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This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altiger Show on the Choose Yourself Network. Today on the James Altiger Show. There's a lot of research showing that men who live on their own die 8 to 10 years earlier than men who are engaged in a family. Well, how do they die? Well, any number of ways, but essentially, you have, and it makes sense, kind of a low resolution security camera on in your brain trying to figure out if you're adding value. When you're sedentary and not engaged in other people's lives and challenged and physically active, basically, the security camera figures out you're not adding any value and stops secreting the hormone that clears out the bad cholesterol, and you can develop any number of ailments, whether it's depression or diabetes or, but, yeah, the you you wanna live a long time? You better especially as a man, you better be engaged. And the number one source or the number one indicator of longevity was how social they were. Or simply put, how many people in their life did they care for or how many people in their life did they love? And it makes sense because if you think of what the camera really wants in terms of survival of the species, the species the universe wants to prosper. When a sun dies, it comes back a bigger sun. The universe wants the next generation to be stronger, smarter, faster, and so it creates incentives around things that are good for the species. Eating food is fun. Having sex feels great. And most importantly, caring for others is the most important thing for the future or the survival of the species. So it's the most rewarding thing. You have kids, right? Yeah. They say that a lot of the real memories that cement in our gray matter as we get older and that we look back on as being really profound moments are moments when we're in motion with our children. We're walking around Rome with our kids, with our teenage kids, pain in the ass, them screaming, and then we look back on it and think that was when I was at my happiest with my with my family, with people I love and who love me, and we were sort of in motion. We were doing something. We were progressing around something. So But let let's say, I mean, of course, many people have families and kids and so on, but there are many people who might not have kids. Yeah. What do you suggest they do? The research shows, if in terms of actual happiness, when you survey people, people without kids are more happy. There's no evidence that you can't be very happy without children. As a matter of fact, when you're raising kids, people tend to be less happy. And there is an argument They they suck when you're raising them. It's f**king stressful. Yeah. They're awful. They can be total a*****es. They can die. Well, yeah, actually They can die if you don't if you don't focus on them 24 hours a day. Like, you ever take your kids to the beach, and, like, all you're doing is making sure they don't die. That's your only activity at the beach. Rolling on audio. Once again, for his second visit to this podcast but this is like, what do you call what do you what do you call, Scott, when somebody's, like, celebrating something? Not celebrating, but, Mitzvah? You you made a prediction that turned correct on the latest on the last time you were on the podcast. What was the prediction? The prediction was that Amazon be the 1st $1,000,000,000,000 market cap company. You have I appreciate that, but, actually, I got that wrong. Apple was the first. Oh, because I think I predicted Apple. So oh, wait. Okay. Maybe I should be There you go. I see where you're headed. No. No. James, you're the genius. No. No. I thought, actually, Amazon was the first. Well, maybe maybe Apple, like, just touched it and went down. Apple was first, and then Amazon hit it. And, actually, now it's Microsoft. Yeah. Microsoft has quietly creeped up to be the the biggest market cap company, right, in America at this point. It has. Barely. What they've done is just incredible. Although, I feel more confident in the prediction saying that the first $2,000,000,000,000 company will be Amazon. Like, it stay it gets there and it sticks. Well, it just because you convinced me in that last podcast. It just like, if if my book, the 4, or my last book about Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, if I were gonna write a sequel to that, it would be called The 1, because everywhere Amazon is bumping up against the other 4, it's winning. In tech hardware, it's beating Apple. The Echo is the most transformative device since the iPhone in digital marketing, where it bumps up against Google and, Facebook. It's now the fastest growing, digital marketing company over a $1,000,000,000 in the world with Amazon Media Group where it bumps up against, the where it bumps up against Google and Cloud. It's the largest cloud. I mean, there's we've just never seen a company firing on this many thousands of cylinders before. So so before I I do have some questions about that, but the main topic Yep. Of this podcast is the algebra of happiness, which is your Hard left turn. Yeah. It's it's your your latest book. It's an excellent book. I I've I've read it twice at this point. You see, I got all these bookmarks on on this. Thank you. My main challenge was trying to figure out where to begin because there were so many interesting points that that that you brought up. And, I guess well well, I I will I will we'll get back to the tech stuff in a second, but or in an hour. Who knows? But, what made you go from writing the 4 to writing a book about happiness? Because and I wanna say, there's lots of books about how to be happy Yeah. It's not of all sorts of people. It's not it's not an original, kind of domain. So it's pretty simple. It's a personal journey for me. I look at my blessings. I look at my mood on a daily basis, and one doesn't foot to the other. And so, you know, a key kinda journey of personal discovery for me is trying to understand how to be less angry and quite frankly less depressed, and it's something I struggle with, and it's something I'm hoping to manage without, pharmaceutical intervention or, it's something I'm just very mindful of. And again, it's it's, one of my classes is or my kind of process for discovering and writing books is I do a class on the 4, the big four platforms, and then if it goes well, I do a video. So I did a video, got a 1,000,000 views, boom book. And my last class and it was a popular session is called the Outward of Happiness where I attempt to take a series of observations around being an entrepreneur or a dad and some research and distill it down to what I feel are a few basic equations on sort of best practices around creating sort of an arc of satisfaction in your life, and I delivered the last class, ad brand strategy. It's my most popular cla*s. Did a video. 2,000,000 views. Boom. Next book. You know, and it it's interesting because, again, what for for anybody looking to write any kind of self help book, whether it's about happiness or about entrepreneurship or whatever, it always distresses me when the author doesn't include their personal story because I feel like, well, who who anointed you, the expert on sales or entrepreneurship or happiness. But when you put in your personal story, which you do here, and you admit to all your personal flaws like you were just alluding to just now, now you have something to talk about because you are the expert on you. Yeah. And, of course, as a human individual, we're trying to to improve ourselves, whether that means more happiness or more meaning in our lives or more passion or better relationships. If you if you address your own complex and how you solve them, it's okay. You leave it up to the audience to decide if they're going to follow the route of of Scott or not. Yeah. A 100%. This is so first off, the title is purposely or the subtitle is notes, on the pursuit of success, Love, and Meaning, and these are notes. I don't have any academic credibility here, I'm not a social psychologist. I've done a decent amount of research on other people's peer reviewed research, but I've never conducted any primary research myself. So I come at this and just saying these are my observations and you have to decide if and when these work for you because there really is no silver bullet. I don't think there is, you know, it's a little bit misleading. I don't think there's a straight mathematical math is certain and I don't think there is a certain algorithm around happiness. What there are are best practices that seem things, behaviors, and components, and investments that people make that tend to result in an arc of happiness. And when I say happiness, that's a loaded word because happiness is essentially a sensation. Chipotle, Netflix, and Cialis will give you happiness in the short term. But the key is what investments and what relationships can we foster over the course of our lifetime such that when the pendulum swings high and low, which it always will for everybody, does it swing on a higher plane? So it's really more about trying to build an arc of satisfaction, and my observations around the difference between success and happiness. I know a lot of successful people, as I'm sure you do, and it's not a guarantee of happiness. No. And you you bring this up again and again in the book, the difference between success and happiness, and and you even have some some interesting charts that I wanna get to. But but you alluded to, you know, in in the book, you mentioned some periods where you you experienced anger. And I think a lot of people, when they're kind of moving up in career, when they're when they're really when they're putting in those 20 hour days Yep. You know, when they just they can't suffer fools at all Yeah. It tends to translate into anger whether you know, usually inappropriately. Because let's just say anger, while it may contain clues for yourself, probably shouldn't be unleashed on other people who don't deserve it. But, you know, you don't really mention depression that much in Yeah. In in the book. I mean, maybe one could read between the lines, but, when you're talking about family and things like that Yep. But, what what do you think your depression like, depression can mean 2 things. 