(ambient music) The Dalai Lama always says, "Remember, you are one in seven billion," by which he does not mean that I'm insignificant, by which he means, don't forget the adventure of looking at things from a distance. (ambient music) Don't forget the adventure of seeing life in its spectrum, its majesty, its scale. Looking at the whole world where you're part of it gives you perspective and it gives you peace. The secret to being more satisfied is not having more, it's wanting less. Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. Today, we're gonna explore how to make the second half of life better than the first, and we're gonna do it with the esteemed Arthur C.
Brooks, and we're doing it on the occasion of Arthur's latest book, his 12th, and an instant number one "New York Times" bestseller, entitled "From Strength to Strength," which is a really powerful roadmap for finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in our later years. Arthur is a professional French horn player turned social scientist turned happiness guru. He's the former president of the American Enterprise Institute think tank, and he's currently the professor of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, as well as professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School. In addition, Arthur writes the popular "How to Build a Life" column at "The Atlantic," which is also home to his podcast called "The Art of Happiness," and if you Google him, you will quickly realize that this guy and his work is just prominently plastered all across the internet and on every prominent media outlet there is. Today, we cover a ton of ground, including how to define happiness and strategies to improve it.
We talk about the crisis of meaning that visits people as they age. We discuss how to confront your inevitable decline, as well as the increasingly important role that friendship, family, faith, and service play in finding happiness as we age. In addition, of course, many other topics are discussed. This episode is very much of a piece with my recent conversation with Chip Conley, sort of an extension, a little book end to that conversation, if you will, so if you enjoyed Chip, you're gonna love Arthur.
He's extremely charismatic. We got on like a house on fire. It's just packed with priceless wisdom and actionable takeaways for everybody irrespective of age, and it's also just super fun, and I think you're gonna dig it. So delay not in clicking that subscribe button and let's do the thing. This is me and Arthur Brooks.
Do you still go to India every year? Well, I can't during the coronavirus epidemic. It's been closed, but I have, you know, I did until coronavirus once or twice a year. It's super important to me. It's just, it's, you've been there, of course. I haven't. You haven't been to India? Julie's actually only been once. I mean, she went to Arunachala. Yeah, so I'd go every year. I would do three things. I would do business stuff in either Mumbai or Delhi, you know, meeting with government officials and, you know, random capitalists, and, because they're so interesting.
The billionaires in India are so interesting, right? And every year I'd go to Dharamshala, see His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and then in the south, I would actually study with somebody in Palakkad or someplace like that, I would actually find a guru, who was willing to, you know, spend a day with me. It's so interesting that you square that with being, you know, this, I don't know if you would call it devout, but it seems like you're a pretty devout Catholic. Yeah, it's the most important thing in my life.
How does that line up? I love all religions, but I'm in love with the Catholic Church, and I learn as much about who I am as a Catholic by talking to people who are not. It's really, really important to talk to people who are not you because you know, there's, too much uniformity and spiritual compatibility does not expose you to enough complementarity. Complementarity in life is actually how you learn things. You learn things from people who are different than you in a lot of ways. And you can stress test your placebo, I guess.
Stress test, and also just, they give you the better technique.
I mean, studying with the Tibetan Buddhist monks in Dharamshala is how I learned to pray my rosary. Wow. Yeah, I learned how to pray the rosary with my breath and heart by studying with the Tibetan Buddhist monks. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. And you've, how many times have you visited with the Dalai Lama? 10, 11. Wow. Something like that. Problem is that he's completely sequestered still. He's 86. Right. Or 87 now in July, it would be 87 in July, and, but he's been in the States many times with me too. So when he would come here, you know, and we would, we've been in different parts of the States and I would interview him, but we've written together too, which is interesting. And what would you say is the primary thing that you've kind of extracted from being in his presence? The understanding that the decision that love is a decision and not a feeling.
Elaborate. It's that to, well, St. Thomas Aquinas said that to love is to will the good of the other. It's nothing about feelings, and this is an ancient medieval teaching that actually comes from Aristotle, that love, philia, is a positive decision on the basis of who we are as people, and the Dalai Lama lives that every single day. He says, you must decide to love. You must decide to love. You might not like. To like, as Martin Luther King said, to like someone is a sentimental something, but to love somebody's a positive decision. It's hard, it takes work. It's a measure of who you are as a person, is your decision to love in a world full of hate, and the Dalai Lama is a living embodiment of that. He's as wonderful as he seems. I suspect that's true. Yeah. And it's interesting to hear love contextualized as this action verb that you have control over. It gives you a sense of agency. Absolutely. And I think our Western notion of it is backwards in the sense that we're looking to receive love, but we're not really adequately focused on how we're giving it or we're exuding it.
Absolutely. We're a feeling-based society and this is actually one of our great, I mean, you think, so one of your sort of preternatural gifts is how you've engineered your life on the basis of what you wanted it to be. You know, this is one of the reasons that I listen to your show and many people do is because they want agency. They want to be fully alive and to be managed by themselves as opposed to be managed by their urges, their impulses, their appetites, and their feelings. That's a phenomenon that we call metacognition, and you're the walking example of metacognition. You made decisions on how you're going to live and you live that way, and that is not a, just a Western brainy idea. On the contrary. You know, the Dalai Lama shows that, by understanding ourselves at a certain remove, we can make these decisions for ourselves, including how we're going to treat others, the love that we're gonna show to the rest of the world. I'm trying to take that in. I'm trying to get better at like receiving, but when I hear you say that, all I'm thinking is, oh, you have no idea, like.
Of course.
