And most people say I was happier in college than when I left college. I come back in 2019, and it’s like the plague had gone through my village. It was completely different. And in point of fact, clinical depression among adults under 30, especially highly educated adults under 30, college graduates, especially the elite colleges, had tripled. Clinical depression up by 3X anxiety, generalized anxiety, 2X. And it’s not because of a lack of therapy. On the contrary, the number of therapists has gone up by about 4X. And so something’s not working. This is what we call in my business as a psychogenic epidemic, which is a simple idea with fancy words because that’s how we get tenured.

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 psychogenic. And so we need to understand what’s behind them. So, when I see the data, and 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. I suffered through to get my PhD, 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, because the 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. I mean, lots of pop arguments about why so many young people are depressed today. And people my age are like, because they’re entitled babies, and they’re not tough enough. And people who are my kids’ age who are in their 20s, they’ll say it’s because boomers wrecked everything, and made houses too expensive, and spoiled the environment, or something. But people have 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 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, is what we’re actually missing.

Tim Ferriss: Right. It’s what it’s displacing.

Arthur C. Brooks: What is it actually that we want that we’re not getting? 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.

Tim Ferriss: Right. It’s like, okay, you’re eating all carbohydrates.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, it’s like — 

Tim Ferriss: 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 eat.

Arthur C. Brooks: But the problem is the protein you’re not getting for Pete’s sake 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 people say, where do you find the meaning of life? Church, the beach, Italy.

Tim Ferriss: Italy.

Arthur C. Brooks: And it turns out that we — 

Tim Ferriss: It’s Trenton, New Jersey. No offense to Trenton. I’ve spent a lot of time there.

Arthur C. Brooks: Seattle, my hometown. We know where you go to find it, and then you have to do certain things. 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.

Tim Ferriss: Right. It is big. It’s huge.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s start with definitions. That’s how I like to roll.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, I know. And that’s the most important thing that scientists almost never do. Throw out a term, and then not define it. So the meaning of life has been 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. Now for some — 

Tim Ferriss: Meaning how life, or why life unfolds for you — 

Arthur C. Brooks: Things are happening all the time.

Tim Ferriss: — the way it unfolds.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, things are happening. It’s like why?

Tim Ferriss: So, is that picking — I don’t want to dislocate the sharing of the three.

Arthur C. Brooks: No, no, it’s important.

Tim Ferriss: But just to, maybe we’ll come back to it. Is that coming up with, or adopting a story that is enabling?

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. It’s adopting a story that actually explains things so that life is not inherently random.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. But it doesn’t need to be objectively accurate when explaining.

Arthur C. Brooks: No, no. It’s just a — it’s your way of seeing things. It’s your understanding of the world. It’s putting things in context, and so things kind of make sense. Otherwise, it’s this random walk through life, which is sort of 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, it’s 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 explain this. Now, you can also have a hybrid model, which I do. Religion, and science, and all this kind of good stuff, but you got to do the work to figure out the physics of that, why things happen the way they do.

Tim Ferriss: So, coherence — 

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s coherent.

Tim Ferriss: — is figuring out why do things happen in my life.

Arthur C. Brooks: Why do things happen the way they do? 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, and it is, why am I doing what I’m doing? 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’ve got to have an endpoint. In Spanish, there’s a great word called el rumbo. Rumbo means — in English, it doesn’t have a lot of significance.

It’s a navigational term that means rhumb line, which is where you’re going. It’s the Euclidian path from where you are to where you’re going. And you have to have a rhumb line if you’re going to make any progress, you’re going to have any goals in any direction, it’s what 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 el rumbo.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Even if the endpoint changes.

Arthur C. Brooks: Exactly. And 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 significance, 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 the great ways of answering that question are having kids, and being married, and believing that God loves you, and all kinds of ways to have that significance question answered. So, 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. And so that’s presence, and search. If you’re looking, looking, looking, you’re a searcher, you’re a total seeker. So, your search score is going to be through the roof. Now where you are — 

Tim Ferriss: My finding score may not be as high.