1, it could be situational. Yep. Something bad happens, so, of course, you're depressed. Yep. And I think that becomes the overprescribed area where, oh, someone just died in your family. Here's some medicine to Yep. Stop your feelings, but that's impossible. But or, it could be biological. It could be the case that it is a chemical imbalance. Yeah. Yeah. So for me, it's comes from a place of anger. My father, suffers from it, and it's just, again, you know, my I I was going through I was talking to I think it was my sister, and I speak to my sister pretty much every week, and she asked me, she said and I can answer almost any question or at least pretend to try, and she said, Why are you so pissed off all the time? And I didn't have a good answer. If you look at it, and I'm sure as you look at your life, being born in America, having access to state funded education, having a wonderful family, having economic security, liking what I do, I just have no excuse for being pissed off. So I started thinking a lot about just managing my own happiness. For me, depression are the only times I've really think I've felt real depression is when I've isolated myself from other people and kind of when I moved to New York. I was living in San Francisco. I didn't like what I was doing. I was in e commerce because I thought it was cool. I did like So just to mention, you you started Red Envelope. It was one of the companies you started as an ecommerce company. You went public in the, first dotcom boom. By the way, our stories are parallel. I sold my first company to a public company in 1998. You rode that rise and fall, and then you had a similar rise and fall in since 2008. And then, your your your ups and downs. Your financial ups and downs are very similar to to mine. So I'm rich. No. I'm not. I'm rich. No. No. I'm not. Anyway, so it 99, I just decided I wanted to I didn't like my job. I didn't like myself. I didn't like my friends. I thought my friends were basically unremarkable people who were super fortunate or or mistook, being blessed or being influenced by being influenced by What what what stood out to you as I thought a lot of the people I were hanging out, and again, it's a reflection on me and the friends I was I chose. I I remember going to Davos. I got invited to Davos because in that day and age, if you were 33 and had a shaved head, you must be a f**king genius and and no insight into the cosmos. And so I got invited to Davos a bunch of times and made a bunch of friends there, and I just realized the only reason I'm friends with the majority of my friends are is because I'm trying to surround myself with quote unquote impressive people so other people will think I'm impressive, and I thought, don't I really getting a lot of joy and camaraderie from these people, and they're getting it from me? And the answer was no. So I kind of freaked out, pressed the reset button, got divorced, resigned from the border, red envelope, moved to New York, basically left everything behind. Well, I was getting divorced part of that list. I wanted to change my life dramatically. I literally wanted to kinda start over, and, nothing really bad happened. I'm a wonderful woman, and people would say to me, you're never gonna do better, and I I would say, well, I wanna do different. And quite frankly, it was a selfish move. I think it was a function of the fact that I could do it. It pretty much always came down to me. That was kind of my first, second, or third priority was my happiness and my selfish needs, so it probably wasn't what I call a high character moment in my life. But I moved to New York, and we're talking about depression. I kind of became an island. I isolated myself, and that is I basically only left my loft. I disengaged from friends, obviously wasn't married any longer. My mom had just passed away, which really took a toll on me, and then I basically only leave my law for, like, food, sex, and go to go to the ready teller. And about 24 months into that, and occasionally do a little bit of kinda pretend work because I had some money, so I needed something to kinda pretend to do. And then I realized kinda 24 months into it that an instant kicks in that if you continue to do this, you're gonna die early, and there's a lot of research showing that men who live on their own die 8 to 10 years earlier than men who are engaged in a family. Women are better at this because they maintain social connections, but if you want if you're a man and you wanna check out early, just kinda start hanging out alone a lot. And typically Well, how do they die? Well, of any number of ways, but, essentially, you have, and it makes sense, kind of a low, kind of a low resolution security camera on in your brain trying to figure out if you're adding value. And when you're on the Stairmaster or on a rowing machine and sweating, you fool the security camera into believing that you're hunting prey or building housing, and it secretes a hormone that's really good for you. When you're engaged at work or doing a crossword puzzle, you fool the security camera again into believing that you're making important decisions for your cohort or your clan and decides to let you stick around. When you're sedentary and not engaged in other people's lives and challenged and physically active, basically, the security camera figures out you're not adding any value and stops secreting the hormone that clears out the bad cholesterol, and you can develop any number of ailments, whether it's depression or diabetes or, but, yeah, you you wanna live a long time? You better especially as a man, you better be engaged, and the number one source or the number one indicator of longevity, the people who live to be over a 100 years of age according to this wonderful book called Blue Zones Oh, I'm gonna start right now. Blue Zones? Not only do I know Blue Zones. Dan Buettner wrote it. He was on the podcast in 2014. But that was when I was doing my podcast over Skype. Just 2 days ago, we ran into him at breakfast at the fairway. He lives in, I think LA. He was just here for the weekend for something, and we ran into him, in this obscure place. It's a diner above a grocery store Yeah. At breakfast, and he recognized me. And but, yeah, he he's a he's a good guy. And I was about to ask you if you read the Blue Zone book because It's a great it's great research, but to to summarize, Dan found, 5 regions where there was a disproportionately high number of centenarians, and he tried to figure out why were these people living longer, and it kind of came down to 3 things. Number 3 or the 3rd most important thing is genetics, and the interesting thing there is people overestimate how important genetics are. They're actually not as important as you think. People like to think genetics are more important so that way they can abdicate all responsibility for their health and say, oh, uncle Joe lived till he was 95 smoking a pack a day. Yeah. Why do people always say that? Like, everybody who's, like, a 100 seems to, like, smoke every day. Because they they're just trying to fool themselves and believing, okay. I can I can treat my body like s**t and get away with it, and the reality is you can't? Number 2 is number 2 is, lifestyle and some don't smoke, don't be obese, and you you clear out a third to 2 thirds of kind of early early carcinogenic or cardiac issues. And then but the number one signal across these centenarians was how social they were, or simply put, how many people in their life did they care for or how many people in their life did they love? And it makes sense because if you think of what the camera really wants in terms of survival of the species, the species the universe wants to prosper. When a sun dies, it comes back a bigger sun. The the the universe wants the next generation to be stronger, smarter, faster, and so it creates incentives around things that are good for the species. Eating food is fun. Having sex feels great. And most importantly, caring for others is the most important thing to the future or the survival of the species. So it's the most rewarding thing. I try and segment love into 3 things: the love you get as a kid, unconditional love transactional love, which is the majority of the kind of types of love that you and I are engaging in at this point where we get something in exchange. We get intimacy, economic security, sex, whatever it might be, a safe household to raise a family. But the most kind of, I would say, important type of love is when you get to a point emotionally, spiritually, financially where you can sort of engage in what I would call complete love, and that is you're not keeping score. You've just decided to go all in on someone else's well-being regardless of what if and what you get back. And at the end of the day that is the most important single attribute, motion, notion, activity for the success of the species, and so if you can get to that point it's also the most rewarding. And most people get to it instinctively with children, but I think really self actualized people get to it with a lot of people in their lives. So they decide, I'm gonna stop keeping score. I'm just going all in and, having an irrational passion for this person's well-being. There there's there's so many, kind of slices there that I wanna kinda peek at. But one thing, in terms of the the blues, what I thought was interesting too was most of the places were, you know, places like, you know, some island in Greece where or this island off of Japan where everybody was demographically the same. I thought soccer. Yeah. But there was this one town in California. I forgot the name of the San Ysidro. Yeah. Yeah. Where they weren't demographically the same, but they were still living to a 100. So so Dan tries to figure it out, and it turns out their 7th day Adventist and part of the religion, I guess, is on Sunday or Saturday. One of the days, they're all supposed to go together and take, like, a walk in nature. 