YouSaid · the spoken record

Arthur C. Brooks

lines on the record
236
first
2023-09-11
most recent
2023-09-11
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Advice from your son. Well, my older son, he's a piece of work. I mean, he's, I learn a lot from him. He's literally one of the brightest native intelligence people I've ever met. But he's also has this super adroit moral instinct to him. And he asked me, he said, tell me one thing that I should never do because I'm in love with this girl that I should never do. He asks, you know, good questions like that. And I thought about it. I said it's actually pretty easy. Never lie to her, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever until you go to the grave. Never lie to her. And ask her never to lie to you no matter what the consequences. That's the secret to the pure oxygen of a true companionate love, the mystical love of...”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Reason she told me later is because I was the first man that never lied to her. I never lied. Now, that's part of my upbringing. And that has to do with your family, et cetera. That was a really super important value in my home. You had to be honest. The only really dramatic and scary consequences with my parents from lying. Don't lie. Don't lie. Don't lie. And so the result is it was kind of, in a way, easier for me because of the way that I was raised. But I was the first guy she'd ever met that didn't lie. She's like, what's up with this dude? He doesn't lie. And I've procured, you know, when my oldest son, both of my sons, 25 and 23, they're both married. And when my 25-year-old and 23.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “There we go. So let's start with number seven. Never lie. Be impeccable with your word. Especially with you. Now, I know a lot of people who are pretty honest, frankly, the reason my wife fell in love with me is not my stunning good looks and my lousy accent.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Because basically what 12 step programs do is knowledge of what's wrong with me, committing to new habits and sharing it with others. That's why AA works is because of those three steps as well.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And committing to actually these practices in your own life. And this can often be I've been doing this thing wrong and I don't want to keep doing this thing wrong. And me telling you, it's making yourself accountable to another person. Like all 12-step programs work this way, right?”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “pretending to be. I mean, the point is that. You're self aware, you're self aware, and part of your commitment, because I know your work. Part of your commitment to lifting other people up is sharing your journey. This is what it comes down to. So you joke about. But the truth of the matter is we're all, we all are. And sharing that is actually part of the way that you're practicing these protocols. You're not hacking anything. You're actually trying to build these habits. And then the teaching role, you're a teacher, by the way, because this is a teaching podcast. We're not shooting the breeze and saying, what'd you see on TV? And I went to a restaurant. No. We're talking about heavy stuff because we actually want to teach these ideas and lift other people up. So that's the secret, man. Learn more. Think more. Don't feel learn. Think. Second. Turn this into habits and practice those habits. Third, share with others and commit to other people through your teaching. That's the secret of happiness.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “The third part of every column is do these three things. Is taking the science and then applying to your life in these three ways. And so it's application and change of habits and a commitment to that. And the best way to cement in those ideas is by lashing yourself to the mast. And that's by teaching these things to everybody else. And everybody, look, I have a lab at Harvard called the Leadership and Happiness Lab. The whole point of the lab is not bench science and pouring stuff into test tubes or doing new experiments. It's learning how we can all be happiness teachers. How can Tim Ferris be a happiness teacher? We already are, by the way. Working on it. Well, you're working on it, and there's no reason that you have to be happy to be a happiness teacher. This is not like playing basketball.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “No doubt, yeah, no doubt. And so that's really important to do in the science of happiness is to look at what the best protocols, what does it mean to stand up to your negativity bias by actually practicing gratitude when what you're feeling is resentment. How do you do that? How do you actually achieve a state of metacognition, awareness of your own feelings such that you can choose reactions in the face of emotions? How can you get into the state of the eye self, which is the state in which you're observing the world as opposed to observing yourself? Well, it starts with knowledge of what these concepts are. And then you put it into practice, this real exercises. I have a column in the Atlantic that comes out every Thursday morning.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I mean, no, he's, I mean, he is extraordinary. I mean, the holy scriptures for Tibetan Buddhists are vast. There's a library in Dharam Sala that's just stack after stack after stack after stack. It's not a Bible. It's not like a collection of books in a little library called the Bible. It's just, it's enormous. And the monks are going through the scriptures again and again and again. So he has, I'm sure, he hasn't explained it to me, but I'm sure that he has actually a regular rotation that he's going through to do his. And that's what we need to do.