I'm gonna tell, wait 'til I get to the part where I get to tell you about, you know, how much your latest book like, spoke to me and how many things it's given me to think about, how imperfectly I've kind of made this transition and live it on a daily basis and, you know, I look at it as a series of light posts or kind of, you know, aspirational behavior patterns, but I suspect, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this, like this is not a linear thing, like this is a, this is a one step forward, two steps back at times kind of thing that, you know, requires a level of mastery that we'll all take to our grave.
For sure, and the reason I wrote it is because precisely, I'm on the same journey and I wrote it as my own exercise in metacognition, which says, you know, I can be managed by my feelings or I can manage them, and the only way to manage your feelings, I mean, the greatest way, the Western way, at least, to manage your feelings is to journal. Right.
This is my journal. This book is my journal. Yeah. It is the journal of actually the, what actually founded my research and how I wanted to apply it to my life, and the only way that I can do that is to make it something I can share with you the way that I can share it with other people.
I know I'm sure that you, the road to being the man that you are includes helping people to be their best selves as well. I'm sure that this is, this show is a form of therapy for you. Oh, 100%. I mean, I invite people on who can help me figure out how to take that next step on my growth arc or who can talk me through whatever it is I'm going through now. So it's, it is very self-serving in that regard, but the greater mission of course, or the guiding light is this effort to be of service and in that, of course, is the meaning and the purpose, which is at the heart of this book that you've written, and a side benefit is, it's a vocation that can support my family.
Yeah, fantastic. But, there's a ego piece to it, and there's a, you know, a sense of like, how special can I be? You know, that plays into all of that, and I wanna unpack all of that, but let's just, we should probably kind of like set the stage and contextualize what it is that we're actually talking about. We just had Chip Conley in here the other day. I love Chip. Who's the best and. He's a very special person. And so we had a different version of what we're gonna talk about today, but all of this kind of subject matter is swimming around in my mind like a soup. So maybe the best place to start is with how you conceived of this book to begin with, because it kind of starts with this incident that occurred on an airplane. Yeah. Right now I write, speak, and teach about human happiness, but 10 years ago, I was the president of a think tank, a Washington-based research organization.
You grew up in DC and you know what these things are all about but a lot of, you know, the people are watching and listening to us right now. This is like a university without students, which many professors would say is the best kind of university. It's a bunch of smart people sitting around, coming up with ideas, trying to impress each other.
Trying to influence policy, trying to influence public policy. It's a very DC thing, and it was a great organization. It's been around since 1938, and I was feeling like a proper big shot being the president of this organization, and it was great as far as it went, but I was having a little bit of a crisis trying to understand what the future was gonna hold. I wasn't especially happy. I was working more than I wanted to. I was away from my family more than I should have been, and there was no end game. I mean, work, work, work, work, croak? Yeah.
Where it, go 'til the wheels come off? It wasn't exactly clear, and furthermore, the whole idea is be as successful as you possibly can and finally, you'll find satisfaction. That didn't seem right and I was, I'm a social scientist. So this is more than idle curiosity. I mean, so it's a research question for me and I didn't quite know how to get my mind around it, and as I was going through this period of reflection, I guess, I had this experience where I was on an airplane and I overheard a conversation.
Now my laboratory as a social scientist is overheard conversations on an airplane. So if I overhear you, you know, talking to your wife, it might become a book. Right, as this did. Yeah. (Rich laughing) Exactly, right. Careful. Uh huh.
Check your seats before you. Make sure you're not sit sitting behind Arthur Brooks. Fortunately, I'm getting, you know, my hearing, it's not as great as it used to be. So, but anyway, so the guy behind me, I could tell he was an elderly gentleman and he was talking to somebody, I assume to be his wife, who sounded like an elderly lady, and he was as near as I could tell, explaining to her that she, he might as well be dead, and his wife was trying to console this obviously disconsolate man saying, it's not true it'd be better off you'd be better off if you were dead.
He's kind of mumbling. It's going on for 20 minutes that nobody respects him. Nobody remembers him, nobody thinks about him, and I'm thinking this is a guy who's probably disappointed with his life. He didn't actually live up to his own expectations or get the education he wished he had, and he's disappointed because it's over. It's probably 85, I don't know. The end of the flight, it was from coming from here in LA out to Washington, Dulles, and it was the nighttime flight. So I couldn't really see, it was dark, and when we landed, you know, the lights go on, everybody stands up, and I'm curious. Now I'm not trying, it's not prurient interest, but you know, humans, it's my gig. So I just flip around to see, and it's one of the most famous men in the world. This is somebody who's done 10 times as much with his life as I ever will, or hope to.
He's rich, he's famous. He's a hero. He's somebody who's not controversial. He's not Senator. He's not a entertainer. He's somebody who has done amazing things with his life a long time ago and is still rich and famous as a result of it and still dining out on it, and I get this glimpse of this mistaken view of satisfaction and happiness, like the world tells us, do a lot with what you've been given, succeed, work hard, strive, achieve, bank it, die happy. That's what the world tells you to do.
That's what the world says, that that's the secret to your happiness is money, power, pleasure, fame on the basis of your achievements, do it as early as possible. There's even a name for it based on a, it's called the Holderlin strategy is, get rich, famous, successful, powerful early, and then dine out on it for the rest of your life because you can achieve that permanent satisfaction. You kind of know that's not right, but I heard this guy. If anybody should be happy with his life and proud of what he had done, it should be this guy, and I thought, so, is it a, is he an outlier or is the whole model wrong? And I started looking into that, and furthermore, I thought to myself, you're on the wrong track to me.
You know, the way I'm going, 30 years from now, I'm gonna be explaining to my wife on a plane that I might as well be dead because I'm not very happy and I'm not gonna suddenly get happy. Let's be honest with ourselves. I'm on a treadmill here, and I gotta find some way to get off because that's where it ends, and I'm not happy now. So come on. And furthermore, I, looking at the data as a social scientist, I know perfectly that the people who tend to be most unhappy at the end of their lives are the people who achieve the most early in their lives.