100%. This kind of community Yep. Plus physical activity. And that, like you say, that turns out to be the most important thing of all. Like, as opposed to diet or, you know, being you know, the the the genetic the genetics issue is wiped out because they're all demographically different, and the diet is wiped out because they're all eating different diets. And the only thing that was common was this kind of Sunday walk that they were all taking together. They had to do this activity together. There's also a lot of research showing that we're our happy place as a species is when we're in motion and surrounded by others. So the modern day equivalent of that is you have kids. Right? Yeah. They say that a lot of the real memories that cement in our in our, you know, in our gray matter as we get older and that we look back on as being really profound moments are moments when we're traveling and in motion with our children, We were walking around Rome with our kids, with our teenage kids, pain in the ass, them screaming, and then we look back on it and think that was when I was at my happiest, was when I was with my family, with people I love and who love me, and we were sort of in motion. We were doing something. We were progressing around something. So You know, and you mentioned in the book something interesting too, and I'm I'm skipping around a little bit, but you mentioned, loving you know, learning to love, another child in that family kinda way. Because you mentioned, you know, there's there's a lot of there's a lot of divorce when you were growing up. There were divorces. There were stepmoms, stepdads, the whole thing. It's interesting for me because I have 2 kids and 3 stepkids. I have 5 kids overall. Yep. And growing to love my stepkids, you know, is it's like an you always wonder, am I going to be able to love, you know, one set of children as much? When I had my second biological kid, I I before she was born, I didn't think I would be able to love her as much as I loved my first kid, because I was already so much in love with my first kid. But then it was just such a natural thing. And then now with the step kids, the same thing. It's such a natural That's good to hear. Yeah. And it really does add to happiness at this point in my life. But some people just don't have kids. I mean, what what what do you say to them? They can't kind of adopt a kid. Well but so you're talking about taking the story you're talking about, I think a lot about masculinity, and I think that it's incredibly rewarding to embrace your gender, if you will. And right now, there's a lot of focus, and it's a good focus on gender as a spectrum. And I think, unfortunately, because of just some incredibly, like, just terrible acts in the workplace, that masculinity and toxicity have been conflated, and I don't think that's true. I think masculinity is a wonderful thing, as is femininity. And I can speak to a little bit more about masculinity, and I have sort of a cottage industry coaching my friends, kind of young teenage and college age sons, and I tell them to embrace your masculinity, but early in life trying to find what being a man is. So when I was younger, I saw masculinity as, 1, I wanted to be ripped. I didn't go to the gym to feel fit. I went there to be big and you know, give somebody sort of the instinctive notion that I could take care of us and kill somebody if I needed to. I don't know why men have a need to feel big when they're young men. 2, I just wanted to be generally awesome. I got a job in investment banking. I had no idea what investment banking was. I didn't like the people I worked with, but it felt like I was awesome because I worked in investment banking, and 3, I just tried to have sex with as many strange women as physically possible. That's how I defined masculinity, and then as I got older, masculinity was still really rewarding, but the vines change that you swing on. 1, being a good head of household, feeling as if you're providing for a family, voting, being being a good neighbor, getting involved civically. And also, I think one of the things that really tests your strength as a man is taking, as you referenced, the interest in the well-being and the welfare of a child that isn't yours. And you even look at pack animals, mammals, the one they usually choose as the matriarch or the patriarch is strong enough and and and big enough to not only take care of their direct offspring but care for the offspring in, you know, in the pod or the herd or what have you. So I think that's a key component of embracing your masculinity as being just a civic minded person, and I think one of the ultimate expressions of masculinity is what you're doing, and that's taking a vested interest in the well-being of a of a child that's not biologically yours. But let let's say I mean, of of course, many people have families and kids and so on, but there are many people who whether they didn't find the right person or did they as maybe they did find the right person, but then as a couple, they decide they they put off the decision until it was too later for many reasons. Right. Some couple or person or single person might not have kids and and Yeah. That that's it now. What do you suggest they do? Because this is a this I don't say this is a big component of your book, but you mentioned it a couple times in in the book. So kids have been profound for me, but the research shows that in terms of actual happiness, when you when you survey people, kids with people without kids are more happy. Having kids is difficult. There is an art to happiness. Now whether over the course of your life it creates this sort of instinctive level of satisfaction, I think it does. It just God reaches into your soul, turns on the switch, and you're usually kind of in love with these things. And I'd like to think at the end of our lives, one of the things we'll be most proud of and feel as if we can drop the mic is hopefully we'll have kinda secure, emotionally balanced children. But there's no evidence that you can't be very happy without children. As a matter of fact, when you're raising kids, people tend to be less happy. And there is an argument They suck when you're raising them. It's f**king stressful. Yeah. They're awful. They can be total a*****es. They they can die. Well, yeah, actually They can die if you don't if you don't focus on them 24 hours a day. Children have never been safer, actually. Our children have actually never been safer. There's there's Well, like, you ever take your kids to the beach, and, like, all you're doing is making sure they don't die. That's your only activity at the beach. Babies are a science experiment. We just we just gotta keep keep this thing alive. It's basically there's not a lot of reward, I don't think, in in the 1st year for the dad, but, yeah, there's no there's an arc of happiness. In some, from kinda 0 to 25, happy, happy, happy. Han Solo, Chuck E. Cheese, spilling into adulthood, college football, just a lot of fun stuff. And then kind of 25 to 45, it's what I call the s**t gets real phase of your life, economic stress, realizing you're not gonna have a fragrance named after you or be a US senator. Somebody you love gets sick and dies. You face failure professionally. Everybody faces failure. Everybody knows tragedy, and you realize, wow, I'm not the most successful person in my cohort. We have this wonderful competitiveness gene that advances the species again, but we anchor off the most successful person we know on every attribute. We anchor off the best looking person we know the most successful, and as a result, we have a tendency sometimes to feel a little insecure or disappointed that we haven't lived up maybe to the potential that everybody, especially in this age, tells us we're capable of. And then something wonderful happens typically in your forties fifties, and I don't know if you're feeling this but I definitely am, you realize life is finite. You take stock of your blessings. Hopefully, you have these wonderful things that kinda smell, look, and feel like you that are turning into less awful little humans. You start to take advantage of or really, you know, wonder at a cylinder of 4,000 gallons that pops up off of the the sea floor, and then I can ride on a piece of fibergla*s. Surfing. Like, I used to enjoy surfing. Now I just wonder at it, right? Just like how does this happen? How did we who even thought of this? Right? And you start to get more joyous. The people who are happiest as a cohort hands down, are always the same people and it's seniors. And despite the fact you think they have less to be happy about because they're basically they're, you know, enduring cell death, right, and they're they're less comfortable, literally less comfortable than young people, They are the happiest. So there is an arc of happiness. It looks like a smile. So so but you, you have this great chapter, about, you know, the the the metrics you use to measure success. And and you bring up a lot of things that I'm sure many people experience, but I know I experienced like, for instance, you could judge your happiness someday by your Twitter account, you know, or maybe how many downloads your YouTube videos get. Yeah. And, you know, that's that's an addiction. Right? It's it's almost set up to be an addiction. Like 100%. You you get a like. Your phone beeps into dopamine hit. It's like a trigger. So and there's a lot of these metrics. You said something interesting just now, which is that we tend to, look at the best person for each metric and compare ourself. I'm I'm not totally sure. I think we we sometimes find we we always have to find a what tribe are we in? And we we live in a society where we could belong to many, many tribes, and we're never the alpha, the number 1 in all in in any of these tribes. Like, there's there's always gonna be people with more Twitter followers. Yep. Even among, let's say, NYU academics, there's probably people who have more Twitter followers than you. So, how do you kinda wean yourself off of these addictions Mhmm. That are really biological, like that dopamine hit of a a new like I'm not sure you can wean yourself. I think you can be just more aware. So if someone had said to you, as a young man, what are your goals? You might have said, I wanna be I wanna have a nice family. I wanna have a family that's emotionally secure. I wanna have great relationships. I wanna be able to take care of my parents. I wanna be economically successful. I wanna be relevant professionally. If you kinda listed all these things, I don't know you well, but what I know of you is you've probably checked the majority of those boxes. But what we end up with is a