Arthur C. Brooks: Well, the presence, that’s presence, right? And what happens over the course of life is that people who search more, their presence score tends to go up, but it might not be that high. So, my presence score is very moderate.

Tim Ferriss: Could you explain this just one more time for me?

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Could you just start that over?

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. 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. Why do things happen the way they do? Why am I doing what I’m doing, and why does my life matter? And that’s search. And some people are intent seekers like you, Tim, you’re an intense 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 listen to the show. This is why I learned things, because 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 presence scores should go up. And mine certainly has.

Tim Ferriss: So, is a presence just to — 

Arthur C. Brooks: The presence of meaning.

Tim Ferriss: — make sure I’m understanding. One is seeking an answer. And then presence is accepting.

Arthur C. Brooks: Is having something that’s satisfactory.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Got it.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 know. I don’t need to learn. I don’t need to — I’m not going to leave my hometown. Why am I going to leave my hometown? It’s awesome here. What do we need to do? I’m going to marry my high school sweetheart. I’m going to work in my daddy’s business, and I’m going to 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.

Tim Ferriss: Right. And to be clear, this is not — 

Arthur C. Brooks: This is not political.

Tim Ferriss: — political.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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? Because they give you a meaning of life is kind of 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 very moderate in presence. It’s higher than it used to be. My presence of meaning was in the cellar when I was in my 20s for sure. And in my 60s is much, much higher for sure.

But it’s still not — 

Tim Ferriss: What do you attribute the improvement to? 

Arthur C. Brooks: As being alive, and actually searching a lot, and looking at data, and optimizing, and trying to live a life on purpose, is self-managing. I mean, I’m a behavioral scientist because I want answers, and I want answers for me. And so if I basically — I’m looking for the biggest questions to answer, to at least address the biggest questions of my life, that’s why I do what I do for a living. I mean, my life is an experiment, and a pure on revolving adventure.

Tim Ferriss: So, I’m curious if I can just interject for a second about the present piece specifically, because I think many people listening to the show will self-identify as seekers, but there are traps along the way as you identify as a seeker.

Arthur C. Brooks: And I talk about these in the book.

Tim Ferriss: And I’ll just tell one quick anecdote, and then I’d love to hear how you have improved, or whether it’s just been maybe not a passive, but something that has 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. And they told 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 this session, but I kept wondering when I was going to do the real work, like when I was going to do the hard work.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: 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. But 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 as they continue their endless seeking.

Arthur C. Brooks: They’re just not going to take yes for an answer.

Tim Ferriss: Right. So I’m wondering how you learn to take yes as an answer.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. So it’s not easy because when you’re a chronic seeker, there’s always something more. There’s always something new. And you can’t be there yet. And so the answer to this actually comes, I have two of my kids are Marines. And so I have one enlisted Marine. I have one officer in the Marine Corps. And my daughter’s a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. And right now she’s at 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 as a non-commissioned officer, he led a lot of guys. What they train Marines to do in leadership is to get to 80 percent knowledge and then choose and stop looking. Now that’s really, really important because you’re going to be paralyzed if you’re trying to get to 100 percent knowledge.

Tim Ferriss: You’re never going to have complete information.

Arthur C. Brooks: Which is what the pure seeker mentality does. If you want to seek and get higher presence, you need to go to 80 percent. Now, how do you get to 80 percent? You get to 80 percent by saying, “I’m pretty sure this is right. And this is right enough that I’m going to 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.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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? 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. But for most people, this is for men and women, all this fiction about the fact that marriage is good for men, but bad for women, it’s 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 going to get that if you’re trying to get to 99 percent awareness, if you’re going to search all the way to the point, because you’ll never get that.

You’re going to have an argument, you’re going to have a disagreement, you’re going to have doubts, you’re going to 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 going to practice? Get to 80 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.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. This is all interesting terrain, which is why I was looking forward to this conversation.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s a lot.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot. It’s a lot. And of course, as I said before we started recording, I was like, “We are 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? 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? Significance. 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. In part, we can talk about the dozens of factors at play I’m 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 going to take all the jobs and I don’t know, therefore, how my contributions will matter.