It's exactly the opposite of what the world tells us, because if you achieve a lot early on, you can never, ever live up to your impossibly high expectations and furthermore, when the party's over, you know it. You know what goes up must come down. Well, we see this played out in all kinds of ways. I mean, it's the high school quarterback whose glory days are, you know, behind him at 18, and never leaves.
Right. The small town or, you know, the professional athlete who had a couple good years and has to retire at, you know, I don't know, 32, and then is faced with the prospect of trying to find something as exciting and as meaningful, which is a, you know, almost a fool's errand at that point, and it's a setup, right, because you think, well, how could my life already be over, and this idea that that sense of satisfaction that you get with setting out and then achieving these goals has any kind of lasting emotional impact that would give you some kind of sustainable sustenance later in life doesn't make any sense at all.
It doesn't make sense on reflection, and yet your, the limbic system of your brain, your primordial processing center for appetites, the things that make you drink too much, the things that make you reactive when you're angry, they tell you it's gonna work, man. It's gonna work. Just stay on that treadmill. Mother Nature wants you to be, have a lot of fitness in your capacity to pass on your genes.
She does not care if you're happy. She will trick you until the end of your life. The neurochemistry is both interesting and powerful here. Like, my lens for this type.
Absolutely. Of thing is always through recovery and addiction, as somebody who's been in recovery for a long time. So it's clear, like when you lay it out, it's like, oh, well this is an addictive relationship with something that is steering you astray, but the neurochemistry of the constant dopamine hit and then the need for the bigger dopamine hit is a powerful means by which we can all dilute ourselves into thinking, well, yeah, but this next thing or this next thing is gonna satisfy it.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, no. If I, you know, I'm finally gonna drink so much, I don't need to drink anymore.
Nobody has ever said those words. (Rich laughing)
You know, it's funny. It's, and, but there's an actually added layer of tyranny to this, which is that, you know, when you were in the worst parts of alcohol abuse, nobody said, Hey, Rich, good job. That's a lot of alcohol. I'm really impressed but if you're. Yeah, the social reward system is inverse to that. But if you're a hopeless success addict, and you know, and you work the 14th hour instead of the first hour with your children, you get patted on the back. Are you kidding me? 'Cause you're just, you're a hard worker and you're successful and you're do, you're, they congratulate you, they admire you. Nobody admires somebody for doing five grams of cocaine on a Saturday night, but people. I know a few people who might. (Arthur chuckling)
(Rich laughing) You're gifted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is the key, but it presses the same levers.
You know, hit the lever, get the cookie, which is how dopamine works. I mean, we understand this better and better. The anticipation of the reward is so powerful in creating the craving, whether it's a behavioral or chemical addiction. It all works the same way, and by the way, you notice that people who are really successful, who are success addicts, they tend to abuse alcohol more than people who are not. You know, the people, the, so high socioeconomic status, people who work really, really long hours, according to the OECD, you know, data across virtually every country, especially for men, they tend toward alcoholism, they turn toward drug abuse. They, these are. Well, maintaining that level of intensity, you need a, some kind of escape valve. Yeah, and there's also cross addiction. You know, dopamine is dopamine and these are, there's comorbidities between dopamine. This is one of the reasons that if you go to the doctor and if you have abused alcohol, the first thing that, and you say, I can't sleep, the doctor should not prescribe you Ambien, because you could get addicted to Ambien much more easily than somebody who's never engraved these dopaminergic pathways into the brain like, you know, Rich loves Susie on a tree that you're mortified to see for the rest of your life, even though the tree continued to grow, right? So explain this existential crisis that so many people face like, you kind of set the stage, but the experience of trying to reckon with this reality is something I think a lot of people can relate to.
If they're not in it, they're inching towards it. Yeah, and this is especially true for strivers, you know, the people who wanna make a lot of their lives, the people who are trying to be their absolute best selves that they measure it in worldly terms, money, power, honor, which is, you know, admiration, or even the envy of other people. These are natural yardsticks that they use, but there's a couple of things that go wrong with that. Number one is this, is the satisfaction paradox. You actually can't find satisfaction by getting enough of those things. You will reset. There's a process that the brain, in any biological process in the human body is called homeostasis that takes you back to equilibrium, because if you stay out of equilibrium, you will die. You have to be ready for the next set of circumstances, whether it's physical or emotional, to be sure, but the bigger problem on this is that you will outrun your ability even to do the things that you did well, which is the thrust of what I'm, was writing about, what I've been writing about in my research.
I mean, the strategic plan for the rest of my life. You find that what people who are really good early on, what they have in common is their, they face the puzzle of the fact that things weirdly that they were really good at and getting better at start getting harder in their 40s. So, and nobody else notices, 'cause if you're a real striver, whether you're in financial industry or you're a doctor or a lawyer or an electrician or a bus driver, and you're just good at what you do and you take pride in it, nobody's gonna notice when things that used to be easier are a little bit harder, that you're just, and you're not making progress anymore, but you notice. The thing is that what happens typically is in one's mid-40s, after working really hard, and just seeing things get easier and being congratulated because you do a good job that you're like, I don't, I'm kind of burning out. I'm kind of feeling bored by this. That's a signal that actually things have gotten harder. So your dentist at 45 starts taking Fridays off.