series of much more definable metrics, so I think most people in their mind kinda have this number called how much money they have, and it's a number. And no matter how big that number is, you can imagine a number that's 2, 5, 10 times bigger than that. So you never really get sated. You never think, oh, I've checked that box. You can always make more money. And the way the way I think a healthier attitude or thinking about that number that is money is that money is an amazing thing. It's the ink in your pen writing your story, and it can write different chapters, new chapters you otherwise couldn't write if you didn't have money, such as buying a comedy club on the Upper West Side. It can it can make the chapters burn a little bit brighter. You can just just money is an amazing thing in terms of the experiences you can you can, can tack under your belt, but it's not the story itself. And if you look at there's research on the correlation between money and happiness, there is a correlation, but it tops out, and that is you will be happier if you are middle class than if you are poor, and you will be happier if you are somewhat upper middle class or affluent than if you're middle cla*s. However, it tops out. The correlation flatlines once you get to a point where you have decent housing, can take vacations, can absorb an economic shock, feel as if your kids can get a decent education. So in St. Louis, that's probably somewhere between 70 and a100 grand a year. In Manhattan, it's probably somewhere between 700,000 and a 1000000 a year. It depends where you live. But once you get to that point, money doesn't drive happiness. And so at that point, you have to start, to a certain extent, get off, stop howling in the money storm and say, well, you know, register what does make you happy. Where can you start investing other than just trying to get a bigger number? Because you will never get to a number that you can't imagine. It's like in that Star Wars film or the first Star Wars film, Luke Skywalker is trying to talk Han Solo into trying to arrest Princess Leia and says, they they would give you more money than you can ever imagine. He said, well, I don't know. I can imagine a lot of money. So imagine the things that make you happy. Imagine getting there. Imagine investing in those, and get to a place of economic security. But beyond that, just realize more money isn't gonna make you happier. It also doesn't make you unhappier. There's a myth that billionaires are less happy. No. They aren't any less happy, but they're just no happier than than millionaires, but they aren't any, less happy either. So you have to have the awareness that if you're fortunate enough to get to a place of economic security to start saying, well, what can I invest in that that will continue that upward trajectory of happiness? And and I think I think well, before I ask this, how how much do you think it's true? You know, people say money doesn't buy happiness. Other people say money does buy happiness. And you you mentioned here, something that I've written about a lot, which is that experiences are more important than things. Yep. So I think I think my theory is money is more likely to buy happiness if you for me, personally, if I keep cash in the bank so, you know, can handle any kind of economic shocks or whatever because I tend to be paranoid after the economic shocks we've been through in our in our lifetimes, and, the more experiences I buy versus things. Yeah. So so what 100%. The well, the research is clear. People overestimate the joy and happiness they'll get from things, and they underestimate the joy and happiness they'll get from experiences. So the advice is really simple. Drive a Hyundai and take your wife to Africa. I mean, it's just it's pretty, you know, it's it's pretty clear what, the the message there around around experiences versus things. You know, you've been you've been fortunate. You have, kind of an an entrepreneurial spirit. Yep. You've started a couple of businesses. You've you've done well. What about people who aren't going who are living in Manhattan, who aren't making, you know, that kind of money? And Yep. You know, do they balance things in a different way? Or did you know? Because I think to some extent too, even with money, at some point, you have to pull yourself away from that tribal metric of defining your self worth by your net worth. Yep. So first off, what is I would argue, okay, when we're speaking about economics, it's important to define what rich means. So my dad and his wife, who are 88 now, between their Social Security, my dad's pension from the Royal Navy, their total income is and it's passive income. They don't have to work for it. It's $48,000 a year. They spend $40,000 a year. Every other week, they go to, the Red Onion or Blobster, whatever it is, and that's their big night out. And other than that, they throw around nickels like their manhole covers. And so they're out of place where their spending is less than their passive income. They're rich. My father is rich, and he knows it. I just think he is so satisfied, so happy that without working, he is saving money. He's making more money than he's spending. I have a close friend here in Manhattan, and I have several like him who runs a large division at a bulge bracket investment bank who makes between $3,500,000 a year after state, city, and federal taxes, brings home about 51% of that, maybe 49%. And between his ex wife, his alimony to his kids, his summer rental in the Hamptons, and his master of the universe lifestyle, he spends all of it. And I can tell you at night, he's staring at the ceiling. He is not rich. So young adults or kids focus on their top line income. Adults focus on their burn. They immediately put in place a plan that says, how can I get on a path that such that when I'm 50 or 60, I will have passive income that's greater than my burn? And people always focus on their top line, but what they also need to focus on is their burn, and that is there's a real liberty and dignity to spending less than you can than you make. And most of us, especially if you're in sort of this master of the universe howling in the money storm race that you find a lot up in San Francisco and New York and big cities, you always raise your spending to how much money, you're making. So it's important, and you write a lot about this eloquently, it's important to figure out forced savings vehicles. Right? Whether it's, stocks, dividends, rental properties, whatever it might be. But get to a if you wanna be rich, doesn't mean making $3,000,000 a year. It means having passive income that's greater than your burn. Full stop. And having it diversified in such a way that the spigot really cannot be too bad. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Bill Maher had a great a great quote a couple weeks ago. He said, happiness there's this happiness study. And 7 of the 10 happiest countries on Earth are these socialist countries in Northern Europe. And basically their strategy is different. They cut the tops off of trees, and they make sure that nobody is homeless. Right? It's very hard to be a billionaire there because they have taxes of 70 to 80%, but they redistribute it to poor people and have decided that we're gonna invest in a kind of a comity of man, and we're gonna kind of level things out. Not saying that's the right thing to do, but 7 of the 10 happiest countries tend to be tend to be, socialist because happiness is not only what you have, but it's an absence of fear from what can be taken away from you. The notion that you have a a an illness in your life that takes you off track, someone you love gets ill, and then you have to then you have to layer on top of that economic stress surrounding it, I mean, that is a real that can be a real blow to your emotional well-being. Well, I mean, it's it's it's common knowledge, let's say, in the stock market that if there's uncertainty, then either the markets will go down or if there if a company says, we don't know what our earnings will be next quarter, that stock will crash. People don't Investors don't like Well, hey. Uncertainty. But but that means humans also don't like uncertainty in their lives. What will create anxiety it creates anxiety, any type of uncertainty. Like, if you if you go for a job interview on Friday and you're not gonna know till Monday if you get it, you're gonna feel anxious over the weekend. 3 3 rats in 3 cages. 1 rat, every time it drinks water, gets a shock. Another rat, when it doesn't get, every time it drinks water, nothing happens. No shock. And then the 3rd cage, half the time it gets a shock, half the time it doesn't. So the happiest rat, the one that doesn't get shocked. But the second happiest rat is the one that gets shocked every time because it knows what to expect, and the unhappiest rat is the one that's shocked 50% of the time because just about the time he or she is convinced they're not gonna get shocked, wham. We hate we hate uncertainty. Do you think there's a, like, I I have friends who, you know, people go back and forth on this. Do you think this is an evolutionary psychology thing where, you know, certainty means, you know, certainty from a DNA perspective means you know where your next meal's coming from, and you know that you're gonna be able to 100%. Mate. And, you know, our DNA is the same as it was 70000 years ago. Do you think that that that fear of uncertainty comes from that? It it's a pure survival mechanism. You hear the wind blowing in a bush, and 99 out of a 100 times, it's the wind blowing in the bush. But a lot of those times, you think, it's a line. I'm gonna stay the hell away from that bush because there's some uncertainty there, and it translates to the markets. Recurring revenue companies, subscription companies whether it's Prime, whether it's Netflix, whether it's syndicated research, whether it's software play into this instinct and this need for certainty so they trade at a multiple of revenues whereas the Bush is rattling that could have a line behind them where you're in a transactional business trying to reinvent your business all the time and there's risk that you're gonna get the wrong fashion wrong or the wrong product out or the wrong car model and you're constantly trying to reinvent the business