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “What does he mean by that? Well, he first wakes up in the morning in the first two hours of his meditation, he gets up at 3 or 3 30 in the morning. The first thing that he does after a little bit on his exercise bike and hanging out with his cat, the first thing that he does is two hours of analytical meditation, which Catholics call mental prayer. That means you take a couple of lines of sacred scripture and you analyze it and you think about it. Most learning doesn't happen when the professor talks about something. If you understand everything the professor says, it's not a hard enough class and you don't have a very good professor. He has to blow your mind with something and you got to go away and think about it. And then you learn it through your own thinking. That's analytical meditation or mental prayer.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Number two, practice. Number three, share. And that's the protocol that works for everybody when it comes to happiness. You got to take those three steps. You got to do the work and understand it. And it's funny because I've done all this work over the years with the Dalai Lama. And he always says the same thing. If you want to be a spiritual adept, think more, feel less. Think more, feel less.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Because look, I mean, if I'm doing something that's clearly at odds with what I'm teaching, I'm going to hear about it. I'm going to hear about it for my students. I'm going to hear about it from my family. I'm going to hear about it. Good Lord. I'm going to hear about it on social media. Not that I'm paying that much attention to that because I want to be happy. And it's really, really important. So basically there's a protocol in my life, which is number one, understand”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “That wasn't really habits. To ingrain a habit, you got to do one more step, which is that you got to teach it. The reason I'm a happiness professor is because I want to lash myself to the mast and I want to be completely committed.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Well, I started by doing habits and practices that were very, very specific. I mean, extremely specific, as specific as the stuff in the four-hour body specific. And I was writing stuff down. I held whole notebooks of protocols and things that I was trying. I was trying things on myself based on science. And when it worked, I would keep it and I would write it down and practice it. Turns out that wasn't good enough, you know, because that was too hacky”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Has come a long way killing me, sweetheart. You killed me. But, you know, I'm writing academic journal articles that 14 people read so I can get promotion and tenure. It was ridiculous.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “It was craziness. And by the way, it was my wife who finally clued me. She's like, you have a PhD, right? What are you using it for? Exactly. I mean, you're like,”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “The most important change, the single most important change I made to the system was the recognition that I knew a lot about happiness but wasn't happy. Because I was studying it, but I wasn't doing it. The biggest change to the system was using my knowledge to change my habits. That was number one far and away. It's one thing. I was giving people all this advice about friendships and about having a good marriage and all that. Looking into my life and I wasn't living these things. I was just like everybody else, waking up, going, sure, I hope I feel happy today. It was pathetic. It was pathetic.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Yeah, I've got Thanksgiving week. So it gives me a chance to actually think about these things in some detail, to be sure. And then I've got it, you know, I've got the data going back to The year 1999, I've got it going forward. And this system has gotten better along the way and changed. What are the most important?”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Getting down to brass tacks. I start putting numbers on it. And if the numbers aren't, if I'm going backwards in a particular year, I do it my birthday and my off birthday, by the way.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “And last but not least, it's loving everybody's expressed through your work. And that means serving others with your work. Your work should be a service profession no matter what you're doing. And so faith, family, friends, and work. And then there's, you know, we branch out from there. And I'm talking about family. I'm talking about different branches of family that I'm trying to make sure I'm working on. I'm talking about my marriage is critically important. It gets one of the absolute highest scores in importance, not always in terms of quality because I'm not the best husband, but in terms of importance for sure. And that's because that's the apex of two of those columns, both family and friendship. My best friend and also the adopted member of my family is my wife. And so therefore my marriage is really at the top of those two pillars. And so I'm thinking about that a lot. So I break it up into subcategories, but they all go into those silos of faith, family, friends, and work, work that serves, work that's meaningful, right? Earn my success. And then I say, okay, well, you know, what does it mean to earn my success? What does it mean to serve others? How do I know? etc., etc., etc.