Can Science Really Make You Happier? (ft. Arthur C Brooks)

Happiness is a combination of enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning and that has a lot of discomfort inside it. Today I'm joined with the legendary Arthur C. Brooks, a distinguished Harvard professor and former professional musician. He shares his unique perspective on how happiness can come to those of us that study science and engineering using surprisingly mathematical principles. What got you here is not going to get you there is the whole problem. Arthur shares his unique perspective and how this knowledge can fundamentally change your approach to well-being. The arrival is not the thing. The whole point is the process of what you're doing and loving the process and dedicating yourself to the process. This isn't just a theory. It's a practical road map for human flourishing. Let's go. Arthur, first of all, I want to start with something that hit me like a lightning bolt. While I was writing my upcoming book called Focus Like a Nobel Prize winner, I quote you about this brutal truth. You quote from people such as the eminent esteemed Paul Dak who said that better dead than living still once he passes his 30th year. Now that's not you know such great verse or poetics and Dak hated poetry. He won his Nobel Prize at 31. Was his life after that more depression than happiness should have been induced after winning the Nobel Prize? No, he actually had a very happy life. So Paul Durac did his Nobel Prize winning work when he was about 26 years old after finishing his PhD. I think it was his dissertation at Cambridge that was that led to a modern understanding of quantum mechanics and then won the Nobel Prize at 31. And then it's like where are you going to go from there, man? And and the truth is he he did wonderful work. But I think that probably his master stroke was when he was in his 60s, he decided that Cambridge had crummy weather and he took a gig at Florida State University, moved to Florida, and every afternoon after eating lunch with his colleagues, he would go and work on a paper a little bit, then take a nap and then have a swim all year round. And so the truth of the matter is that Paul Dak figured out that his life could continue. But it couldn't continue in exactly the same way. That's what all of us have to understand. Especially the high achieving people that watch this show or listening to this show, many of whom are academics like you and me. What got you here is not going to get you there is the whole problem. And you have to let yourself change. You have to let yourself develop. You have to let your conception of what's going to give you fulfillment, satisfaction, meaning and enjoyment. That has to change along with you changing as a person. They say that all research is me search. Now, when I'm looking into, you know, the properties of subatomic dark matter particles, I, you know, I've put on a little bit of excess weight. So, so maybe that's part of it. Maybe it's a diet plan. I just eat dark matter. But you really exhibit this in some ways that are exceptional. You went from playing the French horn, you know, and traveling around following after a girl and, you know, spoiler alert, you got the girl and you got three wonderful kids. But you went from playing the French horn to economics to teaching at Harvard to reshaping how we think about human flourishing and human behavior. So, I guess that my question to you is this. Did you intuitit this understanding that you were running against a cognitive clock? And did that make you want to pivot constantly from these multi-ifferent dimensions and axes that you so handily did? Well, I got lucky in so far as that my first career was as a classical musician and I went into early decline as a French horn player. So, had a lot of early success as a professional. I went pro at 19. I left college and then I had what my parents called a gap decade kind of where I wound up running to Barcelona as you mentioned. I was chasing a girl to Barcelona. I was playing in the Barcelona Symphony which is a very nice career I have to say. But I noticed I wasn't getting better and things that used to be hard were now impossible. small things that used to be easy were getting hard. And so the result of it is that by my late 20s, it was pretty clear that the writing was on the wall. I had to do something else, that I wasn't as good as I used to be. And if I was going to, you know, I'm married man and I'm starting my life, I I had to study. I had to figure it out. And so the result is I was forced into the the into the situation in which I had to reinvent myself as a professional, as a responsible adult. And so I went to college by correspondence. I studied I got my bachelor's degree a month before my 30th birthday. And I found that when I was studying, I was so interested in things that weren't music that I wound up getting a masters and then quitting music entirely and going to get my PhD. But it was entirely precipitated by what felt like an existential crisis. I mean, there were days where like like if I can't play the horn, I might as well die. I literally thought that, which is absurd, you know? It's like everybody's listening. It's like cuz you can't play the French horn. Come on, man. You need a psychiatric treatment. But look, everybody watching us is a striveor. You're not listening to this podcast if you're not a striveor. And so your thing is your thing and you see yourself in that thing. You've objectified yourself probably as seeing yourself in terms of your own success. And that's a mistake. You're a full human person. And the manifestation of your gift can can can be in found in all sorts of different walks of life. And I found that out because I had to. And the result of that was I I've felt able to change course every seven to 12 years for the rest of my career and I've had four different careers. One of the neologisms or portmanto as our mutual friend Steven Pinker likes to wax rapsotically about is what I found so exciting is called a CV of failure. A failure CV. And usually we're used to thinking about, you know, kind of burnishing and saying how impressive we are. And and usually it's the case that the people with the shortest CVs are the most impressive. But you talk about research study in I think it's in the Yeah, it's in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by by Lynn. And you talk about the conversations and studies that this researcher named Lynn did. They all have insatiable passion and hunger to discover the truth about a problem. Winning a Nobel Prize was never these people's motives for their hard work. This isn't just a moral principle. You say it's a practical one. Unlike dreams of winning accolades like the Nobel Prize, our core research values are resistant to disillusionment. What does that mean? What does it mean to be resistant to disillusionment? The whole idea here behind this is that the true the the the the goats in in science for example and and that's in the physical sciences like your or or your world or behavioral sciences like me. They're insatiably interested and they love the process of learning because interest is an intensely positive emotion and so they have a lot of curiosity and that's the fuel. The fuel actually has to has to be the curiosity and what you're trying to do. It's not the Nobel Prize. I mean that's a that's a the Nobel Prize by the way is a good day. Number one in the New York Times bestseller list. That's a nice day. But it's nothing more than a nice day. And if you don't understand that, you're going to be falling prey to what we in my business call the arrival fallacy. That's that look, I love making progress toward a goal. So when I hit the goal, then it's going to be the best day ever and I'm going to enjoy it for the rest of my life. And that is patently false. And that's you're setting yourself up for literally a clinical depression. All sorts of neurohysiological hell, a hurricane in your head is going to happen if you actually think that when you and remember, look, we all did this, Brian. So you remember the day that you defended your dissertation