Arthur C. Brooks: I will become less significant.

Tim Ferriss: I will become less significant. The climate is irretrievably fucked, which I don’t actually believe is the case, but a lot of damage — 

Arthur C. Brooks: They have certainly heard that.

Tim Ferriss: — a lot of damage has been done.

Arthur C. Brooks: They’ve been taught that.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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 burying 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 people — 

Arthur C. Brooks: Clergy.

Tim Ferriss: Clergy. By simply extending the time horizon, the spectrum of options opens up quite a bit, but I would love to hear you explain it.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 significance. People feel significance by having children. People feel significance by getting married.

Tim Ferriss: Or adopting children.

Arthur C. Brooks: Or adopting children as I did. And I did both. We did it by markets and by biology. And people feel significance 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 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 got to do the work. You got to 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 that a lot of young people today don’t have those micro commitments and they’re trying to establish macro significance.

Tim Ferriss: Macro.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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.

Tim Ferriss: 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 you can — 

Arthur C. Brooks: Of course. I’m glad we’ve got civil rights.

Tim Ferriss: — harness anger for. But 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. I think it’s called El Arroyo here in Austin.

Arthur C. Brooks: Arroyo means the brook, means the stream.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Exactly. Like [foreign language] for people who might have spent time in Mexico.

Arthur C. Brooks: Nice.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a long one. Anyway.

Arthur C. Brooks: By the way, Arroyo as a surname in English is Brooks.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, there you go. Look at that.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. In German it’s Bach.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Arthur C. Brooks: As a former musician, I say, “Coincidence?”

Tim Ferriss: So the reason I bring up 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?” Very funny stuff. They put a lot of them up.

Arthur C. Brooks: Soy milk.

Tim Ferriss: And one of them is, “If someone is vegan and does CrossFit, which do they tell you about first?”

Arthur C. Brooks: I know.

Tim Ferriss: Which I thought was pretty good. And this ties into, I believe it was 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 that we all worship something and task number one is figuring out what you worship.

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s his I think his graduation speech.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Arthur C. Brooks: Where he talked about that, right?

Tim Ferriss: Right. So if it’s not religion, it’s going to be something else. Is it money? Is it fame? We talked about this a bit.

Arthur C. Brooks: We did the four idols last time we talked. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: We did. Right. Exactly. Pleasure, that’s where I landed, for better and for worse. And I’m wondering, it seems to me that religion, belief in the divine, might be another way to put it, is almost genetically programmed in humans. I mean, it is — 

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s an anthropological empirical regularity. So what we find is that anthropologists, including paleoanthropologists, find there’s no civilization that they’ve ever encountered that doesn’t worship.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Arthur C. Brooks: There are individuals who don’t worship, but there are no cultures that don’t have religious foundation to them. We’re built for that.

Tim Ferriss: 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 — 

Arthur C. Brooks: Harvard.

Tim Ferriss: — Bitcoin, you name it. Harvard.

Arthur C. Brooks: Famous university.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Whatever it might be. 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 an organized religion?

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. So I’ve looked a lot.

Tim Ferriss: This is a quest for me.

Arthur C. Brooks: No, I hear you. I completely hear you.

Tim Ferriss: This is very present for me.

Arthur C. Brooks: I feel a lot of people — 

Tim Ferriss: I feel like I made a lot of progress for myself, but I’d love to hear you talk about that.

Arthur C. Brooks: So this is a question of not of religion, but of transcendence.

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Exactly.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 be significant, to feel significance, you need to be less significant, you need to make yourself less significant. Now, I had this experience where at my university, the most popular class arguably is astronomy one. And they’re not astronomers. I mean, they’re 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. And so I finally ask a student like, “Why do you love that astronomy one class so much?” She’s like, “I don’t know. But like I go into the morning, Thursday morning at nine o’clock and it’s a 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 the end of the world.

Tim Ferriss: You’re excommunicated from the church of Harvard.

Arthur C. Brooks: “I go in at 9:00 and at 10:30 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 to stand in awe. Have you had Dacher Keltner on your show before?