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Friendship. And friendship, when I'm talking about that, I talk a lot about loneliness because especially strivers, hardworking people, a lot of people watching us, they have a lot of people around them. But what they have is deal friends, but not real friends. Your deal friends are super useful to you. Your real friends are useless cosmically, beautifully useless. And so I go into a lot of detail with my students about how to build useless friendships. Not worthless. That's different. I've got those two.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “For sure. And, you know, you can break them up in as variegated a way as you want. You can make 20,000 of them. But really, there's four that we should be thinking about. So there's four fundamental micronutrients. And I make it more varied than that. I've got 19 because they're really about love and relationships. That's really what it's all about. And the big four are your search for the divine or your spiritual journey or your philosophical, you know, your faith, whatever that happens to be, religious or not. Your love for something bigger than you so you can stand in awe. It's your family relationships. This is the most mystical kinds of love that we get because we didn't choose the loves that were chosen for us. And sometimes we're like, yeah, I wouldn't have chosen that.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “On tenths of 1% on a one to ten scale weighted with respect to what my best estimate of my well-being. And when I'm going backwards on those things, I said a strategic plan for my year. So I know I'm getting crazier by the minute, right?”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Are these still the things that I believe? Have I updated my knowledge? Do I have a better sense of who I am? Have I gone backwards a little bit? Have I lost this sense of what I'm willing to die for? Do I need to go a little deeper at this point and touching up on those questions? Turns out to be a really good. It's sort of the same thing when you go to the doctor and they do the same test again and again and again and again. I have a series of tests that I do for these questions that I ask myself like that, you know, about the reverse bucket list and the meaning questions. And am I pursuing my pleasures socially and making memory with my prefrontal cortex? I also have, by the way, a spreadsheet of 19 micronutrients that feed into my macronutrients and I grade myself.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Those are the ones. I mean, what those do is that they really kind of wrap up coherence, purpose, and significance into two kind of handy-dandy questions. And the point is really this. I mean, it's easy for me to frame that up is, you know, once you find those, you're all good to go. All right. But the truth is you're going to go through the rest of your life contemplating these things. And these are the questions to ask on your birthday.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Very context dependent. Very context dependent, and it requires a lot of updating and serious thought and is not good enough to just be sort of raw, raw, raw and taking it to face value. It takes serious discernment.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “I was like, I'd be getting here all of a sudden. Arthur Brooks got really abusive on my pocket. No, no, no, no, Tim, I love you. Negative moments. You're a beautiful man. But I mean, come on. I mean, everybody around the world is willing to kill for what they think or cancel or hurt people what they think. But the real question is, are you willing to sacrifice what you have for an idea? And that's really hard.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Now, when Carlos says, I am willing to die for my faith, I am willing to die for the United States of America, which for him is an ideal of liberty. By the way, for those of you outside the United States, he's willing to die for our allies, too. Dying for an idea, that's super heavy. I mean, that's like pure grade meaning because people are going to say, are you kidding me? Are you nuts? This is not, I'm willing to kill for an idea. That's like, you know, that's kindergarten stuff Kindergarten stuff. Now, I'm willing to die for something. I'm willing to give my own life. I'm willing to take yours. Yeah, you and every other half-baked, dark triad malignant narcissist cancel culture, trait psychopath.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “because he earned the answers to his meaning questions that everybody watching us has got to earn it. Everybody who's watching us has got to go on a quest, a vision quest for the answers to the meaning questions. There's no other way to do it. Your dad can't tell you. Your priest can't tell you. The holy books can give you inklings. They can give you shadows on the cave wall to get back to the old Platonic metaphor. You need to live and to try things and to go through a process of discernment. And the way to do that is to do hard things, is to challenge yourself and to say to yourself, I will not stop until I have answers to these questions, to my own satisfaction.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Here's his answers. Yeah, I'll tell you his answers. Carlos, why are you alive? Because God made me. For what are you willing to die? My faith and for my family and for my friends and for the United States of America. These are not the answers that a lot of people watching us would give, but these are super solid answers. I'm super proud of my son.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “And thank God nothing's happened to him. He's getting out of the military in December of this year, but he's got answers.