successfully, right? It was great. And the next day was another day. You know, I remember the day I got tenure and I'm like I worked hard for get to get tenure and I got tenure because I started late. I didn't finish my PhD till I was 34 years old. And then I and I worked to catch up. And so I got my tenure, you know, just like six years later, five years later, and then, you know, to get promoted. And and the day I got my tenure, I got the letter in the mail, and my wife and I went out to to celebrate. And we we talked the whole dinner about the fact that our young child at the time had bitten another child at school that day and and we're like, you think he's going to grow to be a criminal now? Now he's a sniper in the Marine Corps. Yeah. So, it's like it turns out that those violent instincts when they're turned outward can be good for America, you know, but but you know, but the whole point is it's like the thing the the the arrival is not the thing. The whole point is the process of what you're doing and loving the process and dedicating yourself to the process. And that's one of the great secrets to satisfaction is the struggle towards something worthwhile and and getting a lot of value out of the struggle, per se. Let me pause there because what Arthur just said really connects to something that most people have never really thought about and and you've talked about it I know with Chris Williamson on his podcast and that's that you can never be happy. It's it's really kind of paradoxical. Happiness is not a state of a wave function that physicists can probe and and look at its behaviors. It is a process and you describe this so beautifully well and I wonder if I could run a theory by you. I call it the entropy of happiness which is basically that you have many many ways as you said you win the Nobel prize you're very happy for that day right but if you win two Nobel prizes your you know marginal increase in happiness is not that much in fact there's only one person who's ever won two Nobel prizes in the same field of physics and Marie Cury won it in different fields so there's only two people who have really won it in two different fields right so in that sense you can't really double your happiness right you can't it's very hard to double it even to be a billionaire you know, from a millionaire or from just our average quality of life, that's not really that simple of of a process. But to become infinitely unhappy and and I'm not I I will never mention this to a fellow parent, but we both know the greatest fear of being a parent or a grandparent or whatever is is would result in infinite increase in unhappiness. Therefore, there are more ways to be unhappy than to be happy. And therefore happiness is an entropic process which is great because almost nobody understands entropy anyway is it said so what do you make of this that that because there are so few ways to really double your happiness 10x your happiness that we spend so much disproportionate time trying to achieve that impossible goal. So that the reason is because we want we want to be happy and the reason it's so hard is we're not built to be happy. Mother nature doesn't care if you know Brian and Arthur are happy. Mother nature doesn't care less. Mother nature has only two goals for Brian and Arthur, which is survive and pass on your genes. That's it, man. That's those are the evolutionary imperatives. And and all of our emotions, the emotionality, positive and negative, that lead us to feeling happier. And you know, happiness is not an emotion. It's not a feeling, but it has feelings associated with them as evidence of happiness. that that that is actually has a much stronger bias toward negative than positive because you know the ancient keings that were wandering across the savannah looking for something to eat. They stayed alive because they were fearful and resentful and ungrateful and suspicious. That's why they stayed alive, not because they're like, "Today's a great day," said a guy right before he gets eaten by a leopard. You know, and so the truth of the matter is we're evolved for a lot of this negative emotionality even though we we don't want it. We don't want it. And so the result is understanding the proper place for our emotions and working on building a life that's full and interesting and rich and moral and ethical and spiritual and deep. We're supposed to be fully alive. Putting the the natural unhappiness in our life in the context of a full life. And that's ultimately what happiness is, is a is a combination of not of, you know, it's not the the maximum amount of feeling good. Dude, people who do that, they wind up, you know, living in their mom's basement till they're 45. The happiness is a combination of enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning, and that has a lot of discomfort inside it. So Arthur, you're never supposed to do what we're about to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. So, I was graced by your assistant and your team at Arthur Brooks Incorporated to get a digital copy. I don't have my physical copy that came out this week as this podcast being released. So, let's do what you're never supposed to do, Arthur, and judge a book by its cover. Hey, book lovers, we're judging books by the covers. We know we're not supposed to do it, but the impossible. [Music] Arthur, so tell us tell us the origin of this book's title, its subtitle, and this whimsical cover illustration. This book is actually a compilation of the 33 most popular essays I've written in the Atlantic over the past 5 years about work and life where you treat work and life like an enterprise where it's you're an entrepreneur in the business of your life. And and when I write about life like that, people it really lights people up and I'll get 500,000 or a million readers. And so I I we the Harvard Business Review packaged up the top 33 of these things into one into one book. And you know, usually my books are a big new idea, completely original out of the pipe. These are the 33 things around the same thing. And it's intended to be read one essay a day. So it's a 33day project to read this book, The Happiness Files. And that's why it's called the Happiness Files. Each day is a different file that you've got there. And so the result is it looks like a bunch of file folders. A very Harvard Business Review kind of thing is the way that that works. And I think it's a lovely I think it's a lovely idea on their part. I have to say usually I have a lot more input into the covers. But I like their idea. Typically people will say uh you know what that uh when I ask about the cover they'll say well I had no choice in the cover or the title or at least you approved of it. Now, it's rumored that your next book or a future book of yours will be entitled The Happiness of Art, Not the Art of Happiness. Why are artists so miserable? And what can we scientists out there learn from those people that should be, you know, by all measures very blissfully enjoying their their extra, you know, sexual selection, mate mate potential. You know, guitarists get a lot more attention from the opposite sex than do, you know, astrophysicists, at least in my experience. So tell me Arthur, what what is it about art that leads so many to feel that it's conccomatant with unhappiness? So yeah, my next book is actually called The Meaning of Your Life, by the way, that's coming out next April. But I'm still I will write a book about the, you know, the the the bummed out musician at some point and and I've thought about that an awful lot and I think I I think I've cracked the code. I think I know the answer. I wish I had this knowledge back when I was a professional French horn player, I have to say. But then again, I was playing my scales. I wasn't studying neuroscience at those days. So here's how basically how it works. We all have what's called an affect profile. An affect profile is the intensity of your positive and negative emotions. Your positive negative emotions exist independently of each other because they have different functions. Your negative emotions keep you alive and thriving because they alert you to