Tim Ferriss: No.

Arthur C. Brooks: He’s one of the great psychologists of our time. He teaches at Berkeley. And he has a book called Awe, A-W-E.

Tim Ferriss: I thought I recognized the name because I was just reading that book.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s a great book.

Tim Ferriss: I was just reading that book just a few months ago.

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s transcendence, it’s to stand in awe in the I self 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 Diessner, the psychologist, who, by the way, is Rainn Wilson’s uncle. Yeah. The world’s leading expert in moral elevation and the physiological impact of moral elevation.

Tim Ferriss: Rainn is very philosophical also.

Arthur C. Brooks: He’s great. He’s a great friend. We’re great friends. We grew up five miles apart from each other in Seattle at the same age. We didn’t know each other as kids.

Tim Ferriss: Small, small world.

Arthur C. Brooks: But we bonded over watching Gilligan’s Island on Channel 11 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 ways to do it. I go to mass every day. It’s a venerable way to experience transcendence. And there are other ways to experience transcendence. Now, I’m not going to 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, because 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, how you get experiences that are completely inaccessible unless you experience transcendence. Lots of ways to do it. Study the stoics and live according to their dictates. Walk the Brahma Muhurta, an hour in the morning without devices. Starting before dawn, practice Vipassana meditation. Listen to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and stand in awe of the greatest composer who ever lived. Or go to mass.

Tim Ferriss: All right. I wanted to tee this up. I didn’t know what your answer was going to be. But 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 2000 probably 12, 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 related to awe. 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 going to be shooting myself in the foot a little bit because I just wrote 10 pages on this that I need to refine before putting it 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 — 

Arthur C. Brooks: At the top.

Tim Ferriss: — at the top.

Arthur C. Brooks: At the top. But he talked about it much later in his career too.

Tim Ferriss: Much later.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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.

Tim Ferriss: They believe more in death too.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. And life is messy and they come to terms with that. And Scott Barry Kaufman talks a lot about this, 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 — 

Tim Ferriss: I have to ask about the Dark Triad.

Arthur C. Brooks: Oh, yeah. I’ve written a lot about the Dark Triad.

Tim Ferriss: Sounds like a great fantasy novel.

Arthur C. Brooks: It’s like anybody who wants to know that, that’s your first husband. Anyway.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I’m going to have to leave that alone. I’m going to resist the temptation.

Arthur C. Brooks: But next time on the show.

Tim Ferriss: Just for a second.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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.

Tim Ferriss: Do you mind if I just play for a second?

Arthur C. Brooks: Please. Because I think this is the point you’re driving at, right?

Tim Ferriss: 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 happiest people, happy isn’t exactly the right word, but the people who seem most 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 landscapes, 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 your rosary. Our friend travels with the rosary and also with blood flow restriction cuffs, but that’s a story for another time.

Arthur C. Brooks: I’m not doing blood flow restriction with a rosary.

Tim Ferriss: 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 paths 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: True. Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: Totally.

Tim Ferriss: And therein lies the seeds of misery.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, for sure. For sure. It’s 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, “People talk about the miracle of walking on water. You know what the real miracle is? Water.” 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 a guy who worked on Tom Brady’s back in Boston. So he’s the best guy. If Tom Brady — and so he was phenomenal. And I asked him, “What did you do before you were this incredible acupuncturist and great physical therapist?” And he said, “I used to be a fitness influencer.” I’m like, “Dude, tell me more. What’s this life all about?” And as a social scientist, I was really interested.

And he would take off his shirt and be on social media and show his abs and then sell supplements or something. 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 ill.” And I said, “So how’d you get out of it? How’d you cure yourself?” And he said, “I decided, I said I had enough. I got rid of my social media. I took every mirror out of my house, all of them, bathroom, every one. And then I showered in the dark for a year, so I couldn’t see my abs.”

Tim Ferriss: Oh, the cross we bear.

Arthur C. Brooks: No, but that’s like the most Tim Ferriss thing ever is the I self protocol. 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.