without that certainty, they traded a multiple of EBITDA. So what you want is stocks where, you know, there's no wind through the bush. You can see right through it. There's transparency around, recurring revenue companies tap into this need to survive. This is the way I see it. So so, again, you mentioned money is, like, one metric by which people judge their self worth and then, hence, their their happiness or fulfillment comes from that. And you mentioned in the in the book, you know, for instance, your your Twitter follower account or Mhmm. Maybe, again, the number of downloads on a YouTube video or there's there's plenty of other, metrics. Do you think there's a way I feel like we're always gonna have some metric because we're because we're tribal animals. There's always gonna be some way we're gonna measure it. Yeah. So but but but most of these metrics are unhealthy because they're, like, just artificially created and man made. They're not about how much food can I like, the kind of thing that would would be a metric with the DNA we have now is Mhmm? Really just related to food and having children. And and but now we have that's taken care of. So we have all these artificial metrics that are really not that healthy, like like Twitter followers. Well, I would argue one of the most damaging metrics in the world is the Dow Jones Industrial Average because it's probably the most famous metric in the world, at least in the US. More people know where the Dow is than, you know, what their PSA or their cholesterol level is. And the problem is is that it's an illusory metric or somewhat of an irrelevant metric because it's basically an indicator of the economic well-being of the top 10%, maybe even the top 1%, who own 80% and 60% of the stocks respectively. Right? So it's a great indicator of how the rich are doing, and by the way, the rich are killing it. That's spoiler alert. But meanwhile, life expectancy in the United States has declined 3 years in a row for the first time in our history, so we're literally dying earlier. All the progress think that is? It's simple. Opioid deaths. More people will die from opioid overdoses this year than die in the entire Vietnam conflict. So we have this based I don't know what you wanna call it, epidemic play plague, but when you think about the amount of tragedy and suffering that the fatalities from a war caused, we're incurring that every year. And a lot of it's unmarked graves, a lot of it's middle class, red state, people who no one really gives a s**t about or that the government doesn't appear to give a s**t about, and so we have these kind of unmarked graves every year and our life expectancy is going down, so we're literally dying sooner. I mean what on earth can we call prosperity if we have no progress, and what would be the most basic metric around progress? It'd be, well, are we living longer? So metrics can be quite dangerous. And, you know, there you said how do you get wean yourself off this addiction? My colleague Adam Alter wrote a good book called, Irresistible, about the the addiction of social media, and I'm addicted to social media. Twitter's my smoking. If I'm bored, I instead my dad used to smoke when he was bored, and he'd get a dope ahead and he liked it and eat a cigarette with his friend. When I'm bored, I go on Twitter and I see how many people love me, and it's reaffirmation. I need constant reaffirmation. I'm addicted to reaffirmation. I don't know what the dope ahead is, and then I'm addicted to, the enragement or the rage that's caused by when people don't love me on Twitter. But I need to see both, and so what I've tried to do is I've tried to modulate it. I have days where I don't do I don't engage in social media. I don't get into Twitter wars back and forth with people. I used to do that. He's like, oh, f**k you. I mean, I so why am I doing this? My a mentor of mine said the best revenge on anyone is just to live an awesome life, and I just said whenever I get angry at someone else, I'm gonna say, okay, my revenge on that person will be to have an awesome life. But it's social media, it's hugely addictive, but the thing is I think you and I can modulate it. The fact that we're even aware of it, you know, when you're I remember going up the side of a house to, I forgot I was doing goofing around in college, I thought s**t I'm drunk, I shouldn't be climbing on ladders right now, But just the fact I realized I was drunk meant I probably wasn't gonna fall off that ladder. So self awareness and modulation is usually important. What scares me about this stuff is can our 11 year olds modulate? Can they the the the hurt, the addiction, the constant feedback, the affirmation they get from social media, can they in fact modulate? And, another colleague of mine at, Stern, Jonathan Haidt, has run written this amazing book called The Coddling of the American Mind. It says a combination of concierge parenting where we apply so many sanitary wipes on our kids' lives that they're no longer developing immunities and they're more fragile and emotionally very weak, and 2, the amount of time they spend on screens where they not only have fear of missing out, but they have FOBO, and that is not only were they not invited to the party, but they see it play out in real time over social media. Right? And boys bully physically and verbally. Girls bully relationally. And we've put in the hands of young girls kind of nuclear weapons of bullying. And so you're seeing teen depression skyrocket, especially among girls. Teen suicide, I think, is up 30% among boys, and I think it's, it's it's 2 or 3 times that among boys. Self cutting, self harm, emergency room admittance. But, you know, I in the book, I talk about meteors, and that is we're dinosaurs hanging out, eating vegetation, everything's cool, and then boom, a meteor comes and and really messes with us. Like, what are the meteors? Where are we vulnerable? And I think that's the biggest vulnerability right now among most of my friends and my cohort is most of us have a decent amount of economic success. Thank God most of us are healthy. But something comes off the rails with one of your kids, your whole world stops. I mean, you get fired, you're bummed out, but you can function. Something happens to your kid, it is literally hard to function every day. It's like nothing else matters. You can't think about anything else, and I think that's an instinctive healthy reaction. And I worry that we have an emerging, mental health crisis among teenagers, especially teen girls, where this combination of concierge parenting or bulldozer parenting on social media is creating a an entire generation of fragile and depressed young young adults. Well, as as the father now of 4 teenage girls, oh my gosh. Zincarzyna, but no. They're actually, one of them now is 20, so she's she's getting through. But to to their credit, I don't see as much social media activity, and maybe it's because they all grew up with it. Yeah. Like, for us, it was a brand new thing, so it became this, like, new, lever to get dopamine hits that we weren't accustomed to. So it's this exciting new thing. And and, like, they don't use Twitter. They don't really use Facebook, but they use they use their ins they go down Instagram, and they don't post as much. Instagram and Snap. Right? Yeah. But that Snap is not about Snap is more about communicating. Instagram is more about, does everybody love me? Yep. And I don't see them they don't post as much as I do, for instance Yeah. On Instagram. So it's more like I have more of the the need for that validation than they do. Teenager in the house? Right. Yeah. So so when I and I think about this, like, how do I what are the different things where I get validation, and how do I wean myself off of them? Because it's almost all unhealthy. Yeah. Like, there's not really any good external source of validation, I I think. There are what I would what so one of the things I try to write about, and I'm I'm fascinated with this, you know, notion of time and the fact that when I was a kid, years seemed like decades, and then I got to a point for about a year when I think it was 28 or 29 where a year felt like a year. And then as the base or the reference point for time grows larger because you live longer, now years are seasons. What used to be the fall season is now a year for me in terms of perception. And the only thing that really stops me, I'm trying to have more moments in time where, like, time arrests itself and slows down. And I find the moments those moments are with my kids, where they I see them do something. I see them I see the way they perceive something for the first time. Affection, like, raw, unbridled affection towards me or their their mom, and I I do my best to really be in the moment and try and stop time and remember that. And I I think that's kind of the whole shooting match. I'm an atheist. I think at some point I'll look into my kids' eyes and know I'm looking into their eyes for the last time, But I find that motivates me because I wanna have more of those moments where I feel a deep, meaningful connection with them or I observe something wonderful. And instead of thinking about getting back to work or what I need to do or do I need to go work out or do I need to get them in bed or get their brush teeth, I just try and stop myself, and I literally think, okay. How do I take these 15 seconds and make them feel like an hour? And, you know, in terms of, the the, you know, the title of the book, the outro of happiness, you make this point in the book about your father. How many more time Like, you do the math. How many more times will I see him probably Yeah. Before I before he's dead. Gone. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's an interesting thing to do do that math. Like, I I was just reading another article, where, once you're 20 years old, statistically, you have 26 100 Sundays left. That's it? And yeah. Yeah. And so it's just interesting to think in terms of those numbers. Like, what are you gonna do? Like, even at 20, you might think, okay. Well, I'll blow 10 of those Sundays doing something stupid. But at some point, the number becomes real. Like, oh, no. This is a valuable moment because it's one of the 900 Sundays I have left or whatever it is. Yeah. Match this is where I think measures can be motivating. My dad's 88. He's doing okay, but he's 88. So, you you're kinda always not great when you're 88. And I get out there once or twice a year. He lives in San Diego. So realistically, I have somewhere between 4 10 times I'm gonna see him. So I think about that. If this is one of the last 10 times I'm ever gonna see him, is there anything I wanna communicate to him? Is there anything I wanna do for him? And then with kids, if you're on the road a lot, as I am, I will sometimes come home because work takes me away from my kids for 2 weeks, and I'll register that they have physically grown. And it really depresses me because the last time I went to baseball, watched my son play baseball on Saturday, he's decided that he's now batting right handed even though he's left handed, and he's more aggressive on the field. And I I won't say he doesn't want to hold my hand now at the park, but he's more conscious of it, and he runs over to the refreshment center on his own. So my 8 year old that I had last year, he's gone forever. And it it's wonderful. I'm in love with this new 9 year old, but that 8 year old is never coming back. And, you know, you're you're right that that feeling kind of overrides almost everything else. Like, I I think back to when my kids were 8 or 9 or 10 or 11. Like, the golden ages are, like, 7 to 13 where Oh, magical. They're they're now they're now not as needy as when they're 0. Yeah. And, but they still you're still god to them. They're into you. Yeah. And after after 13, again, for evolutionary reasons, they have to start bonding with the stronger members of the tribe, which is historically gonna be the people their age, not the older people who are getting weaker at that point. So so 7 to 13 is that is that magic period. And I regret now you know, again, there's only so many Sundays Yeah. That you have and even less than you think because then they have ballet classes or soccer or whatever. So, yeah, you have less Sundays than you think to spend with them, and it's it is a depressing thought. You you can't you can't really dwell on it once it passes. Like, you have to find that next The next thing. It's, so I have a hack for this. Have you heard of the app, one second every day? Yes. Yeah. You mentioned it in the book, actually. That that's the first I've heard of. It was in your book. So it's this little app. You take one second of video every day, and at the end of the year, you have 6 minutes that defines your year. And a a third of them and a half half, if you're like me and you're very forgetful, trigger this wonderful emotion. I don't remember when we did that, and I've already I think a lot about end of life, a, because I'm depressed, b, because I'm a atheist, but I've decided at the end of my life, one of the reasons I want economic security is I wanna do what my mom did. I wanna die at home, and I've already planned it out. I'm gonna have about 2 hours of video on one second every day. I'm gonna do a s**t ton of heroin, and I'm gonna live my life 14 or 15 times over again. And as Frida Pinto said, I wanna leave. I want my exit to be glorious, and I don't wanna come back. We're not we're obviously not ending on that on that note. That's a little depressing, isn't it? We're gonna keep going. Like I'm a 103. No. But it's an interesting thing. Like, we, you know, Brad Meltzer, was a thriller writer. He's he's done many things, but he's probably best known as, like, a political thriller writer. Yeah. He wrote an essay, which about writing his own obituary. Yeah. And he thought that was an interesting exercise for for people. About your tombstone? Have you thought I I was at Monticello, and I saw Jefferson's tombstone. It's a pretty f**king awesome tombstone. It's like, you know, author of the articles of independence, founder of the University of Virginia. It's like, okay. This guy this guy dropped the mic. I think it's helpful, and it's another hack to think about the 3 words you want on your tombstone. You know, I don't know because I always you know, people say, oh, a lot a lot of people write to me and probably write to you, particularly you because you're a university professor. And they probably ask you, professor, I can't how do I figure out my purpose in life, my my passion? What what should I pursue? But then I I I was once even asking an audience down here, who can tell me can anyone here because there's 150 people downstairs. Can anyone here tell me who the president of the United States was right before Abraham Lincoln, the most arguably the most famous president ever? And 0 people one person actually answered Yeah. And said George Washington Right. Which was obviously incorrect. Right. And then no one else had a clue. Yeah. So so so, you know, James Buchanan, arguably the worst president in history, but the one that kinda kicked off the civil war and handed it to Lincoln. But so you think about James Buchanan. This is a guy who, when he was a kid, he said, you know, I'm gonna be president of the United States one day. Like, I'm gonna set my dreams high. Right. And everyone was like, ah, no. You can't do that. Like Yeah. Yeah. You're you know, no. That's that's hard. You're not you're not that's impossible. And and so he achieved his purpose, and, like, he achieved every dream possible, and now nobody remembers who he is. Still unhappy. And he's and he was in he was president of the United States in the year the civil war started. Yeah. I'm not talking so I I think once you're gone, it really doesn't matter to a certain extent what people think about you. What I'm saying is it's if you imagine those three words on your tombstone, I think it can be great a great guide or a great user's manual for how you wanna live your life now and what what will give you happiness and satisfaction, but you brought up something interesting and write about this in the book. I think some of the worst advice that kids get and they get it inevitably from every speaker at NYU. Anyone who comes speak comes and speaks at NYU is usually a billionaire and almost always and because, you know, billionaires seem to know more than anyone else. So your billionaire, come speak to the MBA students. But they always end their speech where they're not always, I'd say half the time with this following. Follow your passion. And it's the commencement speech that Bezos gave. It's the commencement speech that Jobs gave. Follow your passion. And I think that is just such bulls**t and such terrible advice, because if you usually the person giving advice and I always say anyone who tells you to follow your passion is already rich, and the guy on stage telling you to follow your passion usually got rich in iron ore smelting. And my viewpoint is your job as a young person is to find what you're good at. And if you're good at something, then make the investment in grit, perseverance, skills, training, so you can get great at it. And being great at something, the accoutrements of being great at something respect, admiration, economic security, self fulfillment those things are wonderful. And anything that provides you with those things will make you passionate about whatever it is. No kid dreams of growing up and being a tax accountant or a tax lawyer, but the best tax lawyers in America have really nice lives, are really good at what they do, get invited to speak at places, you know, can charter private planes, and have a selection set of mates that's probably better looking and more interesting than they are. All of those things are wonderful and will make you passionate about something, so my feeling is be careful about this follow your passion step because what happens, I see, with young people is they do their first, their second job, and s**t gets real. Work is hard. They face adversity, they face it you know, I was saying if you're seeking justice, you're not going to find it in the corporate world, and work is hard. And as soon as things get hard, they start believing, well, I shouldn't do this or I should move on because it's clearly not my passion, because I'm not loving this. So I think follow your passion is dangerous advice. I think it's find what you're good at, and then make identify and find what you're good at. And by the way, speaking of billionaires, Mark Cuban does he actually says you'll you'll probably be passionate about you you'll probably be most passionate about the things you're good at. Right. It works. They're they're they're linked too somehow. So but what what about, like, you know, Viktor Frankl's advice that, you know, you can, you know, basically survive conditions even as bad as Auschwitz by finding meaning in your life, which could be related to passion. That's so that's so far above my pay grade. Whenever you bring in the big a word I mean, I'm a marketing professor writing about happiness. I can't talk about Auschwitz. I you know? Well, okay. But just meaning. Yeah. Well, look. I the everyone I think has I wanna be clear. I think everyone has different, you know, different algebra. There's best practices and there's signals, and there's some obvious ones. The Harvard Grant study, the largest study ever conducted on happiness, 400 males. It started in 1929, all 19 years old at Harvard, and, of course, what's illuminating is they decided to track the happiness of 400 males. Like, who gives a s**t about women? Right? Which kinda tells you the age we were living in. And they tracked these guys from the age of 90 until the last one died 80 years later, and they had to swap out 4 principal scientists because the scientists kept dying, and they tracked everything they ate, where they lived, how much money they made, the exercises, the relationships, everything, and then they consistently queried them on their level of satisfaction and happiness. And what they found was pretty simple in terms of a best practice across the people that were happiest and also a best practice or a worst practice among the people that were typically unhappiest. So let's start with unhappy. The thing that was most prevalent in people's lives who were consistently more unhappy and, by the way, this is a do as I say, not as I do. What would you guess the one thing that was present in people's lives that most most often led to unhappiness? People almost get this wrong, by the way. I would