threats. Your negative your positive emotions keep you alive and thriving because they alert you to opportunities that you should approach. You need both. They're literally produced by different parts of the lyic system of the brain. Everybody has a different emotional profile in terms of the intensity of their positive and negative emotions. You can fit the population into four equal quadrants with respect to their emotional profile. Now, anybody who's listening to us right now, you can go to my website and figure out which you are all free, arthurbrooks.com, and you can take a test to find out which quadrant you're in. And you're going to see right now why it matters. Some of the population, a quarter of the population is above average, above the median obviously in both positive intensity and negative intensity. These are super high affect people. This is 65% of CEOs and entrepreneurs, even though it's 25% of the population. Those are called the mad scientist. Brian, you're probably this profile because you're a mad scientist. Me, too. I'm the maddest of the mad scientist. I'm 95th percentile in positive emotion and 90th percentile in negative emotion. Everything for me is like super intense, right? Okay. Now, there are some people who are very lucky who are high positive, low negative. Those are called the cheerleaders. There are some people who are low low who are low positive and low negative. They're very low aic people. These people who never never never freak out. These are called the judges. They make great surgeons, hedge fund traders. They just don't freak out. And then the last her have high negative emotion. And yeah, exactly. They no freaking out. And then the last quarter are high negative and low positive. Those are called the poets. And there's a reason why they're called the poets. People have high negative emotionality and low positive intensity of their of their emotions. These are people who feel negative events very very deeply. And what we find in the lyic system of the brain is they have a very active part of the brain called the vententralateral prefrontal cortex which is involved in ruminative sadness which is a part of clinical depression and romantic activity where you ruminate on another person and creativity. So if you're thinking about a writing an opera or a poem that's when you're really ruminating on an idea and that leads to intense creativity. That's why artists are typically we think of them as depressed, romantic and creative because the same part of the brain that gives them this this poetic temperament which is really really hard to cope with because they feel the negative really intensely and the positive really lightly. There's the scientific explanation. There you go. Of course, this is the audience for for your show that can appreciate that. That's right. And one of the most important branches of physics is called solid state physics, which is actually a terrible name, but it used to be called like applied condensed matter physics, which is even worse, but anyway, it has to do with the properties of matter in its most, you know, kind of relatable state, which is as a solid. You know, we can't really relate to plasma and gas and and and liquids. Well, some of us relate too much to liquids. But you're known for this popularization of research from I think it was the 60s by Ray Catrell which was a catel which is about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence and I wonder if we could pivot now to a discussion about how you know many of the audience members are professors or teachers in some way even as a graduate student you had to teach I had to teach what do we benefit from getting older and getting off of the fluid intelligence curve as a scientist say in particular and then what are the benefits of getting onto the crystalliz iz intelligence curve when that does occur. And my question to you maybe after after you explain those two concepts is are there ways that you can actually borrow from another phase when you're in the phase of fluid intelligence borrow from the crystal and vice versa. Can you actually learn and apply tools from the orthogonal you know dimension if you will while you're in a a different dimension of your career or your life? This is the work of Raymond Catel who is a great social psychologist in the in the branch of of psychometrics and intelligence which is the measurement of human intelligence. Human cognitive horsepower is what it comes down to and and these days we think just IQ but but that's actually not the most interesting thing. His work talked about the manifestation of intelligence at different phases of life. And what he found was that younger adults have something he called fluid intelligence, which is based on working memory, focus, and innovation, brand new ideas, and they're able to crack the code on problems by yourself. Now, that's what wins you Nobel prizes. And that's one of the reasons that he finds that that tends to peak in your late 30s and then decline. And that's the reason that most people do Nobel Prize winning discoveries in their these days their late 30s. And there's a bunch of research on this. And I'm bringing Kohl's to Newcastle by telling Brian Keing this because you write books on Nobel Prize winners. And they're 65 years old when they come on your show. And they did their work when they were 38. The average age is like 80s on my show. I'm thinking I you know because I'm a social scientist. I'm thinking of the economists. The economists win when they're in their 60s. So, okay, but but and and the problem is that a lot of people, this is why Paul Drack talked about how your life's over after 30. What he meant was that that your your fluid intelligence declines. And it turns out that that innovation in your research is actually way harder than it used to be. Working memory is not as available as it used to be. And people thought of that for the longest time as degradation, sort of neurodeenerative misfortune. But it's not. It turns out that the brain actually just changes to a different form of the brain based on basically the hippocampus which stores episodic memory is full. And so yeah, your working memory is not as good because you have to you have to reassemble memories from different parts where the where the the the component pieces of a memory are stored in different places in the hippocampus and the filing system is no good. So a guy comes up to you on the street says, "Brian, good to see you, man." You're like, "What's his name?" and you send your little librarian to the back of the stacks and he goes up three flights of stairs and stops for coffee and 15 minutes later he comes back and says that guy's name is Mike and Mike is long gone and Brian feels like a but it's not the the problem is not that there's something wrong with your brain the problem is that your library is full I mean my young adult kids their library has one book in it they open it up and say Mike right so that's the difference is the way that this works so what you have however is not just slower working memory. What you have is more stuff that you have access to. So, you have better pattern recognition and instructor capability. You're better at at seeing talent, mentoring people, discussing ideas, and recognizing patterns across fields that you don't even know. That's why historians are much better that what you find is that that the best historians do more than half their work after the age of 65 because they have to have a huge library. Meanwhile, poets which are innovators with words do their best work before the age of 40 and more than half their work before the age of 40. Poetry is a fluid intelligent profession. History is a crystallized intelligence profession. Okay. Now, let's talk hypothetically about a 50-some year old physics professor at a Cal big elite California university. You know anybody like that, Brian? Let me check. Let me let me What's good about that? But what what you find typically is that it's much easier to do innovative brand new idea generation when your brain is less crowded and working faster, which is to say in your 20s and 30s. And it's much much easier