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

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“Aya and listen to a hundred of his cantatas and learn how to analyze them. I mean, your life will never be the same or your neighbor and our mutual friend Ryan Holliday read the Stoics. Read the Stoics. I mean, it's a quasi-religious experience. You will feel a deep satisfaction at your littleness, probably for the first time in years, as a matter of fact. There are many ways to get this, but you need to get small, in front of Bach, in front of Epictetus, in front of God. You need to get small is the whole point.”
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
“Quiet and cool for sure. And therefore, you get just a bigger bolus of the benefits that you actually get from being in contact with the Earth and being in contact with nature, et cetera. Another way to do this is to stand in awe of human genius that's way outside the realm of your experience. So learn about the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. Read about his life”
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
“Well, it's good because you start the day that way, and the programming of it. And by the way, the experience of seeing the sunrise is incredibly awe-inspiring. Plus, it's quiet and cool.”
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
“I mean, it's just, it's the worst. And so you have to find a way to get peace. We really need is to put ourselves in perspective. Now, most people are afraid to be little, are really afraid to be insignificant. Perspective requires that we see reality and we get smaller and we stand in awe of the universe and what it can bring. There's lots of ways to do that. Meditation practices are very good for that. Prayer is very good for that. Religion and most traditional circumstances very good for that. But walking in nature without devices before dawn for an hour is incredibly good for that for all sorts of reasons. And this is extremely well validated in the social science literature.”
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
“I do not have a counter argument So there are alternatives. So I can tell you as a Catholic that that's my thing, but I can tell you he's a social scientist that it's not the only thing that will actually bring the same neurophysiological and psychological benefits. What we need is a sense of the transcendent that makes us small. That's what we need. Why? Because we need perspective and peace. I mean, Tim. You're going to go through all day. It's like my podcast, and it's my commute and my lunch, my money, and my friends and my mom and my me, me. It's so, man, it's just so, it's like watching the same episode every single night of Better Call Saul for the rest of your life.”
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
“Seeking for the divine, a serious spiritual practice. These are the things that will actually do much the same things but without the numbing and without the danger because it's tricky, right? I mean, hitting the dopamine lever has consequences. Hitting it hard and often has desperate consequences for it. And we know none of us needs problems in our lives. We have plenty of those already.”
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
“And again, because it doesn't eradicate. The unhappiness, the darkness, but it puts it into context such that as part of the quilt of your life. And so it's just one square in the quilt of your life and not the whole blanket.”
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
“You don't want to invite him back. And so you do something that feels like an inoculation from those depths. The key thing is that the real insurance policy is enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. That's the real insurance policy.”
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
“Well, pleasure tends to be numbing. It does tend to be numbing of negative emotion. So people will pursue pleasure because they're actually trying to, it's fentanyl. There's a reason that there's nobody who enjoys fentanyl because it's not something you're like, I want to go hang out with my buddies and take fentanyl and make a memory on the country. You're trying to eviscerate memory. You're trying to get rid of memory with these types of things. And so numbing things tend to work that way. And I understand, I mean, you've actually had, you have a history of mood disorders in your life, and you don't want them. You don't want them back.”
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
“And again, there's nothing wrong with feeling good. But for you, we need to watch to make sure that you're getting enjoyment and not pleasure. And we need to be very disciplined about enjoyment, not pleasure.”
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
“Well, there's a lot of research that shows that there is a way to buy happiness, but it's not by buying stuff. It's by buying experiences. It's by buying time. It's by giving it away. And you already figured that one out.”
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
“I mean, I'm not talking about poverty. I'm not talking about not getting three squares. I'm talking about not having the money for the nice stuff that people think is really wonderful to have, the houses, the boats, the cars.”
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
“But you got pretty famous Young. And so you saw the dark side of that, which is what social scientists and even neuroscientists will tell you with their research, is that fame is really the only of the idols that you can ever be happy in spite of. When Lady Gaga tweeted fame is prison, And everybody derided that. I'm thinking that's deeply adept. That is a deeply clarifying comment. And by the way, I mean, you know, John Milton wrote that in the 17th century, that it is the idol that we thirst after and sacrifice the happiness of our days for that. And you learn that by experience, not because of disposition, because you did hunger after it and then experienced it, and you realized that it's a very, very, very bitter fruit.”