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Because he needed to see what he could do. He needed to find out what it meant to be Carlos Brooks away from his family, away from everybody. Why? Because he was looking for the answers to the questions. They were in Koate. They were like, why am I alive? I don't know. Maybe I'll find it in the cap of a combine. Maybe I'll find it when I dig rocks out of the soil. Maybe I'll find it by doing something hard with my hands. Then he joined the military. He was 19 years old. He joined the Marine Corps. Boot camp is no walk in the park for the U.S. Marine Corps, as we've all heard. But then it got harder from there. He did infantry training battalion, then the N-Dock for the Scout Sniper Platoon, which is a branch of the Special Forces and the Marines. Today he's Corporal Carlos Brooks, Marines 3-5, Scout Sniper Platoon, and he's got answers. Now, that's a scary job for me and his mom. He goes on field trips, right?”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “And it's really fun to be my son, you can imagine. So Carlos' business plan for his life was by the time it went through several rounds of revisions was appropriately unorthodox. He was going to go work on a farm by himself and find the answers to the questions. Work hard. And so he actually got a job on a wheat farm in Idaho, a real job, not some sort of hobby farm. It was an 8,000 acre working wheat farm. He lived in the farmer's basement for the first year. He picked rocks out of the soil. He started at the bottom, made minimum wage, fixed fences, cut down dead trees, ran a combine by himself 16 hours a day.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “And Carlos was having a good old time in high school. We had substantial grade problems and academic issues. And my wife's like, at least we know he's not cheating. But the problem was he wasn't really having fun I think it was a meaning problem. In search of the answers to the questions after high school, he really became an entrepreneur with his life. And I asked my kids to do a business plan when they're in high school because they're entrepreneurs and I'm VC. I'm an investor. I deserve a business plan. And when they weren't original, I'd send them back for revisions.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “I am willing to die for others. That's the answer. I mean, I probably won't be called to it, but I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to do it. I've come to the conclusion that I'm actually willing to do it. And here's how I learned this from my son. I learned this actually from my son. I mean, I have theoretical answers that are politically correct in the Catholic sphere. I would die for the Catholic Church. I would die for my faith. These things are true, by the way. I really would. Two pat. Here's how I learned this from my son I have three kids 25, 23, and 20, and my middle son is named Carlos. And Carlos is, he's a kinetic boy. He's a fan of yours. You know, he's probably watching us right now going, oh, Dad's going to talk about me right now. Carlos. Sorry, Carlos”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “In other words, you want to lighten the load for other people. And so, in other words, you want to serve your sisters and brothers. Is that fair? Okay, that's a great why. That's a great way. That's a great answer to the first question Why are you alive? Yeah”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “That's okay. The why of your life, our mutual friend Simon Sinek talks about this, start with why and the why of your life can be because of creation or it can be because I exist to lift other people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, which, by the way, is the why of my life. So that's number one. It's there, but it's in choate. It's not quite clear enough. Find out the answer to that and write it down and then perfect it over a six month period.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Tell me. Well, I mean, there's the physical answer, but metaphysically, why are you alive? Which can be one of two things. Either who created you or what you put on earth to do? You can answer that in one of two ways. Do you have a strong belief? why you're”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Go for it. I didn't say something wrong with it. I just think that's, what do we say? It's necessary but not sufficient Opus Day myself.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “You need a purpose. You need to answer a purpose question, which is what's the purpose of my life and what direction am I going? What's the goal of my life? What's the end point of my life? And the last is significance, which is why does it matter that I'm alive? Now I have a test to see if somebody has a meaning crisis in their life. It's really just two questions. And to pass the test, you need incredibly true, honest, and compelling answers. There's no right answers. There's only wrong answers or no answers. So you want to take the test?”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Archer So you go in search of it. And it turns out I want to go find the meaning of life is too big a question. You'll never find it by sitting at the mouth of the guru's cave or with the ayahuasca shaman saying, I just want to find meaning in life. You need to boil it down to really sub questions, which are all about coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? I need to believe something about why things happen the way they do. It doesn't be religious. It can be completely secular.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Yeah, good luck. Go make it. And if it's no good, it's on you, man. And by the way, Sartre, he has a very empowering, a very muscular philosophy because he says, you have to live up to the responsibility of creating your essence and living according to it. It's sort of Freudian in its way. And then, of course, there's Nietzsche, our old Pal Friedrich. A lot of young men love Nietzsche because, by the way, it's unbelievably beautiful prose. Gorgeous writer, including in English. You don't have to go learn German to read it. But, you know, the gay science, which is one of his most famous texts where he said, God is dead. And we killed him. It lands, right? But his whole point is existence is real, but essence is a figment of your imagination, so don't even try to find it. That's nihilism. We're struggling with these schools of thought. And we all suspect, it doesn't matter how religious you are. You know, it doesn't matter what your wiring actually happens to be. You kind of wonder if maybe me chance.