for you to be a great instructor, teacher, mentor when you're in your 50s and 60s. So this podcast, by the way, is a teaching exercise. This is a public education exercise. And I dare say that 25 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to do it. You wouldn't have been able to do it. What are you doing? You're discussing you're you're bringing pretty sophisticated scientific ideas to people who are not necessarily PhDs in science. Why? Why can you do that? Because you have crystallized intelligence. That intelligence increases through your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and stays high for as long as God gives you your marbles 80s 90s. So when people come, you know, brand new professors come to Harvard where I teach and they say, I mean, right out of their PhD, and I'm the mentor cuz I'm an old guy and they'll say, "What's the secret to get great teaching evaluations?" And I say, "Get old because those are the best teachers." Is the way that that works. But that's one of the reasons that you should as you get older, be a popularizer. Bring retail ideas. Bring them to the masses. You're uniquely qualified to do that. By the way, keep writing your papers if you want, but don't beat yourself up. I mean, I read my papers that I was writing in my early 30s when I was working on my PhD. I was doing military operations research at the Rand Corporation to, you know, support myself and and, you know, I was doing, you know, neural nets and genetic algorithms, you know, early AI stuff and applying it to behaviors, to human behaviors for, you know, highly kinetic activity in the military. And it's like, I read that stuff, I'm like, what are you talking about? I can't even read that stuff now. And now I have an audience of 500,000 readers a week for my column. And I'm retailing science ideas every week in the Atlantic. And I couldn't have done that then. And by the way, I'm a lot happier now. Just to push back with love and respect. It is said though for great teachers like for example Durac his brother-in-law I think was Neil's Boore. I I I forget it was or or might have been Pi. It might have been Wolf Gang Pie another Nobel laureate. And they said I think it was Wolf Gang Pie right? Yeah it was Wolf Gang Pie said about Dak he said he said Paul never uses two words when none will do. And it was sort of a way for me to recognize this thing called the curse of knowledge, which is what I want to push back on what you just said and that often times you know so much that it's it's almost impossible to relate to your very young self that didn't know anything. So how can you at this stage of your career 50s 60s whatever you are relate to a 31-year-old assistant professor at Harvard? I mean how is that possible? Aren't you cursed with the knowledge that you've accumulated? Not just the knowledge, I like to say the wisdom that you've accumulated. Yeah. No, no, it's true. But you know, that's the same question, by the way, as how can you be a really, really good parent to your teenager when you know so much stuff that they don't know and you're talking to somebody who thinks they know everybody. How old are your kids? I can't remember. How old are your kids? I've got a lot. It'll take too long to to tell you all their ages. Okay. You got a bunch of kids, right? I have a 14-year-old. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. and your 14-year-old. I remember being 14 and that's the point. The point is not being paralyzed because I know so much more than an adolescent child. The point is remembering what it was like to be an adolescent child. And the memory of that is part of your crystallized intelligence. That's the key thing. I remember my brother had kids a lot long time before I did. And I said when I first started having my kids, my kids are in their 20s. My kids have kids. So I'm a grandfather now. And and at 61 it's the best thing ever. And and I asked my brother, "Give me one piece of advice for being a father when my kids are coming along." He thought about it. He said, "Don't freak out." And I said, "Well, you got to be more specific, man. I mean, don't what do you mean don't what what do you mean don't freak out?" He said, "Just remember what it was like to be a little kid, right? You've got all the wisdom and you might be able to help them, but the best thing that you can actually do is to remember what it was actually like." And this is what I'm mentoring the 31-year-old assistant professor. I remember what it was actually like. I put myself back into that situation and then I give them a little crystal ball about what it's going to be like when they're a little bit older so I can help them make really good decisions, you know. So, I'll give you an example of this. So, I'll get young professors who they're up against, you know, tough teaching circumstances. I mean, when you come out of your PhD, you've taught in graduate school, but you go to a big university, an elite university, and you teach undergraduates, they're going to light you up like a Christmas tree, man, on the evaluations. They're going to light you up. And it's like merciless a brand new PhD. And so they'll a lot of the professors they'll say like, "Yeah, you know, I I know it's hard. So the first year I'm just going to focus on my teaching, right?" And I say, "No, no, you're going to do your teaching as best as you can and you're going to have emotional fortitude and you're going to get better and any moment that you have, you're going to go back to your office and work on your paper because that's the currency of the realm. that's what's going to get you your, you know, your at three years renewal and at six years tenure and depending on where you're teaching, etc., etc. And I give them advice like that because that's a crystal ball into the future. And that's just a that's a an avoidable error. So, here's something that's keeping me up at night that kind of brushed upon with your fellow colleague George Church recently on an episode here. And that's you know we're sort of evolving into these you know homo siliconus or you know we're kind of converting to these convergence of of you know technology and squishy matter and the question I have for you is does that give us old guys an advantage because we you can't accelerate thanks to the thermodynamic laws we already discussed you can't accelerate the wisdom acrual process so our young colleagues with all their fluid intelligence we can wipe the floor with them because chat GPT5 just released today knows way more than every Harvard professor even you and every PhD that's ever lived in every subject not just in one subject like you and I might be specialists in so don't we have an unfair advantage now due to AI will it lead to increased flourishing for older academics like us I mean can we recapture basically our youthful fluid intelligence courtesy of this 10 millisecond response time supercomputer we all have with us it sort of depends on how we decide to use it what what I think that the the the AI. It's interesting because, you know, we're working on I have two startup partners in a an enterprise I've got that's creating a a twin of me that's been trained on so far 986,000 words that I've written or spoken and will be another couple million words before all is said and done. And it'll be released in in January. And what it'll be is, you know, something that can accompany my students so they can responsibly and in a careful way answer questions as I would and and in point of fact have and also branch out into areas that I haven't done research on on the basis of how I tend to answer questions but looking at research that I've actually never seen before. And so the whole idea is for all of us how we're going to be able to use artificial intelligence. If we are creative people and idea originators, it's going to make life great. It's going to make life better because it's going to do a lot of the work of sort of filling out paragraphs, you know, doing doing sort of make work that we and we're going to be able to specialize even more in the beauty that's idea origination. On the other hand, if you know, we're just kind of journeyman academics who can plug and chug you know you know rack and stack the articles in the basis of a one particular recipe. It's not going to make life better. It's going to make us replaceable and I think it's going to depend. It's funny, it's going to reward creativity. I was talking to somebody at one of the big social media networks the other day, one of the very, very top people, and he said, "What is doing right now in Silicon Valley, is that it's creating a superstar market among engineers." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "The really, really creative ones are making a million dollars a year. And the ones who just knew how to write code are now saying, "You want fries with that?" I mean, what you and I do, I call it the world's second oldest profession. You know, it wasn't more than 400 years ago when this guy Galileo Galile, you know, he was a professor. That's how he earned his his bones back in Padua in his career before he became famous for writing books, which we all know is how lucrative. Well, you do, but it's basically been a guy scraping on a piece of rock with another piece of rock. And it really hasn't changed much even in the 388 years that Harvard's been around. So, what what kind of phase transition might we expect? Is there sort of a quantum level jump that we can take to get academia which seems to be the most I thought CO would kill it. I mean, you talk in this book about death by Zoom and many other detriments to happiness and ways to improve things in the workplace, but I thought CO would kill academia as we know it. Charging 30 grand a year at Harvard or you know for Zoom classes, as great as they are, still it wasn't the same as being in person. And yet now academia is strong, the brand is stronger than ever. You know, Harvard hasn't admitted more students than it did in 20, you know, 2020. So what can we do to up update at least to the you know 1800s if not the the 20 you know 2020s what what can we do to modernize academia as you see it as Renaissance men and women that we aspire to create. So the learning process among homo sapiens it has very much to do with the with our ancestral environment and the way our brain works. We have the same brains now as we had 250,000 years ago. And and the result of that is when we try to do things that are outside of the that they don't synchronize with our ancestral environment. They don't work very well. So for I'll give you a perfect example of that. You know, people said we're never going to ever see each other ever again because we're not going to be together. We're going to work by Zoom. Now there's a lot of things we can do by Zoom. If we had been doing this podcast 5 years ago, you and I wouldn't be talking together on Riverside, which is this great technology. And this great technology was largely propagated during the COVID era, right? But the truth is that our fundamental relationships are not different than they were. So I'll give you an example of this. I don't have a Zoom marriage. I have an in-person marriage. I don't have a Zoom religion. I have an in-person religion. I'm doing the same thing. I go to mass every day as a Catholic. I'm doing the same thing every single day that people were doing 1,800 years ago for the exactly the same reasons. No. In other words, there are certain things that are synchronous with the ancestral environment, ancestral brain, and things that are asynchronous that don't work out that very well. So, what can we think about technology and what have we learned from COVID and virtual work that we can actually talk about with respect to other technologies like AI and how they're going to update the university or anything else that we do? And the answer to that is to the extent that it complements the way that we actually learn, it's going to be beneficial. It's going to work and it will be adopted. And to the extent that it substitutes for these ancient technologies and techniques that really really work, they won't last and they won't work is the whole point. So the whole idea you're going to get your entire education sitting in your mom's basement being taught by a bot, well, no, you're not. Because a good deal of learning is relationships with other people is how this comes in. This is how we learn. you know, people sitting around a campfire telling, you know, the ancient mythology of the of the origins of the world, right? I mean, how was Genesis 1:1 passed on? It was not passed on by, you know, a bot telling somebody that. It was humans doing that. And that's how our brains will learn these things. So, to the extent that we can use AI to make it a little bit better, improve the knowledge that then we can actually share with each other as actual brothers and sisters in the flesh, great. To the extent that we try to replace each other as humans, I don't buy it. So about nine years ago, our commencement speaker here at the University of California, San Diego, was your co-author and friend, the Daly Lama. And we asked him I I got a chance to ask him a question and that was, you know, what basically what is your daily routine? I mean, for lack of a better word, I know yours, you go to mass. You just mentioned it. Religious Jews like me, we, you know, pray every morning as well. And the question to him was, well, he, you know, he's Buddhist, right? So, what was his what his is his, you know, sort of daily ritual in terms of creating happiness? And he started off by saying, well, I wake up and you know this better than me, probably 3:00 in the morning and I meditate for 8 hours. And then my eyes just glazed over. I said, "Well, you obviously don't have kids," which which I knew, but but you know, having young kids and having other, you know, kind of demands on your time actually is probably the thing that will make you most enduringly happy, right? And him lacking that, he has a brother, I believe. I know that he was asked once, you know, if his brother if his brother died, would he be would he be unhappy? Would he be sad? And he said, "I would try not to be." And I found that so hard to relate to, Arthur. And the question I have for you is this. In quantum mechanics, there's the famous measurement problem that by measuring a system, you change it. There's no way for an observer to not interact and thereby affect the behavior and the outcome of quantum systems. So, how do I know if he's really happy? Even if I could meditate 8 hours a day or be like you, you know, super fit, you know, incredible career, grandchildren, all the things that that I aspire to someday as well. But but how do I know that you're really happy? In other words, how does it how can we observe and what can we glean from that bearing in mind that we always affect what we observe. It's interesting. So, I've known the Dal Lama quite intimately for the past 13 years and and since I first started going to Dharm Salah and we've done a lot of writing together and we've done a lot of conferences together and and a lot of very very very meaningful private time together. He's written about happiness but he has transcended happiness and that's what we need to do too. Here's the interesting thing about it. What the Daly Lama is is fully alive. And to be fully alive is an ancient concept of a good life well-lived that Aristotle would have called udimonia as opposed to what moderns often think about, which is I want to feel good today. I want to have an excess of positive emotionality. You got to transcend that. That's not the goal. I mean, it's interesting. I wish I wish id known this as a younger man but so how does the Daly Lama and by the way the protocols of the Daly Lama for first thing in the morning I'm very intimately aware of these things and they're super good for every scholar who are watching us today and there's good neurohysiological data to back this up the one thing let me take a can I can I take a side note go down this rabbit hole for a second is that okay because you know we got all these professors listening to us and and when I was a young professor I was like how can I be more creative and productive why because I got to write my paper or later I want to work