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
“Your answer is correct. You are not motivated by power. It's the first one you get rid of. Okay, you got three left. Money, pleasure, fame. You got to kick one out. You got to get rid of one. What's the next one to go?”
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
“But we all have one or two that really animate us, and we don't always know it because we're not paying attention to it. Now, Aquinas' point and modern psychology bears all this out, that as a normal adult with a complicated life, if you know you're idol, you will recognize the thing that always leads you astray and leads you to do the things that you later regret. Because you were following that idol. So it's very important to figure out which idol that is so that you can manage it. Not that you'll make it go away because you're human, but you can manage your idol. Okay, so I start by saying, what's not your idol? Because of the four, there's something that you could ditch.”
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
“Fame, fame. Okay. Okay, let's keep with the quiz. DC, what's the idol? Is how close are you to the president? What senator do you know? I mean, communities will coalesce around this, but each one of us has our idol too. So here's the game. You want to play? Let's play the game. Okay, so the truth is none of us has all four. None of us is so vice ridden. We don't have the energy or time to be serving all four of these idols. I mean, come on, life is short. You underestimate me, sir.”
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
“Money, baby. You go to a party in New York and everybody's like, How's your fun this year? How are you doing this year? And like, how much does this apartment cost? It's all about money. You go to LA, what's the idol?”
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
“Change, and but when he said fame, he actually say fame, he said honor, but that has a different connotation in English. You know, I have a son who's a special forces in the military, and he serves with honor. That's not what they mean. Honor means to be honored. It's fame. It's reputation. It's the admiration of other people. Maybe it's Instagram followers or something ridiculous, but it is something that we want in the opinion of other people. And we see thirst after it. And he says everybody is motivated by one thing and even throw away comments, like communities, they coalesce around an idol. It's so true. You know, we're recording this podcast in New York.”
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
“Or what your thing is, has a lot of one-sided conversations and a lot of inconvenient morality attached to it. So we take these divinity substitutes. These are the idols. Idols are biblically and in mythology. What idols all have in common is that they're godlike, but they're not God. They're convenient substitutes for God. That's all an idol is. And St. Thomas Aquinas says there's four substitutes for God, which we can think of as the four substitutes for the real secret of happiness. They are money, power, pleasure, and fame.”
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
“And his magisterial work was the Summa Theologiae. And the way that he does it, by the way, is just, it's a masterclass in the way that we should be thinking about big topics today, which is by saying, by starting the topic with the best objection. Here's the question, here's the supposition. What's the best objection? Here's how I meet that objection. What's the second best objection? Here's who I meet the object. The whole book is written this way. It's unbelievable. And in the section on human happiness, which he pulls from Aristotle, who claims without any need for proof that this is what we all want, whether we act that way or not, that there's four things that we do that distract us from happiness. Now, his definition of happiness is seeking the divine. You know, this is what we all want. What do you want? The divine. Do you know that? Not necessarily. Is it hard? Yeah, that's the reason we don't actually act like we're pursuing the divine because, you know, pursuing God or the divine or the metaphysical singularity or exterior consciousness.”
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
“Thomas Aquinas, he said, No, no, no, no, guys, read this one. This is the one. And he interpreted Aristotle for the modern world. It was the same thing, more or less, that Averroes was doing for the Muslim world and the Maimonides was doing for the Jewish world because they were coexisting in southern Spain in this intellectual soup that's hard for us to understand today. It was so deep what was going on. So St. Thomas Aquinas was an unbelievably adroit social scientist. He was also, 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
“Your viewers can Google it. I'm sure there's some black and white grainy footage of it or something from when I was in the 70s or back. What's my idol is actually based on the insight of a medieval philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas. Theologian, but really a philosopher in the Neoplatonic tradition. Aquinas is responsible for introducing Aristotle to the modern world. Up until that point, nobody read Aristotle. It was all Plato, Aristotle's teacher.”