I would say probably health issues. But Well, it's close. It's related to that. It's alcohol. And that is when, people Which is linked to the most common causes of death. Yeah. And people, you know, their when their health came off the track, it it caused their health to come off the track, failed relationships, less productive at work, and I talk about in the book, I don't think I've ever been I'm not a I don't have an addictive personality or I don't have that chemistry, but when I first moved to New York and I was working at Morgan Stanley, I used to go out every night and get s**tty drunk with what felt like other successful people. And you're 22, you can kind of handle the alcohol, and people have this dangerous stereotype of substance abusers that it's someone homeless in Central Park when the reality is the vast majority of people with a substance problem are functioning adults. And so you need to take and I tell my kids this. You need to take stock of your relationship with substances. And even if you're productive, I was making a lot of money at Morgan Stanley. I think I was pretty good at what I did. I was socially quite successful, but I was a little s**ttier at everything in my life because of alcohol. I was less healthy than I needed to be or I should have been. I I my relationships with my family weren't as close as they should have been. I felt like s**t all the time. I wasn't as productive and as good at work, And so I think it's important to, at an early stage, say, okay, is my relationship with a certain substance just making me s**ttier at something? Even if I don't hit rock bottom, even if I don't have an intervention, right, what is my relationship with substances? And again, this is more like do as I say not as I do because I love alcohol. I'm a better version of me. I believe I agree with Winston Churchill. I've gotten more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me, and I still continue to drink. But if the research is pretty clear, alcohol really is the destroyer of happiness across cultures. And then the best practice, the thing they found that was most present in people who are consistently happier than their peers was very basic, and that was the depth and number of meaningful relationships across 3 key categories. 1, at work, do you feel respected, admired? And just as importantly, do you respect and admire other people? With your friends, do you feel a sense of joy and camaraderie? And, again, just as importantly, do you know they sense joy and camaraderie from you? And finally at home, do you feel an intense level of love and support? And just as importantly, do you know they feel loved and supported by you? And those things are really those that is the secret, you know, if there is a secret sauce to happiness in this study, a 400 page write up of the largest data set ever collected on happiness, has the best first line of any academic study ever produced, and it's the following. Happiness is love, full stop. So so, what about, like like, someone like me doesn't I don't have This is gonna be interesting. No. You're gonna be my therapist right now. So so these put s**t together. That's the only therapy I I have. These podcast sessions always degenerate into my therapy. Good. Good. So so I don't have, like, a workplace where I go to work, for instance. Right. You know, you have Well, what's this? Where are we right now? I see all these people who are nice to you, which must mean you're paying them. No. They're they're my friends too. But, you know, this is just a podcast studio. I could go to any podcast studio, and I have I have many types of work just like you. You're Yep. A speaker, an investor, a professor. Yep. You know, you a mentor. You know, when you when your work when you get older, your work sometimes is diversified across many areas of life. Yep. And so there's no not one I guess you can choose, though, to be in the areas where you experience this. You you can select your audience instead of, trying to instead of just falling yourself into some job where you're not necessarily choosing the people around you. Well, happy happy is when usually in the context of achievement. I I get a big payday. I I cross a $100,000 a $100,000 downloads on my podcast. But real joy is usually in the agency of others. Joy is usually experienced because something happens, you've collectively worked on something with a group of people, and it's a shared success. That's joyous. That that stuff's a lot of fun. And greatness, my one of my venture capitalists, a guy named Larry Bond from General Catalyst, said something really powerful to me once. He said, greatness is in the agency of others. And when I was a young entrepreneur, I used to totally think about, to be a leader, I have to chart a path on my own. And then I realized great leaders are really good at just assembling a good team, demonstrating empathy and grit and excellence to keep the team together and retaining kind of the best players. But it's true the team of the best players wins. But joy, real joy, is very difficult to experience in isolation. So but, like, you know, venture capital is an interesting, category because it's it's it's right down to the numbers. So on the one hand, you're funding these companies that are creating jobs, maybe creating products that are helping society. Maybe you're making the entrepreneurs that you fund, you know, wealthy and economically secure. But let's say your fund returns 12%, and the fund you're competing with returns 14% a year. You know, that's gonna lead Well, it's we're talking about the same thing in metrics. Numbers are terrible. I mean, the metrics are big. To lean off of that, though. No doubt about it, but ideally you're evolved enough to go, okay. There's always gonna be someone more successful. Ideally you're evolved enough to go, do I make a nice living? Have I achieved a certain level of success? Am I able to provide economically for my family? And yeah, if I'm not on the 100 Midas list, yeah, that's a disappointment and I should aspire to be part of that. But people generally as they get older, this is the good news, and this goes back to the arc of happiness. I don't wanna say people get off the wheel, but usually at a certain point in their life they go, they start looking at the glass as half full, not half empty, and they say, I've made a really good living, and I've provided for my family. My family, for a variety of reasons, including Matt, really loves me. And those boxes, those metrics start becoming more important. And so the the lesson there is, yeah, metrics and goals are super important and holding yourself accountable. Your time here is finite. You should hold yourself accountable. Metrics those types of metrics don't lie. But if there's one piece of advice seniors would give to their younger selves, and there's a lot of research on this, the one piece of advice old people would give to their younger selves, what would you say it is? What would what is the one piece of advice you would give to your younger self? 25 year old James Altucher, would you what is the one piece of advice you would give to yourself? Trying to think. Because, you know, there's also the philosophy of not having regrets because that's how I am who I am. Mhmm. So on the one hand, I wouldn't change a thing. But if if if in a parallel universe, I could advise my younger self, I don't I don't really know, actually. Well, the one piece of advice seniors consistently say they would give to their younger selves, when I'm talking to people in their seventies and eighties, is they wish they'd been less hard on themselves. They wish they'd cut themselves more slack. And one of the keys to healthy relationships, one of the best practices for productive long term relationships, is a very basic notion. It's forgiveness. At some point, everyone screws up, and the healthiest relationships are people who come to the relationship with a willingness to forgive, and that's true for the relationship you have with yourself. And that is, you know, I talk of another one of my algorithms is success is the ratio of, resilience over failure. Everybody knows failure. I've been Mike, you mentioned red envelope. You know, I thought red envelope was gonna make me a billionaire. Instead, I ended up losing 1,000,000 of dollars and I won chapter 11 in 2,008. I have been beaned in the face professionally. I mean, just f**king beaned in the face. And I mourned, and mourning's mourning's important. I think it's actually important to go, okay, this has happened to me. I deserve x amount of days or months to mourn. I'm gonna be upset. I'm gonna cry. I'm gonna feel sorry for myself. That's fine. But at a certain point, you should probably be coming out of it. And if you're not coming out of it, you're stuck and you need to seek outside help or outside intervention. But it's, you know, the ability to get up, dust off your pants, and get up to the plate, and swing harder is so important, especially in our society, because one of the wonderful thing or one of the many wonderful things about America is we let people get off the ground and step up to the plate again. And very few societies I have I've started 9 businesses. Generously, generously, I'm like 3, 2, and 4. Right? Who would who would invest in that guy? And yet America, the University of California, venture capitalists keep investing in me. So the the key attribute is a willingness to keep getting shot in the face and standing up again because you have a society that lets you do that. We always say they joke in America that we embrace failure. That's stupid. We don't embrace failure, but we tolerate it better than any other society. Yeah. And I think I think and you kinda refer to it, either in the book or in an article that it's almost and and I have written about it in almost similar terms. I call it failure porn where we've gone from a kind of environment where young people are think that failure is tolerated to thinking that failure is celebrated. It's an attribute. Yeah. No. It's not. Yeah. I would certainly rather not fail ever and and Yeah. Learn success in other ways than having to learn it through through just failure, which was a very painful way to to do it. So what are the what are the 3 words that you wanna have on your tombstone? Oh, I would