Why are you taking Fri, I thought you loved being a? I used to love being a dentist, but you know, everybody gets bored. They're not bored. They're actually on the wrong side of their fluid intelligence curve. Fluid intelligence is your ability to innovate, your ability to focus, your ability to get better and better. You're a ninja at your job, and your 20s and 30s is when, it's like blue ocean, man. I mean, you're just like, you're getting your, and then your late 30s, you peak 'cause fluid intelligence peaks in your late 30s or early 40s, and you start to decline and people who try to stay on that curve, who try to keep their groove, who wanna be special in that particular way, woe be unto them because they're gonna ride that curve all the way down to the basement. They're gonna wind up like the man on the plane behind me. Yeah, a couple observations. First of all, baked into the DNA of the striver is going to be a denial of that declining fluid intelligence.
Sure. They're just, they're gonna fight it all the way to the death and just try to outrun it basically, right. Yeah, just do harder and harder and harder work, 'cause it always worked in the past. Yeah, and what was, you know, somewhat dispiriting, there's a silver lining to it, but somewhat dispiriting is not only the inevitability of the decline of this fluid intelligence, but how early it comes a calling. Yeah, absolutely, and you can keep doing the thing that you're doing. I mean, I was perfectly fine doing what I was doing. I was running a company and I was, you know, super energetic doing all the things that I was doing, but I was noticing it was getting less satisfying and I didn't have the focus that I had before and I couldn't quite understand why, and I thought maybe it was because I was just less interested or I was out of steam or something, and what it was was I was on the wrong, I was on the downward part of my fluid intelligence curve, and I did not know that I was making a big mistake, which was the failure to recognize that that was not my only success curve, that there was another one behind it.
Well, before we get to that though, so you're 58, right?
Yes. I'm turning 58 in, yeah. May 21st.
Okay. So almost 58. Yeah, yeah. Depends on when we air.
Nobody would accuse you of having lost half a step though, right? Like, it's a self, it would have to be a self diagnosis, which would require.
Yeah, it's you curing you. Like a level of, of like self-awareness and you know, enough inside work to be able to call yourself out. Truly, I mean, but this is the striver standard is you versus you that, what all strivers know is, they got better than they were before. The strivers', you know, sine qua non of excellence is I was better than yesterday. I mean, you're like a super athlete, and if you're losing a step in what you're actually doing athletically, that's bumming you out despite the fact that you're like, you're eating everybody's lunch for people who are your age.
That means nothing to you. No, my visit to the pool today was, you know, it was a reckoning of, you know, with my own mortality.
(Arthur chuckling) Yeah, but if you were swimming compared to me, you know, it'd be like. Yeah, but that doesn't count. Exactly right. Exactly right.
You know? And so when you're losing a step compared to you yesterday, that's what's really, really painful, and so, you know the solution, the striver solution is to work harder, work longer, and this gets into this deeply, deeply dysfunctional, addictive behavior. Like when you're chasing the high, what do you get, how do you chase the high? More of the drug, more of the drug, and when you're getting less of the high back, because, you know, homeostasis and drug addiction and drug abuse means that you take more and get less and you simply have to do more and more and more.
You're chasing the elusive high that actually comes from that, and that's what it's like to be on the wrong side of the fluid intelligence curve, mostly in your 40s, but at your 50s, but I know people in their 60s that are trying to keep up with the young guys, you know. They were the star litigator, they were a lawyer before and, you know, they come in, they can crack any case. They're gifted, and the guys in their 60s and 70s, or 50s even who are trying to keep up with the lawyers in their 20s and 30s, that's the wrong path. Yeah, you wanna be Cincinnatus. You don't wanna be the nattering old guy, you know, wandering down, you know, the hallway knocking on people's doors, right. (men laughing) It's true, but it's crazy. You know, when I first finished my doctorate and I was writing these papers that were so mathematically sophisticated that today, I can't understand them, and I wrote them when I was in my mid-30s and I can't understand them, and at first I thought, you know, when I was, when I was starting to lose my edge in this really pretty hardcore research that I thought that I needed to work harder, I needed to, you know, go back over my textbooks to relearn my math, to do that until I realized that this is the structure of the prefrontal cortex of my brain, and there was another path, there was a better path.
Weirdly, this is not what we talk about. This is not the common knowledge because the success trajectory that's handed to us by our culture is get better, get better, get better, get 10,000 hours, you'll never get worse. You can be a star for the rest of your life, croak, done, and that was the tradition of the guy behind me on the plane, and by the way, when you look at the biographies of some of the greatest women and men through history, you find that they died bitterly unhappy because they were on the wrong side of their fluid intelligence curve. Right, so talk about, there's a couple really interesting examples. Like, you talk about Darwin and Pasteur, and you know, these guys that we, you know, if you don't really know their story, you would never imagine that they, you know, suffered this, you know, kind of their version of this.
Yeah, the biographers that, biographers don't care about if you were unhappy. They care that you were great because that's what goes down in history. You know, this Rich Roll, you know, he had this, all these millions of listeners to his podcast, they don't talk about the fact that, you know, something might not have been going right in your emotional life. That's, because that's not interesting as far as the history, the strivers' concern. Charles Darwin is a perfect example of this. Charles Darwin was the, he was the king of the mambo when he was 27 years old.
I mean, he came back from his voyage around the world where he visited the Galapagos Islands. It was the five year voyage of the Beagle that terminated from when he was 27, and he came back and dropped this atomic intellectual bomb, which later was known as his theory of natural selection. He was introducing the concept of evolution by his mid to late 20s, and he was almost overnight the most famous celebrated scientist in all of Europe.
He was rich, he was famous. He was the guy on the plane early in life, quite frankly, or any striver that we can imagine who's, you know, he's killing it, and he earned it. I mean, he was no slouch, and he developed that over the next couple of decades, and then he hit a wall in his early 50s. He actually couldn't keep up mathematically with his own field because it was developing more and more and more.