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
“Yeah. We have a game. I have a game show in my class at Harvard. It's called What's My Idol. Now, you can tell how old I am. When I was a really little kid, there was a game show on TV called What's My Line.”
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
“Yeah, it's like six miles. DNA, man. It's all survival to pass on your genes. And that's great for the propagation of the species. It's not good for, I don't know, for pursuing the divine path.”
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
“I'm going to love it. If I moved to California, I'm going to enjoy the sunshine for the rest of my life. Turns out you get six months, by the way, of enjoying weather, but the taxes are forever. And that experience of never learning is called the hitonic treadmill. And it's unbelievably painful. The way to solve that problem Is halves divided by wants. The way to get real satisfaction is not having more but wanting less. And that's the reverse bucket list, et cetera. That's the set of habits that helps you dominate that particular science and short circuit the loop that you're on because of Mother Nature's plans for you, which are not really in your happiness interest. She doesn't care if you're happy, by the way. No.”
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
“Yeah, for sure. So that's what brings satisfaction. Here's the problem with satisfaction. And this goes back to where we started the conversation. Mick Jagger's saying, I can't get no satisfaction. That's wrong. You can't keep no satisfaction. That's why you try and you try and you try. And there's a reason for that. You know, neuroscientists talk about homeostasis, which is a phenomenon of always going back physically and emotionally to your baseline. And there's a reason for that because you need to go back to the baseline in your life so you can be ready to react to the next set of circumstances. If emotionally you were going to be bummed out for the rest of your life, you'd become immobilized. And if you felt super happy when something good happened, you wouldn't be in the hunt anymore. Mother Nature wants you to think that you're going to feel this emotion for the rest of your life so that you will either avoid one thing or pursue something. But she wants to fool you and send you back again and again and again. Have you never figured out, man, if I get that call?”
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
“Totally. I mean, it's like, I've read your books. It's interestingly deceptive. The four hour fill in the blank, the early books, it makes it sound like it's a hack and it's easy. No. No, it's not. The four hours is hard is the point. Those four hours are going to hurt.”
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
“They're watching your show because they want to be better in their lives. And so they're going to be good at deferring their gratification and doing hard things. Or at least”
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
“Can defer your gratification and do long term projects. You're a satisfaction guy. The problem for you and me and a lot of people are going to watch your show because they want to be better. I mean, nobody's watching this show just for giggles. They're watching this show.”
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
“Satisfaction is achieving something with struggle. It really is that project that you're talking about, which it will give you meaning as well. The project per se can actually cross the boundaries across the macronutrients, just like something that you eat has more than one macronutrient. But satisfaction per se is doing something that takes effort and expending the effort. So if my graduate students, they cheat to get an A and exam in my class, they'll get the grade, but they won't get the satisfaction. The satisfaction comes from the pain. This is one of the paradoxes of life. You've got to suffer to get the satisfaction. You've got to defer the gratification. When somebody's on the pleasure meal, by the way, they also don't get satisfaction from anything because they can't defer their gratification anymore. These problems bleed into each other. So one of the things that you find is that people who are very accomplished, you know, the people you are good at satisfaction because”
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
“Because they become addictive, they become monomaniacal, and they're not the secret to happiness. If you're at three o'clock in the morning in Vegas pulling the lever on the slot machine by yourself, that's not the secret of happiness to anybody I know. And I've never heard somebody say, you know, you know what gives my life happiness methamphetamine never been said, right? And the reason for that is because these are drugs. People say drugs of abuse. No, no. These are drugs of pleasure. Let's not lie about it. They give you pleasure. And pleasure alone without memory is a problem. This is a very practical example of how we can use this science and turn it into a set of guideposts for our life.”
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
“That's the secret to it. So I'll take a survey of people's habits. Now, this is the reason that pornography is a big problem. You're not consuming it in public with friends to make a memory, for God's sake. It's just some sort of weirdly. That's a pretty weird thing to do, right? I mean, it hits the dopamine lever. I mean, they all are neurophysiologically similar phenomena. They hit dopamine, dopamine, dopamine dopamine.”