Tim Ferriss: So what are other ways of facilitating self-transcendence? And I, for instance, I’ve interviewed BJ Miller, who’s 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 baking cookies together. He talked about introducing people who are weeks or months from dying to art.

Arthur C. Brooks: Right. Right. Because he wants to induce a flow state.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s what we’re talking about. One of the great things about transcendence is — so Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the great book Flow.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s how you pronounce his name.

Arthur C. Brooks: Csikszentmihalyi. Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: A lot of consonants.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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. And so we established the first way is worship or meditation. The second is service to others. But the third is really is total absorption, is total absorption in 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 going to want to distract yourself from. So what, so you’ve got 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. Clickety, clickety, clickety, click. And before I know it, my wife says, “You want lunch?”

Tim Ferriss: Nature seems like another option. It’s so simple. Just 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, try to get your feet on the ground. Beauty. I mean, 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 going to bring a clipboard. Couldn’t find a clipboard. So I was like, “Well, I’m going to 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 Andy Goldsworthy?

Arthur C. Brooks: I’ve heard of this, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So this is — 

Arthur C. Brooks: Using pure nature.

Tim Ferriss: This is Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature. Everybody should get this book. But just check out some of the images in there.

Arthur C. Brooks: This is the idea of beauty of working with nature as opposed to against it.

Tim Ferriss: It’s using natural found objects, whether trees, leaves — 

Arthur C. Brooks: A circle of dandelions.

Tim Ferriss: — ice crystals, a circle of dandelions. It is the most mind-boggling kind of — if James Turrell were to only work with organic materials outside of a hobbit house, what would they look like? They’re just absolutely entrancing, would be the word I would use. And so this is the book I want to use as my clipboard.

Arthur C. Brooks: I like it. And this is of course transcendent. This is at the essence of using human ingenuity in a flight of fancy. This is pure harmony between who we are and what we’re meant to be. I love it. I love it. And 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.

Tim Ferriss: So tell me more.

Arthur C. Brooks: So the transcendent experience is the one thing, the one place that they don’t happen is an assimilated experience of human life. Fundamentally, transcendent experiences require being fully alive. There’s the great fourth century sage and saint, Saint Irenaeus, who’s one of these guys where, I mean, today it’s pretty costless to be religious like me. In those days, you might get your head cut off. And so he was doing a lot of deep thinking. And he said, “The glory of God is a man fully alive.” And 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? And 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 a 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.

Tim Ferriss: And a simulated life means you’re cosplaying life.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 27 and 28-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, 27-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 fully remote, 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 them run in terror.

“And because 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. I know something’s not right.” Here’s the funny thing. Your brain, 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. 

Tim Ferriss: This is pops over dinner, right?

Arthur C. Brooks: 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.

Tim Ferriss: Engineering problem.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 toaster with stuff in here. You’ll burn your house down if you’re trying to make your own toaster. It’s a complicated problem. My marriage is a complex problem. I understand what it means to love and be loved. I understand. I can’t put it into words. I’m not Pablo Neruda. But I understand what it means to love and be loved. But I will never solve my marriage.

Tim, I mean, this morning before we started, Ester texted me, “I love you,” and she does. And when we finish, I’m going to turn my phone back on again, she might be pissed off at me. I don’t know. I don’t know. And part of this is because she’s Spanish and that adds a layer of complexity in and of 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 going to be satisfied and my brain’s going to know.

Tim Ferriss: 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, and 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’m very involved.

Arthur C. Brooks: AI, neuroscience, biologics, all of it.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Right. The last 24 hours, I’ve had conversations with three or four scientists all at the cutting edge of different fields. I love it.

Arthur C. Brooks: Me too.

Tim Ferriss: Simultaneously, I feel like we should pay attention. And this is, I guess, I’m not borrowing, but certainly I’m in lockstep with Nassim Taleb on this, which is paying attention to things that have persisted for very, very long periods of time. And also paying attention to evolutionary biology. It’s like we are evolved to be very social creatures moving through physical space together.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Full stop. And if you take that away — 

Arthur C. Brooks: If you take one or the other away, you’re in trouble.

Tim Ferriss: You’re in big trouble. And you don’t have to understand all the myriad mechanisms by which this and that happens and 15 different hormones interact to produce some type of subjective experience. It’s like if we have evolved with these things as constants over millennia upon millennia, maybe it’s a good idea.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Keep them as regular ingredients in your daily experience.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 neuroscientist living today is Iain McGilchrist at Oxford.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, smart.

Arthur C. Brooks: He wrote The Master and His Emissary back in 2010. And The Master and His Emissary talks about the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain do many things the same, but fundamentally they get 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 of 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 hustle culture, to making sure that people don’t study humanities, they only study STEM. And most especially to the simulacrum, the technologized simulacrum for ordinary life, that’s all left hemisphere. And if you’re on the left hemisphere, you’re going to know how and what, and how and what and how and what, and you’re going to be bereft of why, including the big why questions, which make up the meaning of your 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 Ferriss never said to your great-grandmother, which was, “Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today.” And the reason is because 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. And 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 100 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.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, complicated versus complex. I like the distinction. And also having just come back, I’ll just brief aside, every year I do this past year review, I’m going to be doing that in the next few weeks.

Arthur C. Brooks: Me too.

Tim Ferriss: 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. I established 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 20,000 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, right? There’s simplicity right — 

Arthur C. Brooks: And check your phone only 10 times.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Yeah.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Right on the other side. And if you do those things, by the way, you’ll probably be checking your phone a lot less, hopefully. I want to touch on something because I know we, as expected, are going to 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 phrasing that I want to hear 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. So those are both interesting to me. 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. So dealer’s choice, which one would you like to — 

Arthur C. Brooks: We’ll start with suffering, because suffering is the big, most misunderstood thing in most of modern life. We have an eliminationist strategy toward especially mental suffering. We see big increases in depression and anxiety. And if you go to campus counseling at any university and you’re going to say, “I feel sad and anxious.” They go, “We’ve got to fix that.” Well, probably you can have some therapy, 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 dukkha, right? But it also suggests that you have a working limbic system, which is your alarm system for threats in the environment. Negative emotion 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 that suffering is your teacher, because suffering is the ultimate complex right hemisphere experience that teaches 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 this following. Suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance, pain times resistance.

Tim Ferriss: That’s good.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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.

Tim Ferriss: Resistance. Yeah.

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s what it comes down to. And every good athlete understands that.

Tim Ferriss: And by the way, just very quickly, the meditation that I was describing and recommending is effectively that.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: It’s lowering your resistance to everything that you would be inclined to resist.

Arthur C. Brooks: And 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 going to happen this day.”

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 this bracing. And I say this every day because I’m going to suffer today. And Tim, you’re going to suffer today.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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.

Tim Ferriss: And that Psalm might as well have been also put right next to Marcus Aurelius meditations. I mean, it’s — 

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 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 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 Ferriss had to do because he had no choice. He had no therapist. He didn’t even have Advil. And so that’s what I’m talking about. 

Then the second point that you made, the second question you asked is, okay, when you’re in search to get presence, you’re in search, search, search, search. There’s a mistake that people commonly make, was thinking, if I search enough, I’m going to find. Seek and you shall find. Knock on 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 to make a pilgrimage 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 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 root of 1,100 years old, doing the Hajj, if you’re a Muslim. What you find is that 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 Abrahamic religions is heaven, right? And it’s the end of samsara and the karmic religions or whatever it happens to be, is they’re reuniting with a Godhead in the Hindu body of religions. But the bottom line is that what’s most important 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 weak. You weaken yourself on purpose. This is why you walk 25 kilometers 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 Camino, I was in a liminal space in my career. I just stepped down as the CEO of this big think tank. And I didn’t know what I was going to do. I mean, I was 55 years old and I was spent, dude, I was out of gas. I was burnt out. I’d been working 80 hours a week. I missed a lot of my kids growing up. I’d made mistakes, right? They stuck with me by the grace of God. And I was walking the Camino day after day after day. I was praying. I was tired and I was in pain. And when I entered into Santiago de Compostela, this medieval city in Northern Spain and I saw the cathedral, I realized that 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.