on my book. I got to I got to do my lecture notes and and I'm I'm spent I don't have any ideas. Okay. So you got to optimize your brain chemistry such that you have the maximum amount of sustained dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. That's the goal. Dopamine is a neurom modulator that that you know gives you focus. It gives you anticipation of reward. It gives you a a heightened sense of creativity. So, the problem is that, you know, when you you get into the office at 9 or 10 in the morning and you've been doing stuff and you had a kind of an argument with your wife or husband and and then you kind of goof around for a little while and you answer email and then you get some coffee and you go talk to the person in the next office and and then you don't get anything done. Why did you not get anything done today? Here's why. You spent your dopamine in the wrong place. So, here's how the Dollaly Lama starts his day. And here's the version of how I start my day that I built on the Dollaly Lama's protocol and has fundamentally been a gamecher for my productivity as a scholar and as an author. He gets up at 3:30 in the morning. The first thing he actually does is he exercises. He has an exercise bike and it's hard now because he turned 90 in July and and his knees are kind of not great and the whole thing. But for many decades, he would do half an hour of aerobic exercise every day to start the day. And then he meditates. It's true before he ingests any nutrition. But the meditation that he does is called analytical meditation where he'll look for the first two hours he'll look at a passage in Tibetan Buddhist scripture and meditate on what it means for himself and the world. Then at the end of that then he'll take some nutrition. He doesn't drink he drinks tea. So it's where he gets some caffeine. And caffeine is an unbelievably potent neotropic substance which just just sucks dopamine into your prefrontal cortex. And then he eats healthy food. He's not a vegetarian, as a matter of fact. He eats healthy food, including protein first thing in the morning. And then he's able to undertake his creative tasks over the course of the day, whatever they happen to be. So I built my protocol on this. It's changed my life. If I get up at 4:30, 4 every day and when I'm home, I'm on the road about 48 weeks a year, but I try to simulate it no matter what time zone I'm in. 4:45 to 5:45, I have a combination of zone 2 cardio and strong resistance training, which is really, really important. Anybody who's over 30, you better be picking up heavy things or you're going to get sarcopenia. And it's also extremely good for your brain to to lift weights. And then I get cleaned up and I go to Catholic mass every day. It's my worship. It's my it's my version of his analytical meditation. And only then about two and a half to three hours after I've been up then the natural adenosine in my brain which is an inhibitory neuro neurochemical in my brain. It is actually that has resolved. So I'm not feeling groggy anymore. Then I administer the psychosimulant of caffeine and I get a clean dopamine surge into my prefrontal cortex. I have only 60 grams of protein in terms of yogurt and berries etc. And then I hit the books and I get 4 hours of creative concentration. No meetings, no calls, just writing and thinking and prep and research every day from 8 to noon. Every day from 8 to noon when I'm home. And that's by the way, that's how you do it. Look, like we're scientists. You and I are scientists. I'm like a scientist, but you get my point. We're supposed to live in an evidence-based way. We also believe in the metaphysics of, you know, a good God who loves us, which means that we not only believe in the creation, but the artist, which is a beautiful thing, too. But we better live in an evidence-based way that lives up to our standards. And that's one of the ways that we can actually do that by seeing ourselves as a research project. Let me ask you a selfish question. You travel a lot. You just mentioned, you know, traveling 90% of the year or almost or more. I feel great guilt when I leave my kids especially because you know the youngest is seven and then the oldest I said is 14. A lot of them in there. My question to you is you know when I go away sometimes it's for work. I don't need more money. I don't need more publications. I've got a chaired professorship. I've you know written books many books and I'm writing more. I don't need to do anything. But when I get that invitation and you know they want me to speak and they're going to pay me which is rare for a physicist. I know you experienced this in in different ways, but for a physicist to get paid to give a speech is pretty rare. It's very tempting. Even though, as I said, I don't really need the money necessarily. And I count things in terms of Shabbats away from my children. I say, "How is this worth?" Because you only get 2,000 Shabbats, right? You only get or sorry, you only get 1,000 Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 1,000 weekends if you're if you're secular, right? So, you get 1,000 weekends with your kids between age zero and 18. And then 95% of your life with them is gone. Basically, you're going to not live with them as much. So my question to you is how do you know should I not feel guilty about it? Should I feel guilty if I'm gone for you know.1% of my time with them? That's quite a good deal and I do feel guilty about it. How did you overcome that or how did you kind of negotiate that with yourself and with God maybe too? Because of being such an important role as the as the founding parental role model with your wife, you're basically like a god to your kids. So how do you how do you resolve that for yourself? And I'm asking purely selfishly. you know, our own personal example is how is how we actually bring our sisters and brothers along. You know, I mean, there people want to know how people have done it and done it poorly. And I've done it poorly at times. You know, before I was running this lab and and my happiness business out of Harvard, I was the president of a big think tank in Washington DC called the American Enterprise Institute. And that was a crushing job, man. I was the president of that thing for 11 years. And I was I never worked less than 80 hours a week. And I had to raise $50 million a year. and I had hundreds of employees and I was on the road, you know, I had to raise $250,000 every business day of the year. It was brutal, man. It was absolutely brutal and and I was in a panic in the early years of that such that I I made a lot of decisions that I later came to regret quite seriously. I made decisions where, you know, my kids kind of grew up and and I missed a good deal of it. A and and I thought to myself, why? And the answer is because I was trying to be special rather than happy. It was really quite selfish, I have to say. And so the result of it is as I've grown older and I'm very close to my children now and I'm very close to my I live with some of my kids and grandkids in a big house in a multigenerational house. That's a decision that I've actually made for physical proximity. They're like the Catholic family from 1940. My kids got married early and started having kids in their early 20s because, you know, raised them Catholic. They do Catholic stuff and but I'm not going to I'm not going to miss it. And I have protocols around my life such that I don't miss Shabbat. I don't miss it. So yeah, I travel every week, but I don't travel Sundays. I'm home on Sundays. I'm at mass with my family on Sundays because it's super important to me to actually do that. When I'm home, I live in Northern Virginia and I have a home in Boston because of my because of Harvard is my university, but my family's in Northern Virginia. Wherever I am, when I'm with my family, I don't take dinners out. I have protocols just like I have protocols for for for productivity first thing in the morning. I have protocols to maintain proper relationships that I believe that God the you know what is the divine spirit and the love that is my antenna to God here on earth, which is my family. It's my wife. It's