He needed the knowledge that today is what we call genetics, the field of genetics, which is just beyond his capacity, and so his forward progress stopped and he was not able to update. He couldn't, back in the old days, he wouldn't have been able to, he would've been able to learn this new knowledge, but for some reason he couldn't do it, and his creative work never made any more advances. He wrote like 11 more books after that, but it was all straw in his mouth, and he went to his death, regretting bitterly the disappointment that was the back half of his life. And it was Gregor Mendel who picked up the football and took it across the goal line. Yeah, interesting. Poor Gregor Mendel. He, I feel like he deserves more, you know, more recognition. Well, Gregor Mendel is an interesting case, 'cause for sure, I mean, a Czech monk who wrote his papers in German and who had invented the field of genetics didn't actually get super famous for it until after his own death because after he invented the field of genetics, he was promoted by his local bishop to be the abbot of his monastery, and he spent the rest of his life in management, doing human resource issues among the monks, and he died in.
That's so crazy. And he died in relative humility serving his religious community so it's a kind of a different model, but in a way it's a better model. Well, better than Darwin for sure. Oh my, for sure, yeah, but the other thing is that he moved on from his fluid intelligence curve and then went on to serving other people. He went on to becoming a, he went from being a player to becoming a coach in his own way, which is interesting. Right, which is similar to the trajectory of Bach that you talked about in the book. Yeah, yeah. I mean, these biographies are interesting. As a social scientist, I have a tendency to be like, studies show, but it turns out that somebody's life shows can be more evocative and winds up, you know, helping me a lot more too.
Bach is my favorite composer. I was a musician for many years and Bach was my favorite composer. He was, you know, unbelievably prolific. He lived 65 years, published more than 1,000 pieces of music for every instrumentation of his time and had 20 kids. This is prolific.
20 kids. Wow. 10 lived to adulthood, and most of them. How many wives, how many women? Two, I mean, his first beloved wife, Barbara, died after seven kids, and then his, and his second wife, who is his copyist had 13, his last 13 kids, and he was a fam, he was total family man, absolute family man, and, but what happened was the same thing that happened to Darwin, which is, his forward progress stopped when he was about 50 years old. He was the most celebrated composer of the high Baroque, which is this, you know, the music that we think of as Bach today was the rage. I mean, princes were seeking him out for commissions, and he was super famous in, all over Europe, as famous as you could be before social media, before that. He didn't have a podcast, but he was pretty good, you know? No.
The Bachcast, he was very famous, and about age 50, he was supplanted because his own son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, was developing a new musical style that took Europe by storm and left the high baroque in the dust, and Bach couldn't write in the new style. He just couldn't figure out how to write in the new style. He was too far down in his fluid intelligence curve. So he retooled his whole life, and he did it right by accident. He became the most celebrated beloved teacher of his time. He said, I'm gonna teach all different kinds of music, especially the high baroque. I'm gonna teach chorus, I'm gonna teach organ. I'm gonna write textbooks. He was literally, had his pen in his hand, writing a textbook called "Die Kunst der Fuge," "The Art of Fugue," when he croaked. It was, half a measure was written and his own son, who had supplanted him, wrote in the margins, "at this point, the composer put down his pen and died." He was like.
Right. Strong finish, and he was surrounded in his ultimate, his last days, helping others, writing a textbook.
The textbook by the way, is played as music in concerts today. Imagine writing a textbook so incredible that it's read as literature. That's what this is today, but at the time he was like, I don't know, he's like an expert in disco. Beats me. That's what we would think of as anachronistic at the time, and when he died, he died happy because he was known as the greatest teacher of his time, and he felt like he was serving other people. He was on his second curve, which is what the man on the plane missed, which is what Charles Darwin missed, which is what Linus Pauling missed, which is what so many strivers, what you and I are in danger of missing.
Right. Unless we can understand what that second curve is. (intense music) Prophets walk among us. As a writer and podcaster for nearly 10 years, I've become more convinced than ever that our world is populated by scores of beautiful and brilliant people who have amazing stories to share, those that we don't know who can teach us something new and leave us all the better for the experience of their sharing, and so I've dedicated my career to tracking down the most compelling prophets on the planet, going deep with each of them on my podcast to elucidate the best of what they have to offer and to sharing the insights gleaned for the benefit of all, but the podcast is not the only medium by which to share their stories, which is why I'm proud to announce the release of my new book, "Voicing Change: Volume II." More than mere words on paper, "Voicing Change" is a physical manifestation of the magic, inspiration, and timeless wisdom that transpires each week on "The Rich Roll Podcast." The first edition of "Voicing Change" was a beautifully rendered book worthy of display on any coffee table and Volume II follows in that tradition by showcasing even more of my favorite conversations in an elegant publication replete with interview excerpts, essays, and stunning photography, making for an exquisite companion to the first volume or a satisfying standalone work.
Picking up this book allows you to revisit the wisdom of your favorite everyday prophets and physically interact with the life changing ideas contained within. "Voicing Change: Volume II" available now while supplies last for a limited time. Order your copy today only at richroll.com. Right, so the second curve involves this reckoning with your declining fluid intelligence. In 12 step, they would say, you know, it's a moment of clarity that must visit upon you where you realize that you have a problem, and then the first step towards, you know, embarking on this second curve is a recognition and a cultivation of crystallized intelligence. So let's explain that a little bit. There's a social psychologist in the middle of the 20th century named Raymond Cattell, who noticed that there was kind of two kinds of geniuses, and what he meant was people who have exceptional ability and accomplishment. One blooms super early, and they have innovative capacity, the ability to focus, solve problems, and they're kind of sole proprietors, big early stars, and you would see them in law, in science, in, you know, almost every field. There's a second kind of genius that blooms really late, like 50s and 60s.