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
“Yeah, a guy pounding a 12 pack in his apartment alone. Why? Because that's pleasure and that actually leads to addiction. It's problematic. They always have an ad of a guy cracking a beer with his buddies people and doing something he's going to remember memory.”
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
“Challenge. When I meet somebody through a series of structured questions, I can figure out if there's a problem along one of these macronutrient dimensions. And it turns out that there's some very easy interventions that we can make across all three. And I'll give you an example. The first one is enjoyment. I say, you enjoy your life. They'll think about their little pleasures. I say, that's not it. Pleasure is not a secret of happiness. Pleasure is the fast road to obsessive, compulsive activity and addiction. Why? Because all pleasure is, is a phenomenon from the limbic system of your brain saying do more of that thing because you're more likely to survive and pass on your genes if you get those calories if you have that sex, whatever it happens to be. The way that you can actually turn that into a source of happiness is by mixing into ingredients with your pleasure, people and memory. Never do something that gives you pleasure alone. That's the rule of thumb. If you're doing it alone, it's a problem.”
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
“In different ways. So, happiness side is what I spend a lot more time on because Just so interesting on how we can pull the happiness lover. It starts by actually a good definition, which is not feelings. Feelings are evidence of happiness. And thank God happiness isn't a feeling. Can you imagine going through life chasing a feeling? That's awful. It's like, if it feels good, do it. Or if it feels bad, make it stop. It's a terrible life strategy. Happiness and its feelings are associated with three tangible phenomena in our lives that we can actually understand, manage. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three things that we need in balance and abundance. Think of these as the macronutrients of happiness, the protein carbohydrates and fat of happiness. If you don't have protein and carbohydrates and fat and balance and abundance, all kinds of weird things are going to happen to you. You're not going to be as healthy as you should be and you won't feel good. Same thing is true. You need to enjoy your life. You need to get satisfaction from your accomplishments and you need to have a deep sense of meaning. And each one of these is a big challenge.”
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
“A big black X. I mean, it's like X. It's so appropriate. So this is important because we understand that these are separable phenomena. We need both these emotions, but we need to be able to manage our emotions like prose. And that's a lot of what I 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
“And usually the way that this looks in people's lives is that you're in your positive idol, but something's intruding. So there's something bugging you that you don't always remember. You know, we go through life and, you know, on a certain day, it's like, yeah, it's all good. Oh, yeah, that thing. And then you go back to kind of going back to your positive idol and oh, yeah, that thing, you know, that thing. And so that's the mixed state.”
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
“And your negative emotions are much more intense than your positive emotions. This has evolved to keep you alive. Positive emotions are kind of nice to have. Negative emotions are signals or alarms that something might kill you. A sweet smile from somebody across the room is very pleasant, but a frowning face might be somebody who wants to murder you. And so therefore we've evolved to pay attention. This is called the negativity bias that we have. We also have mixed states that we go through all day long. So if you look you ask people in surveys what they're feeling at any given moment. So you'll say, you know, in five minute increments, what are you feeling, positive or negative? You'll find that about 90% of the time people can tell you how they're feeling. In 40% of the time for the average person, it's really pure positive emotions at a low level. It's your idol as most of the time. Good life's okay. It's kind of sunny today, whatever, whatever. All good. About 16% of the time is pure negative emotion. And that usually means something's happening that you don't like. Now, 33% of the time, you've got both.”
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
“That's a very good question. And by the way, the answer is not obvious. As a matter of fact, psychologists until about 50 years ago really believed that unhappiness was the absence of happiness. But it's not true because we actually find that the basic negative and positive emotions are coming from different parts of the limbic system and can coexist.”
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
“Okay, so if you know that you're a poet, this is an affect level. It doesn't mean that you're cosmically happy or unhappy. It just means that this is your natural disposition. So this is important, right? So it also means that you need to manage two levers. You need to manage your happiness levels up and you need to manage your unhappiness levels, not to zero. There's nothing wrong with unhappiness. You need to mute them. You don't need to numb them. You need to manage them.”