my marriage. And I messed it up. I messed it up a lot of times when I was in my 40s. And I'm not missing it in my 60s. And so the result is you're just not going to find me on the road on Sunday. I'm going to be home by Saturday night, usually by Friday night, and I'm going to goof around with my wife on Saturday. And Sunday is dedicated to God because that's what I want to do. And that's what I think that God wants me to do. And and that has worked really, really super well. And I'm ra helping to raise my grandsons, which is the best thing ever. That's amazing. And that means you have, you know, people that share a common enemy under one roof. That's that's a incredible. You've invited them in the children and the grandchildren. Okay. It seems to me at least in my early life that I aspired to things in the professional world, most notably for me the Nobel Prize in that I had a very difficult relationship with my father. He was a great scientist. He won a lot of prizes, but he never won the Nobel Prize. And like a lot of kids compete with their dad playing football or doing wrestling or whatever. We were compet competitors about science. And I knew the only way to unequivocally, you know, defeat him, so to speak, was to win a Nobel Prize. And I I kind of, you know, self-critically did worship it. And it seems to me things like the Nobel Prize or academia tenure, etc., they have a lot of the hallmarks of religion and they're mostly practiced by secular people. I mean, for example, the Nobel Prize literally has a grave, you know, carved image that you get to and you have to bow down in order to accept it, right? They have special regalia, special rituals. It's practiced on the death day. It's given away on the death day of Alfred Nobel, not his birthday. There's a lot of, you know, kind of escalological kind of conceits there. But also in academia, there's there's hierarchy, regalia. There's all sorts of things that we can do that compare it to a religion. So my question is, you've written a lot about I think it was Thomas or or is the name of the scientist about the hierarchy of idolatry and you know, bearing in mind the the second and first commandments imprecation against idolatry. How can we first of all can you explain this this concept of the four attachments and and how we as academics perhaps or scientists and young people listen to this as well. How can we avoid the negative sides of say the Nobel Prize but also have something wonderful and godlike to aspire to without actually worshiping and violating a votara or the worship of foreign gods. It's a very deep concept that you raise and the truth of the matter is it's not an academic problem. It's a strivver problem. as people who strive for true excellence. And there are lots of reasons that we do that. And so, you know, I can go back in time and I know the I know the childhood of strivvers, Brian. I mean, I I I know your childhood. They're it's always the same. It's, you know, it's I can't get their attention unless I do incredible things. And then when I do an incredible thing, I get a pat on the head and I think, well, I I guess, you know, that I have to earn their love. And then you go through the rest of your life trying to earn everybody's love, getting the next gold star. Every st's got this pathology. And and look, God's love is a free lift, free gift, freely given. And we're made in God's image. So we better give love as a free gift. And we better take it freely given. The trouble is we're bad at that. We're really crummy at that. And so the result of that is that we're always trying to get the next gold star. And look, I like my dad was a scientist, too. My dad was a big shot, too. My dad was a as a mathematician in his you know his descendants his intellectual lineage how mathematicians do that his dissertation adviser and his dissertations dissertation adviser my dad is a direct intellectual descendant of Gaus he was brilliant my dad was the most brilliant man I've ever met right and I'm still trying to get his attention I'm hoping he's proud of me and he's been dead 23 years it's like I I god forbid I should leave my professorship because my dad would roll it over in his grave and his dad who was a professor would roll over in his grave. I get it. I get the academic strive. I completely get that. But but Brian, we need to be free. We need to be free to love freely and let allow ourselves to be loved and stop trying to earn everybody's love. Now, what you referring to a moment ago was how this conundrum is dealt with philosophically by Thomas Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinus for those of us who are Catholics who was a Dominican frier but he was a contemporary more or less of monades and avarose and they were all platonist neoplatonists in the in the middle ages in the 12th 11th and 12th and 13th centuries and and Aquinus really discovered Aristotle or real really rediscovered Aristotle for modern audiences and notice that Aristotle said that people are beguiled strivvers are beguiled by four earthly idols money, power, pleasure, and fame. He called it honor. Honor is different. Like, you know, my marine I have two marine kids and they serve with honor. You know, that's that's that's not what I'm talking about. Fame means the admiration. And in academia, fame is extremely local, right? It's like you're not going to be internet famous as a physicist, but when you walk into the room, you like Brian Kading, he wrote that paper on, right? I get it. So, we have this weird prestige version of fame in academia. Totally. So, so these beguile us and when we turn those things into the thing that that we think is going to give us satisfaction, we always wind up in misery. That was Aristotle's observation and Aquinus's observation for the modern world. So the game I play with strivvers is called what's my idol? Because when you know your idol, Brian, you can be free. You can be free. What's your golden calf? You want to play as we when we as we finish the podcast? You want to play? What's my idol? Let's do it. You want to be my contestant? Let's do it. Okay, here's how it works. Now, here are the idols. And this is very good social science. Money, it's like money, which or resources, power, which is influence over other people. Pleasure, which is feeling good, comfort for a lot of people, and fame, which is the admiration or prestige of the world. Okay? One of those beguiles you more than the others, but I'm not going to ask you which one it is. I'm going to I'm going to eliminate the ones that it's not. Right? I'm going to say I'm going I'm going to take these away one by one. And when I take it away, it doesn't mean, by the way, you don't have it at all. If you take if you kick out money, it doesn't mean you're poor. It just means you're average, right? And by the way, stvers hate being average. Mhm. So, okay. So, of these four, money, power, pleasure, and fame, which is the one that beguiles you the least and you're going to get rid of? I would say money. I mean, I grew up pretty poor and, you know, I wouldn't want to be poor again. I'm not, you know, as a public university professor, you know, you can't say I'm rich, but yeah, I I think money is probably the least kind of worshipful of those idols. Yeah. You're not that money motivated. If I said you can go buy a boat, you'd be like, I don't want a boat. I get seasick, right? And I hate fishing. Yeah. Okay. And it's a pain. Okay. Got it. Power, pleasure, and fame. What's next? Power is not something that attracts me. I've never wanted to be a politician. I don't, you know, I have respect for some of them. I don't have much respect for most of them. Ruling other people's lives, you know, especially since I've had kids is is of zero interest to me. So power would be maybe even easier to give up than money. So maybe maybe I'll invert those two, but they're they're kind of tied. Most academics will get rid of power. And the reason is because they hate people having power over them. That's what defines a university professor, right? I mean, it's like the dean, are you kidding me? Why did he become a dean? Cuz he couldn't write papers