These are the ones who are more historians. They assemble other facts that actually exist. They use a vast intellectual library. They're better at working with people and forming teams. They're much better teachers. So applied mathematicians, for example, they use the theories that have been developed by other people in new and creative ways, but assembling them, they bloom really late. Theoretical mathematicians, bloom really, really early, and so he called the first fluid intelligence, which is what Darwin had and which he declined. The second, he called crystallized intelligence, which is wisdom, the ability to recognize patterns, take information from other people, and put it into coherent stories and teach it. That's what it comes down to. That's what Bach did, it turns out, and there's these two different intelligence curves. Now, later on, research showed very clearly that everybody gets both. We all get both. Now, not everybody recognizes both. Darwin didn't recognize both, and a lot of people, they have a lot of, you know, they stumble a lot early in their lives until they don't actually realize their own form of genius until they are much later, because they have a misspent youth, for example.
Those are the people who only recognize the crystallized intelligence, but properly understood, we both get both and the mistake that we make is not walking from one to the other, but trying to stay on the first. Or just holding onto the former until you know, that ship is so capsized that making the transition into the latter becomes much more complicated. Yeah, for sure and bitter, and you, through bitterness, you can live in the past. Right. So, crystallized intelligence is more about synthesizing information, pattern recognition, also leveraging a lifetime of experience to, you know, have some kind of wisdom to share, and then really it's about channeling it in service. I mean, we explored this with Chip. You know, he calls it being a modern elder, right, but whether.
Right. You're a teacher or a mentor or an advisor, what have you, it's really just a giving back of what you have, you know, accumulated over the years.
Your knowledge, right, and every profession.
But for a striver also, it's sort of like, yeah, but it's about, it's about me getting, right.
I know. Like, what do you mean I'm giving this away? Totally, totally. I mean, it's, the hubris that comes from the first curve is so hard to kick. It's so hard to kick and part of this, because the accolades that you get as the sole proprietor, as the super ninja. Well, you have to be the, you have to be a bit of the man in the shadows.
You're the guy behind the guy. A lot. Yeah, and so this is the interesting thing. So you find that, you can find it in almost any profession. So you go from researcher to teaching professor. You go from, in your former line of work, the star litigator to the managing partner, or in entrepreneurship, you go from the innovator, the startup entrepreneur to the venture capitalist, 'cause the venture capitalist, the most successful ones are pure crystallized intelligence, and you don't find venture capitalists who are 25 who were very successful because they don't actually have the perspective and the pattern recognition built up through the school of hard knocks. You actually need to be a prob, most need to be a really good entrepreneur, and with that just incredible focus that comes from the crystallized intelligence curve and then walk onto the second curve where you can pick out the ninjas. Right, right, right. Pick the winners. In your case, when you became a professor at Harvard, was that a conscious decision of embracing crystallized, you know.
Completely.
This crystallized intelligence, or was it a happenstance sort of thing where it just seemed interesting? It was on purpose. It was on purpose.
Oh it was, wow. I mean, I gotta eat my own cooking. Yeah. And I had done this research to find out how, I was in the middle of an executive career that I understood, it looked like it had a dead end for me, and I did the research and find out that sure enough, I was probably five years late on my fluid intelligence curve, and I said, okay, what is my crystallized intelligence curve? I'm an academic, I'm an idea guy.
I'm a social scientist. Right. Write, speak, and teach. Write, speak, and teach. So, I'm gonna stick it to you a little bit here. Got it. Because what I see is a guy who has a lot of self-awareness who understood that his life in the think tank world inside the Beltway and all of that had kind of run its course and was sort of providing diminishing returns to your well-being, et cetera. You make this pivot, you become a professor. As a social scientist you got interested in this particular subject matter, you write this book, but the book's a instant number one "New York Times" best seller. (Arthur chuckling) It seems like, and I'm sure this wasn't your lived experience, but it seems like you went from kind of public intellectual to happiness guru almost overnight, and ever since, have you not been on some version of the hedonic treadmill, going from speaking engagement to speaking engagement to podcast to, you were just in Half Moon Bay.
It was "The Atlantic" Happiness Conference that you were hosting and you're publishing all these articles on "The Atlantic" and you're on the news, and, you know, you're on the, all the shows and all that kind of stuff. (Arthur chuckling)
Like, are you not rushing around chasing some kind of validation in this like, second or third act of your life? And I, no judgment.
Yeah, yeah. Like, listen, you know, I'm like, you know, I mean, we'll get to that, but like, you know, I'm just interested in how, even if you're, if you were to disagree with me, how do you know the difference? Yeah, I know.
You obviously, you've been talking to my wife. Just pure observation. No, that's, it's ironic. Yeah. You know, it's ironic that I, you know, I talk about the success addiction and how to break it such that you can get on your second curve, which requires clarity and humility. And just by dint of talking about that a lot, you've fallen back into it.
It's like, people are like, yeah, for sure, for sure. Look, I mean, it's like, I'm a, it's like a, those experiments in the 1950s of primates where they could self-administer cocaine and within six hours, they were sitting in front of the lever hitting it until they died.
I mean, I'm a cocaine monkey. I mean, I want, I'm hungry to talk about this, to spread these ideas to be sure, but I gotta be careful because I can actually turn this right back into something else. Now, it's a different kind of work. It's not a fluid intelligence work because writing, speaking, and teaching is synthesizing ideas. Right, and it is a, you are mentoring the world by passing on this very valuable message to people.
It's teaching. But it's about your ego's relationship for all of that.
For sure, absolutely. I mean, it's an absolutely astute observation, a fair one at that. I mean, it's, when you have, when you strike while the iron is hot and I'm doing something that is associated with the excellence of the fluid intelligence curve in a younger man, for sure, and so I have to ask myself, where does this lead? Does this lead to ever bigger and greater? Does this lead to something, and as soon as I start thinking that, at least have the presence of mind to say, no, this is a temporary phenomenon.