wanna have dad, teacher, and American. Oh. Why American? I why I'm not criticizing that experience. I aspire to be a patriot. I wanna be seen as someone who is fiercely, proud of and promoting, American ideals. I I feel hugely, you know, it's so easy to credit your your your character and your your your talent for your successes, and it's so easy to, blame the markets for your failures. And I have no such delusions. I was raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died as secretary, and the reason I'm here talking to you now, the reason why I'm able to provide economic security for my family and I have health insurance and I get to do these amazing have these amazing experiences is because the big hand of government, the university in the form of the University of California, the generosity and vision of California taxpayers and the Regents of University of California gave me an amazing education for zero cost. My total tuition at UCLA undergrad and then graduate school at Berkeley, was $7,000. And I just couldn't have gone to college if it had been much more than that. Kid kids don't have that opportunity anymore. Like, every Huge problem. Yes. I think that is a huge problem. I and you mentioned in another in other areas where you mentioned in this that, you know, your degrees is a is a a predictor of success. I don't know if that's always gonna be the case anymore because of the high the disproportionate Well, the value is being starched out. We as academics have become drunk on exclusivity. So rather than viewing ourselves as public servants, we now view ourselves as luxury brands. And we brag at the beginning of every semester that turned away 90% of the applicants, and that's tantamount to a housing shelter bragging that it turned away 90% of the people who showed up last night. We're public servants. We're not f**king Hermes. And academics like myself have totally lost the script here, and that is we should be in the business of making unremarkable kids remarkable, and instead we're in the business of making remarkable kids billionaires. So there's never been a better time to be remarkable in the United States. There's never been a worse time to be unremarkable. And for me, the United States has always been about taking remarkably unremarkable kids and giving them remarkable opportunities, as they did with me. So I think it's a huge problem. I think the biggest there's a lot of factors here, but one of them is the man in the mirror. The exclusivity, intoxication among academics and institutions is gross. Stanford has tripled the number of applicants, but it hasn't increased their freshman class size one bit because academics have so little to fight over that they like the exclusivity and the prestige that comes from that. So I think we need a Marshall Plan to increase the number of 1st year seats. I think we need to get the government out of the business of funding student loans because credit always drives up pricing. I think endowments that don't that grow faster than they're growing the the number of seats they offer should be taxed because they're when they're growing their endowment faster than their public service, they're for profit enterprises. They're not nonprofits. So, unfortunately, what used to be the upward the lubricant of upward mobility in the United States has become the sand in the gears, and we have a caste system now. I disagree with you a little bit. I think you're around some exceptional people, including yourself, that probably have made done really well without a college degree, and there will always be highly publicized examples of Jay z and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Assume you are not Jay z, and college is a really good plan b. That's a that's an easy assumption for me. That's a nice assumption. You got mistaken for Jay z. But there's I give me a kid's pedigree and his ZIP code. Alright. He went to Dartmouth, and he's living in New York. I can guess his income within, I would call it, 90% certainty that he'll be making $150,000 plus by the time he or she is 30. Dropped out of junior college living in Little Rock, Arkansas. Lucky if they make 50 k by the time they're 30. Now there are always exceptions, but I think the exceptions are vastly inflated by the media relative to their actual numbers. Well, you know, there's there's there's so many things actually in this book. Again, I have this, like, bookmarked almost every other page and a bunch of notes. But, Scott, once again, you've provided enlightening insights in this podcast. Thanks, James. Your latest book, The Algebra of Happiness, I really enjoyed it. I really feel I improved as a result of reading it, which is good criteria I use. And, gosh, you'll have to come on again because I almost feel like we could do, like, a a part 2. There were so many things you said about imposter syndrome, about risk. You talk a lot about your ability to be affectionate and how that's connected to happiness. But then I also wanted to people should also follow your your podcast pivot that you do with, I don't know if you're still doing it with Cara Swisher. Still doing it. So so, because last one I saw was in in January. I don't know. Yep. We're still out there. And yeah. Well, you always have, like, really interesting way. Like, in the last podcast, I I remember this one really interesting insight you said about Amazon, which kind of totally flipped me on Amazon, which is it was right after Amazon bought Whole Foods, and you basically said what they bought was, you know, a 1000 new warehouses. So they're gonna be able to deliver that much faster faster than anybody any other company in the world. Yeah. And there was a recent article you wrote, and I know we're hitting a tech thing at the last minute. But, you know, you mentioned, you know, Amazon it was a fill in the blanks thing. Like, Amazon is to what as Uber is to what. And so Amazon obviously started as a bookstore, then it became an everything store, and then it really be it went meta that and became like a cloud Yeah. Store, like a a a a place you go to buy the infrastructure to be your own Amazon. And you said that the same you said something similar about Uber. You know, Uber started off as a car service, then it's delivering foods. Now it's gonna start, delivering other types of, you know, ways of moving around. I I would even go meta on that where Uber is gonna become this place you go for all logistics. Yeah. So if you if you have people on one side who have excess capacity to move around Yep. And people who need that excess capacity, Uber will figure it out. Yeah. There's, so what what Uber needs to do to justify its crazy valuation is ride hailing is a s**tty business, just as ecommerce wasn't a great business, but Amazon was able to use kind of their cheap capital in a flywheel effect to get into other businesses that were profitable, specifically the cloud. And there's evidence that Uber might be able to do it with Uber Eats. I think you're right on the logistics. I think you're wrong in the company. I think Amazon's gonna be the one in logistics. Amazon goes into, freight and trucking platform, and overnight, that whole industry has just been brought to its knees on. Unless unless logistics is more powerful as a peer to peer, decentralized operation than as a centralized one, which I think we don't know. Yeah. That's that's fair. But the point is that, for example, I think Lyft is just I think the most value the most overvalued public company in the world right now is Lyft. The most overvalued private company right now is WeWork, but what Uber has that Lyft doesn't is Uber has shown somewhat some evidence of this flywheel effect by getting into Uber Eats, which looks like it's a good business. But you know time will tell, but ride hailing and we're really going off script here now, I know you were trying to close it out. I think ride hailing is basically the 3,000,000 lords taking revenge on the 350,000,000 surfs. We've figured out a way to take the 18,000 mostly white, mostly college educated people of corporate and have them split what will likely be 80 or $90,000,000,000 with their investors. And meanwhile, the 4 a half 1000000 drivers on the IPO are gonna get somewhere between 10¢ $1 per ride as their war as their reward, for building this company. So we have literally figured out a way to sequester the low educated, low income people from the spoils of the information economy at a rate we haven't seen. This is this literally is barreling towards a society of of of 3,000,000 lords being served by 350,000,000 serves. Because if you think about it, it's it's venture capitalists have provided have this intermediary, Uber Yeah. Which they give money to that subsidizes all of our transportation Yeah. While everyone else is taking the subway. So, like, when you take a ride with Uber, some percentage of that, like, let's say 40 or 50% of that is paid for already by Yeah. Venture you know, Wealthy Venture Capital. Oh, it's irresponsible. We don't need to take care of it. Yeah. We don't we really don't know the actual value of a ride. It's certainly much more than you're paying on Uber, and that's already expensive. It's a transfer of wealth from drivers and investors to us as riders because the marketplace now, has replaced profits with vision and growth. And Uber is a visionary growth based company. We'll see how long it lasts. But the net effect, when you think about what's happening to the middle class, when a worker at General Motors in the 70s averaged $28 an hour, and now a worker at Uber averages anywhere between $8.12 an hour. It's like we have lost the script. I mean, we can't the greatest I think the greatest source of good in the history of mankind have been capitalism and the American middle class, and if we keep kicking the middle class in the nuts, it's gonna come back to haunt us. And on that note There we go. No. But that's what I mean by you provide amazing insights. Whether it's technology or happiness is always fascinating. The algebra of happiness by Scott Galloway. Also, check out his book, The 4, which I think is still incredibly relevant, and your podcast, Pivot, is always fascinating. Scott, thanks once again for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, James, and congrats on your success. Thank you.