anymore, you know? It's like, give me a break. You think I'm going to be a provost? Are you kidding me? Shoot me. My dean, my dean, Christine, she listens to the podcast. So, I I I love you, Christine. She She's amazing. She keep giving me that lab space. Christine, we love you, Christine. I know. I know. Probably my deans do as well. So, I love that. But, by the way, I have great deans. But the whole point is I grew up with an academic and my dad always said never does never exhibit the slightest competence in management or they'll make you the dean. Take my word son. He said so. Okay. So, okay. And so you don't want to have power over other people either because you know like that's not the creative life that's management. Are you kidding me? Crazy. Okay. Okay. So, we got rid of two and now we've got comfort or pleasure, feeling good and the admiration of the world. Which one do you give up next? It's getting harder because obviously these things you care about more. Which one do you give up next? I mean, you know, I'm definitely I like finer things. You know, I like good food as you can tell. I like to eat. I like to, you know, do do pleasurable things, but I'm not unnecessarily as as, you know, worshipful of that. So, I would say pleasure would probably go next. I mean, comfort, it's hard to, you know, peace is a different thing, right? You peace is the highest worshipable value at least that we wish upon people, right? Even in my years as a Catholic, I remember, you know, we would wish each other peace because without peace, nothing else is possible. Even if you have your health, if you're at war, if you're in a jail, it's it's impos and if you're not at peace with yourself. So anyway, comfort, I'm not saying that's the same as peace, but but pleasure. Yes, I could give up pleasure next most easily. So now we know that what Brian wants is the world's agilation for his considerable gifts and to be acknowledged for and recognized for his serious achievements. And that comes from the fact that you were raised a stver and strivvers are going to strive and you're going to go into large parts of your life trying to earn other people's love. And and that means strangers and that means students and that means administrators and that means your wife and that means your kids and that means your parents and that might even mean God. And that's pathology. That's an idol. That's an actual idol. And that's what's going to always lead you astray. Always going to lead you astray. Anytime that you're like you're mad at your wife, it's going to be because she's not appreciating something that you're doing and she hasn't actually loved you enough and said, you know, that's so thank you for, you know, thank you for doing all these wonderful things. You you're a good boy and you've earned more of my love. And when you don't feel like you get it, you feel resentful. This is a classic thing that strivvers actually have. And that's the idolatrousness that we all have. And everybody has an idol, by the way. This is not some weird pathology and some mental illness. This is just kind of how fallen humans have been wired. This is Genesis 2, the fall of man. And Exodus, right? It says, Exodus, people think, you know, it says, "You shall not leave yourself after lead yourself after your heart and your eyes lead you astray." But really, in Hebrew, it means to prostitute yourself. The actual translation is, you know, you should not go astray after your eyes and your heart after which you prostrate. And we physicists and scientists and and academics, we think we're so sophisticated, but literally we we worship an idol in about 3 seconds, whether it's the H index, which was invented here at UC San Diego, or some other, you know, citation count or book sales or or what have you. Anyway, Arthur, you've been so generous, but I do want to close with a fellow Arthur, a great Arthur by the name of Sir Arthur C. Clark. He has three famous laws. By the way, did you know that he invented the word podcast unknowingly? I did not know that. So you see behind me there's a sign it says open the open the pod bay doors. So when Vinnie CO an engineer at Apple invented the iPod and pitched it to Steve Jobs Steve thought the name it looked like the pod in the pod bay doors of fame in 2001 of space odyssey which is the origin or connected to the origin of the word podcast. So podcast wouldn't happen without a fellow Arthur. How about that Arthur? Okay. So Arthur said many things. Another Arthur C. Another Arthur C. That's right. You have to put the and you're you're you would be cited first because you have the B and he Okay, here we go. So, I'm going to ask you rapid fire. Rapid fire. We'll close out in three quick questions. Okay. He said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And my question is, you've basically reversed engineered the physics of happiness or human flourishing and you've taken for what others suffer from. So, what is it about happiness that is so chimeic and and that you've learned that is is basically this this 200,000y old software that's still operating on our million-year-old hardware? What is it about happiness in the pursuit of it in the in the Declaration of Independence and on down? Why is it so chimeic? Why is it so difficult that you have to write these books about it? Why is it just so simple and we could just all, you know, practice as if it's not magic? Because mother nature doesn't care if you're happy and she gives you urges to think only about yourself. You will only become happier when you forget yourself by remembering others and remembering God. Now Arthur's first law, Arthur Clark's first law says that when a distinguished elderly, I'm not calling you elderly, but when a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is possible, he or she is very likely to be right. But when he or she says something is impossible, he or she is very likely to be wrong. Arthur, what have you been wrong about, if anything? What have you changed your mind about over your academic career? I've changed my mind about a lot of things, but a lot of it has to do with what we talked about here, where I honestly believed that if I could achieve all of the dreams that I have, if I could arrive at the goals that I had set, then I would actually arrive at a certain level of happiness. And that's wrong for me and it's wrong for everybody. Okay, the last question echoes the origin of this podcast name, which is that Arthur said, "The only way to know the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible." I want to give you the opportunity to go back to a 25, 30-year-old Arthur C. Brooks and get 25 seconds with him and ask him or tell him some advice. Would you change anything or would you let it play out the way it has in the at least this branch of the wave function of the universe? I would tell a 25year-old version of myself that your suffering has meaning. You become the man that you're supposed to be, not because of the good days, but because of the bad days. Learn from those bad days as opposed to trying to eliminate your suffering and your life will be better as a result. Arthur C. Brooks, one of my favorite thinkers. Your mind, we're in love with your mind over here. I think Galileo, you know, he looks a little bit like you with that beard. Arthur, thank you so much. This is such a great book. The Happiness Files out now. He's got more hair. A little bit. A little bit. Arth this has been a real pleasure. Congratulations on all your success. I hope we can meet in person someday. Maybe when you're visiting a marine or two down my way in in San Diego County. I'd love it. I love it. Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it. Thanks for your show and thanks to all of your audience. Have a great day. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Arthur C. Brookke exploring how happiness can lead to human flourishing. And I know that you'll love this episode I did with Google X leader Moadot, who's devoted his life after the death of his son to achieving happiness for over a billion people on Earth. Click here. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. [Music]