You're spreading these particular ideas, but this is not forever and. Keep telling yourself that. Well, I'm now lashing myself to the mast. I'm on this popular podcast telling you, but I have to be careful because I'm a dopamine guy. I really am. Aren't we all? I mean, we're built for this.
Right. This is. I mean 100%, I am. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, we're two guys in our mid to late 50s who, on some level, you know, one thing we share is that we're both hitting a certain kind of stride, right, in our lives, and I came to this very late and I feel like I finally found this thing that like, I'm good at that people seem to enjoy.
Right. And I wanna make hay while I can, and so I'm gonna sit in that, you know, that denial mode of, I don't need to recognize my declining fluid intelligence, but part of what I get to do here is synthesize information and share other people's Wisdom and pass that along. So there is a kind of teaching, kind of advisory mentorship piece to all of it, but there's also a big ego piece. Yeah. Like, how many people are watching and listening and like, how big can I make this and will this lead to something else, and you know, all of that kind of stuff, which is really, it's dangerous and it's intoxicating, and when you told the story in the book about the woman, the Wall Street executive, who, you know, was very unhappy, but very successful and said, yeah, but maybe I just want to be, maybe I'd rather be special than happy, and I was like, that was like a gut punch, 'cause I've entertained that.
Like, I'm a pretty happy guy, but I go through periods of being exhausted and burned out and stressed and somewhat unhappy and thinking, yeah, but like I get to do this thing and I feel really special doing it. Totally, totally, and that hits the same circuits that you, that lit you up. Like, I haven't had a drink in 19 years. This is like having a drink. It hits the same circuit. Yeah, it's the same neurochemistry. Sure, sure This is, I mean, cross addictions are, exist all over the place, and there's a reason that you have to be, especially if you have monkeyed up your dopamine with substances or behaviors at a previous point in your life, you have to be especially adroit.
You have to be awake to these types of behaviors, and at very least to be metacognitive about them to understand exactly what's going on for at least. Look, Rich, you just told me you're doing it. You didn't, you're not accidentally doing it. Not somebody said, discovering this. You're, you have the self-awareness to do this because you have recovered from, from, you know, something, being in the grips of that. You're not. Right, but as they would say in 12 step, self-awareness will avail you nothing. (Arthur chuckling)
Self-awareness. I can call myself out, but if I don't alter my behavior. Correct, correct, and my guess is that you do alter your behavior, but the question is whether or not, you know, you're work, yes, you're working in a liquor store. Yeah. And so there is constant temptation and there is a little bit of backsliding, but we have to take care of ourselves.
We, there is a balance. I am, I want to serve people. I want to lift people up. My mission with my crystallized intelligence is, I am going for the rest of my life to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using my ideas. That's what I'm going to do, and when there's a ton of attention on that, it's risky. It really is risky, but I can't, and you can't. But the valence of that message, like the depth and the resonance of that message is directly correlated to the extent to which you are walking that talk. So the minute that you're out of balance with it.
Yes. That message is not gonna land. It's weakened, absolutely.
Yeah. And so I have to be very careful with that. I have to have an exit strategy from this particular point. This doesn't lead to lead to something else to something else, and then suddenly, you know what? Then I'll be happy.
Then I'll be happy.
Right. I have to, I make sure I'm not fooling myself. There's the new thing, you know, that's always right around the corner that's gonna satisfy that thing.
Exactly right. That's exactly right. Well, you sat at the foot of a guru in India who declared that your wife was your guru. Right. So what, does your wife keep you in check with this or, she's got the clarity.
Yeah, for sure. To say, hey man, come home.
Yeah, no, she understand, for absolutely, absolutely. I mean, she.
Sure Miami was great. Yeah, that was.
(Rich laughing) How was Rich's podcast? I talked to her right before we started.
She says, well, enjoy that, you know, enjoy that, but come home, and that's really important because left unmediated, it can be a really dangerous thing. You can, and you know, it's really, I mean, somebody, and you're not the first person to recognize the irony that I'm talking about, be careful with your ambition because it's as addictive as any drug and then being very ambitious about the message of talking about tempering your ambitions. Right. This is the, kind of the nested structure of actually how these things work. Yeah, the lattice work of that is kind of so beautifully constructed, right.
Yeah, yeah. That if you're out of synchronicity with it, it'll just fracture.
Wheels inside wheels, man, and so, yeah. so my wife, Esther, is truly my guru and has, it's time for me to come home and we have a time limit. By the middle of June, this era will have passed. Yeah. This epic will have passed.
Yeah, all right. Well may, I'm gonna put it in my calendar and call you on that day.
(Arthur chuckling) All right, so one of the things that I appreciate about the work that you do is that it's rooted in science. You're a social scientist, but as you have sort of written about repeatedly, social science is very good at kind of pointing out these problems, but not always so great at the practical kind of off ramp or on ramp to, you know, altering your behavior pattern. Right. So we can say, look, you gotta get off the hedonic treadmill. You know, you've gotta let go of your attachment to your fluid intelligence, all of these things, but there are, those are very, you know, ephemeral notions, right? So let's root this in practicalities with maybe first, some thoughts on like, what would make somebody happy? What is happiness? How do we make this transition gracefully so that we can actually follow that curve of be being even happier, like that arc continues to go upward, right, through our 60s and our 70s if we can keep our health intact.