Tim Ferriss: Question, how did that appear? Was it drop by drop? Was it a Japanese breakfast on a silver platter in your mind? I mean, did it all come at once or was it bits and pieces that you slowly were able to weave together? 

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 in a temporary blindness, which is probably temporal epilepsy in the case of St. Paul, but it was a realization. It was a realization. It was something that had already existed out there, right? And it felt like it came to me little by little, particularly over the last couple of days, the last couple of days of the pilgrimage. It was, “What am I supposed to do?” I’m supposed to return to my roots as a scientist and to use that as missionary work for 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.

Tim Ferriss: Did that want come into high resolution in part because of the nature of that particular pilgrimage, the religious connotations 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, the different context?

Arthur C. Brooks: 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.

Tim Ferriss: You did the pilgrimage with your wife?

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. And I would’ve done 33 days except she’s like, no. So we did the last eight. And 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.

Tim Ferriss: And also, if it is nature, it serves some very important, at least from an evolutionary perspective, function.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, when we look back at just 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 leftover and nature forgot to get rid of it.

Arthur C. Brooks: Male nipples.

Tim Ferriss: Male nipples, 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 X.

Arthur C. Brooks: Let’s watch the comments, Tim let’s watch the comments.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The comments, I’m sure will have plenty of suggestions. But I mean, it’s half your brain, right? So along with the — everyone needs whatever, eight glasses of water a day and can only have 30 grams of protein at a given sitting. We only use 10 percent of our brain, not true. We use all of it.

Arthur C. Brooks: True. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that was a thing when I was a kid in the ’70s.

Oh, if you could get access to the other 90 percent and then a science fiction story will have you, the person who knows how to use the other 90 percent, can fly or something.

Tim Ferriss: So gaining, really embracing and fully utilizing that right hemisphere 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 somatosensory and psychological texture of life, you really need that right side, and at least as you’re describing it. And — 

Arthur C. Brooks: 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. And so you wouldn’t write The 4-Hour Body the same way today. I’m sure you wouldn’t.

Tim Ferriss: No. I stand by all of the tactical stuff.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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. And you realized 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 Tim getting all mystical again? No, no, no. He’s actually moving hemispherically into the full brain.

Tim Ferriss: Well, 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, psycho-emotional, 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 de Mello has a lot of really good writing on this as well. You need to lower resistance, right? 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, at peace, reconciled, but yet still productive in the world, people. Whether that’s Henry Shukman, who I mentioned, or the Jack Kornfields 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 Rumi, 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.

Arthur C. Brooks: And 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.

Tim Ferriss: No. No, no, no.

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s probably a political point too. I’m not sure. But 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 up 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 going to 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 freeing 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.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Arthur C. Brooks: The way 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 love or friend or therapist.

Tim Ferriss: Or if you use it to do certain things more quickly so that you can simply consume the free time you’ve created with more left dominant.

Arthur C. Brooks: By frittering away your time on Instagram.

Tim Ferriss: Which is what I predict most people will do.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, exactly right.

Tim Ferriss: So the idea of this — the era of leisure time is, on its face, pretty ridiculous because that’s been predicted with every advance in technology, but — 

Arthur C. Brooks: Exactly. And we started off by talking about the technology that I use, which is my morning protocol. The morning protocol, per se, is not the secret of happiness. It instantiates. It enables. What it 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 of these protocols are. That’s why 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 coherence, it’s more purpose.

Tim Ferriss: So 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 Emptiness. 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 wind down. And that is personal evening reading. What do you read before you go to bed?

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 brain 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 it, 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.

Tim Ferriss: Sounds great. Sign me up.

Arthur C. Brooks: I read love poetry.

Tim Ferriss: Do you have any favorite Psalms? And then love poetry, what are we talking?

Arthur C. Brooks: Well, actually we are talking about Neruda. The greatest love poet ever. The Chilean love poet in Spanish, which, pronounced in Spanish from your beloved, is like a narcotic and yet it won’t ruin your life. The Psalm, Psalm 121. Any of the Psalms actually, because they have 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 beautiful thing to do and that’s a great part of the evening protocol. The evening protocol is happiness and better sleep, deeper love, generativity in 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?