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
“Prefrontal cortex is highly active for people who are sad and people who are creative. That's the reason why I say poet, you don't think about somebody who's skipping down the street. You think of a creative person with a cigarette. Exactly right. You're in a French cafe thinking about thinking nihilistic thoughts and writing poetry. So that's the poetic disposition. And the last is low, low.”
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
“So, I don't have a happiness problem. I have an unhappiness problem, is what it comes down to. It's not a problem because unhappiness is really important. You won't be happy if you get rid of your unhappiness because you got to be fully alive to get happier. But you do need to manage yourself. Some people are really high positive and really low negative. Those are the cheerleaders. Those people can't stay in the gym. Why? Because they don't feel better when they go to the gym because they're negative affect is already in the cellar.”
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
“In my new book, as a matter of fact, because it's so important for me and for understanding ourselves, it's called the positive affect negative affect series, PANS, P-A-N-A-S. It's on my website. It's easy to find. I didn't create it. It's been psychometrically validated a bunch of times. It's a great test. And what it does is it helps you figure out if you're High negative or low positive, low negative, and there's four combinations it's a two by two matrix. You can be a high positive affect person and a high negative affect person. That's a high affect person. It's got a lot of strong moods about everything. That's the mad scientist. That's the mad scientist profile. That's me. I'm at the 85th percentile in happy affect and I'm at the 85th percentile in negative affects.”
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
“To begin with, happiness and unhappiness in terms of moods are largely processed in different hemispheres of the brain. A lot of neuroscientists believe that unhappy cognitions and emotions are largely dominated by activity in the right side of the brain. And the way that we know this, there's a terrific neuroscientist at University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson, and he's done work that shows that the left side of the musculature on your face is more active when you're unhappy, when you're experiencing negative emotions, anger, fear, disgust, sadness. And it's actually funny when you have when my kids were little, I would notice that when they fall down, you get a moment where you don't know what's going to happen next. Are they going to laugh and keep playing or are they going to get the water works, right? And the way that the tell on that, because it's usually five or six seconds because the wiring in their brain is actually not complete.”
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
“Students, I put them through a battery of tests to look at whether the bigger challenge in their life is happiness or unhappiness. The world is really scarce in the definitions that it gives us. And there's a big mistake that almost everybody makes about happiness, which is not a lot of mistakes. Number one, that is the absence of unhappiness. Number two, that it's a feeling. Both of those are wrong. Number three is that we can get it. So we can approach happiness, but we can't get there because we actually need unhappiness. And unhappiness and happiness are not opposites and can coexist. So there's a lot to.”
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
“Started exercising. There is a little vanity to it, but not that much. The whole point of the matter is this is one of the single best ways to manage your negative affect is to be in the gym for an hour 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
“But he had a good sense of humor. But the whole point was he wasn't prepared to fight for life because he didn't have the hygiene for his own happiness. And that example set me on the path to learn about this and to share these ideas. And it has transformed my life. I'm grateful to my father and I will be for the rest of my life for the example that he gave me and the lesson he taught me, even through his unhappiness.”
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
“But 50% of your baseline mood, your tendency toward abooleance or gloominess is sitting in your DNA. And this is the reason, Tim, that I came to the happiness field because I saw my grandfather who was Wonderful man and gloomy, and my father, who was brilliant and a lovely person and an excellent, ethical, kind man who is gloomy. And I said, no more, man, no more. I'm going to live on the other 50%. I am not going to be governed by that 50% that made my father an unhappy man. And so he died young, 66. He had cancer and they gave him 10 or 15 years or more. And he died in two. And as a statistician, he explained it. He was a biostatistician by his graduate degree. And I said, Tad, it's terrible luck. And he said, look, there's got to be people on that side of the curve, too.”
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
“No. My father was a gloomy man. And no doubt that had a lot to do with genetics because 50% of our emotional baseline is genetic. We know this from identical twin studies where twins are born and separated at birth into separate families. This is not an experiment that social scientists have done because that would be horribly unethical. But three identical.”
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
“The reason that we're always unsatisfied in life is because we have complex problems. We want love. And all we have is complicated solutions that the world is offering us, like, you know, computers and the internet and social media and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you'll never be satisfied because it's the wrong kind of solution for the wrong kind of problem.”
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