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Existentialism, you know, Sartre, and even to a certain extent, Kierkegaard would say that existence precedes essence. In other words, you're born and there is no meaning until you create it.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Mini's a hard one Meaning's the hard one. I mean, look, I mean, enjoyment's no joke and satisfaction takes work, but meaning eludes some people their entire lives because they don't know what they're looking for. They're fumbling around for something. They don't know exactly what it is. And a lot of people, they deeply suspect that it doesn't exist, that it doesn't actually exist. You look at a lot of 20th century and 19th century philosophers and they say it doesn't exist. I mean, there's sort of three schools of thought about meaning. There's the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims. It's all kind of based on meaning in the following way. Essence precedes existence. Meaning, you have meaning in life that precedes your actual life, and your job is to find it and live up to it. But it's already out there. You just need to go looking for it, right? In the 19th and 20th centuries, that was relaxed with two major schools of philosophical thought, nihilism and existentialism.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “I have to do it a lot. I do it at least once a week, actually, because I want to remember. I need to remember. And if I don't, I'm going to be walking kind of on eggshells and just sort of wondering and having that kind of minor sense of dread. I don't want to live that way. I don't need to live that way. It's not important for me to live that way. On the contrary, it's important for me not to live that way because I won't be fully alive now. I'll be living prospectively in a future and that future is dominated by fear and then I'm really not washing the dishes. I'm really not enjoying that juicy peach. On the contrary, I'm breaking my teeth on the pit. And it's not even a real pit. That's crazy. Not yet, really yet.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “And I deeply wanted to be successful, but I can't control that. And so I don't have to do much more than a couple of Maranasati meditations on the, you know, the market failure of a book But I have to do it about losing my mind because that feels deeply existential to me.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Lot because I have my own death meditation. I'm not, I mean, I contemplate failure sometimes because I'm afraid of it, but I'm not deathly afraid of it. The truth of the matter is the great thing about being 46 as opposed to 26 for you. The great thing about being 59 instead of 29 for me Is that bad stuff is going to happen and it's going to be okay. Bad stuff's just going to happen, right? I mean, the truth is that we realize, you and I both realize, that the worst thing that's ever happened in life probably hasn't happened yet. And okay, that's heavy, but it's not that heavy. You know, we're going to survive. You've survived a lot and it's actually going to be okay. I don't want to fail. I've always got, you know, we have that book coming out. I have a big book coming out a few weeks from when we're taping this episode.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Imagine that. Look into that, stare into it. Stare into it. And they do and they get over it and they can master it. That's the Maranasati death meditation on the self-objectification of the success addicts.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Kids, you know, make a note of it So I failed, right? But a lot of my students haven't. And so I asked them to do the Marinasati meditation on their own academic and professional failure. Number one, two minutes. I think I'm falling behind academically, and the people around me are getting better grades. Two, I just got put on academic probation. This was my dream to come to this school, and I'm not succeeding. Three. Job mark is looking bad compared to other people. I can't believe it. Four. I think I need to move home for a while. Five. My parents feel sorry for me. When they cry Because all you want is for mom to be proud of you. That's all you want when you're a success addict. That's all you want.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Because at the end of the day, in the Marinasati meditation, you recognize the illusion of the tragedy that was your death in the first place. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, new life will emerge. Will it be you? Will it be somebody else? Do you care? See, when you look into the abyss, you can cope with it. You're stronger than that. My students, by the way, at Harvard, graduate students, Harvard Business School, best in the world. So we like to think they're afraid of failure because they've never failed. They've never failed. I mean, you and I have struggled and, you know, we're older and, you know. I failed a lot. But my students are deeply afraid of failure. I mean, I basically got kicked out of college when I was 19. It turns out you're not supposed to drop all your required classes and take nothing but Indonesian dance and North Indian classical drumming. Turns out that's not the secret to academic success.”

    2023-09-11 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #692: Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT