Ep. 385: The Hacking of the American Mind

Guest: Dr Robert Lustig, author

In the introduction to his book “The Hacking of the American Mind,” Dr Robert Lustig quotes John Butler Yeats, who said to his son William, “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure, nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”

Lustig says philosophers have known this for thousands of years, yet today, “the systematic confusion and conflation of the concepts and definitions of pleasure and happiness have been inserted into the limbic system, [the emotional part] of our brains.”

The consequence of this assault on our brains is a slow-motion crash of millions of lives, a crash that Lustig says “was intentional.” He says the business community and governments have taken advantage of neuroscience that lays out the difference between pleasure and happiness and how they influence each other. Lustig says, “They have hacked our decision-making capacity and, in doing so, have altered our individual and collective well-being.”

Stuart McNish invited Dr Robert Lustig, the author of “The Hacking of the American Mind”, to join him for a Conversation that Matters about how you’ve been manipulated into believing that you can be happy by buying pleasure.