Tim Ferriss: Machine. Are you talking about — you can’t get the machine — 

Arthur C. Brooks: There’s no off switch.

Tim Ferriss: Right, the off switch. I’ve become much, much better at it, much better. But that has, for my entire life, been the — ruminative challenge is that I laid down to go to sleep and my mind is like, “I’ve been waiting all day to tell you so many things.”

Arthur C. Brooks: I know. I know. “There’s some things we need to discuss here. This is very important.”

Tim Ferriss: Exactly. “You’re probably wondering why I gathered you here today.”

Arthur C. Brooks: Exactly right. “The boss has something on his mind.” I know. I know. And 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 — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, no, that’s a no fly zone. That’s verboden. 

Arthur C. Brooks: That’s my wife.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that is verboden.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 love molecule, the bonding neuropeptide that functions as a hormone in 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 grievance, grievance, grievance. And have more fun together. Number two.

Tim Ferriss: And how long have you been married?

Arthur C. Brooks: 34 years.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Arthur C. Brooks: Second is pray together because the fusion, one flesh is 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. And 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 eye contact from the beloved, which is when you have eye contact with a newborn baby, oxytocin is like the 4th of July inside your head, which is why you wouldn’t leave the baby on the bus because suddenly the baby’s kin, right? It’s an evolved phenomenon. And last but not least is remember ABT, 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 and you’re like, “I’m big and strong.” Why? Because 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 bed, five minutes earlier to bed and stare at each other.

And it’s hard. It’s scary, it’s like — the eyes, according to St. Paul, are 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 old faithful for her. She will love you more if you have 5 to 10 minutes of intense eye contact before you go to sleep while you’re holding hands under the covers.

Tim Ferriss: And by the way, for anyone who has not tried this — 

Arthur C. Brooks: You’ve done this, right?

Tim Ferriss: I have done this. 5 to 10 minutes is so long.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a really long time — 

Arthur C. Brooks: Oh, it’s intense. Here’s an exer — 

Tim Ferriss: You could start lower, right?

Arthur C. Brooks: You can start lower, but here’s the most intense exercise you can do. If you want 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 here?

Tim Ferriss: Is this for the Shaolin Monk therapy school?

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s super painful. And it’s going to be more painful for you because after about four minutes, you’re holding her arms up, right? So there’s like five pound weights in each hand. And so you’re in intense excruciating pain while having your soul opened with a crowbar.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Arthur C. Brooks: And this is intense there.

Tim Ferriss: How did you arrive at this?

Arthur C. Brooks: Well, I’ve experimented with this and also I read the research, right? 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 and it’s called Proyecto Amor Conyugal.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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 in a little retreat center outside Madrid. And we were seeing — Because my wife and I, we do a lot of talks together and we counsel couples that are engaged, et cetera. This is our side hustle, right? It’s 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 and it was like, Holy mackerel. I mean, because they don’t know how much neuroscience they’re actually doing. There’s somebody who came up with this and said, “I wonder if this works.” It’s 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.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Cool. And also, not yet in English, that sounds like a job for Arthur Brooks and some AI tool.

Arthur C. Brooks: And Ester Brooks, who’s like — she’s the spiritual leader in our family.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there you go. Job for Ester, who wouldn’t need the AI. Arthur, always so much fun to spend time together. Thank you for taking the time.

Arthur C. Brooks: 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.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, thanks, man. This is, boy, talk about lucky timing. All the serendipity required to end up with this job, remarkable. And I 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 arthurbrooks.com on all the socials.

Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: 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?

Arthur C. Brooks: If 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 a decision. And you’ll lift up yourself and that person in a little bit of the whole world. Happiness is love.

Tim Ferriss: Boom. I think that is a perfect place to end. And folks will link to everything as usual tim.blog/podcast. Go love somebody, including yourself.

Arthur C. Brooks: Right on.Tim Ferriss: See you next time. Thanks for tuning in.

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