Right, yeah. To continually get more happier as we age. Right, and the way to understand that is to begin with, what are we try, what's the hole in our souls that we're trying to fill with the success that we're pursuing in our fluid intelligence curve. It virtually always has to do with love, and why? Because, you know, we can get more validation. We can get more satisfaction early on by sacrificing the non-special love relationships, and by being successful. I mean, that's how people behave, and so what do we need? If we're fearful of what it would mean to not be successful, we have to remedy that fear by surrounding in love.
Fear and love are opposites. They are cognitive and philosophical opposites. Love and hatred are not opposites. Hatred is downstream from fear. When we are fearful of being unsuccessful, the remedy to that is more love and love only comes from human beings. So what you find is that the happiness 401k plan that, you know, what you need to invest in all along the way, which as the, you know, the great thing about it is a 401k plan and money means you have to sacrifice. Now, you don't have to sacrifice now. You actually enjoy now, and into the future is in the categories of faith, family, friendship, and work that serves other people. The more that we invest in those particular things, the more that we can actually step away from these hyper-validating, but ultimately unsatisfactory accomplishments on the fluid intelligence curve, and so one of the things that I talked about is, how do you start your spiritual walk when you're 45 years old and you've, you're a declared agnostic and think it's all woo woo and nonsense.
How do you reestablish a relationship with your spouse and kids when that has become cordial at best? How do you kick a success addiction that is deeply rooted in the neuromodulator, that's just keeping you chained to that sense of success. How do you break those ideas? And so those shackles, and so these are the things that we actually talk about. That's what I talk about in the book. It's reestablishing love relationships and replacing the substitutes for love that will never truly satisfy you. Yeah, it's beautifully put. The dilemma, of course, being for the striver who has, you know, not been there for their kids, and really hasn't been super present for their partner, has shunned any relationship with faith, and has lost touch with most of his or her friends because of that allegiance to the career track, becomes a sticky wicket to undo, and you go through kind of a series of, you know, the common things that come up.
Like, I don't even know how to do that or, you know, I would feel it would be embarrassing for me to call this friend that I haven't spoken to in 20 years, and I've been going through a version of this, like, I noticed that, you know, I'm raising kids, I'm working really hard. It's like, I don't have time for much else. Yeah.
And I miss my friends. Yeah. And I realize like, that's work and that takes like, an intentionality and carving time out, and I'm trying, you know, and I don't always do such a great job, but I really started to recognize in the last couple years, like I miss my friends and I not only do I want them in my life, like I need them, and if I don't sort of water that garden, I'm, it's gonna be really difficult.
It just gets harder and harder. Yeah, yeah. There's a movement. I mean, given the fact that traditionally the loneliest people in America are 60 year old men, right? 60 year old men, it's like the, not 60 year old women. It turns out that 60 year old women tend to be pretty good because they. Women are much better at this. At friendship. Yeah. They're better at friendship because they put the time in on friendship, you know? And that's why women, for example, they recover six months after being widowed, typically to their old level of happiness where men never do.
I told my wife that. She's like, huh. (men laughing) Noted, good to know. Now the widow Brooks, you know, like, I guess it'll be okay, but it's. Right.
So, and so what do they do? There's, in a couple of countries, there's this thing called the men's sheds movement. And what it is is that men who retire 65 or 70 years old, they retire and their wives drop them off to, in these like sheds where they do woodworking in parallel with other guys. I'm like. You talk about like, it's the parallel play date. Totally, totally parallel play, which is what kids.
That is so infantile, it's hilarious. Totally, 'cause they don't look at each other so the guys already don't how to talk to each other. They're making a bird house together, something.
You know, it's sad, right? You don't wanna be dropped off at a shed, you know, to make a birdhouse with a stranger because you don't know how to make friends. It's like you're completely. Or you were too afraid to call your friend that you haven't seen in a long time. Yeah, and so the key is actually you. So one of the things that I recommend is that, the four are, you know, faith, family, friends, and work, but strivers over-index on work and under-index on the other three, so the key is to right now start making a proper investment in the first three.
So everybody should be reading, I don't mean a traditional religious faith necessarily. I mean, you need to read some wisdom literature and engage in something that is transcendent every single day.
Right, as a practice. Yeah, everything, that means 15 to 30 minutes of reading something, the stoic philosophers, or literally studying the theory of the work of Johann Sebastian Bach or walking in meditation with a walking meditation in the forest, whatever that is free or rediscovering the faith of your youth, whatever it happened, or at least looking at that. The second is family and friends, you should be sending, we all should be sending a text or email in each one of those categories every single day. How are you, how did that thing turn out? You know, I was just thinking about you today, whatever it happens to be just to touch, just touch, touch, touch, and then start, you can grow it from there, but when these relationships are fallow, they're very difficult to, especially when it's like, hey, I just retired.
Wanna be friends again? It doesn't work that way. Right. We need to. And family is insufficient on its own or just turning to your spouse. Your immediate family, for sure. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that you find is the 60 year old man often will, they'll, the strivers in particular will retire and they, you know, they've got enough money for example, and they'll just want to hang out with their spouse all day long. The spouse is like, I got a life, man, I got a life and they don't want that, and that's intensely lonely because they actually don't have that closer relationship with their spouse, but it's the friend at hand, and if you don't actually create these roots, it's interesting because the metaphor that I like to think of is the aspen tree, which looks stately and solid and solitary, you know. It's the striver. It's like, yeah, sometimes I'm lonely, but you can count on me.
You can take shade under me, and this, the aspen tree is actually a great metaphor for the way that we should be living because it's one single root system. All aspen trees in a particular grove are one plant. The largest living organism in the world is called Pando. It's an 106 acre Aspen stand in Utah. That's six million kilograms of wood, and that's really who we are. If you're thinking about, you know, the height of your tree and the, you know, the glorious of your leaves, you're getting it wrong. You're the, that your, the health of your tree is actually the health of the next tree. You know, you need to be cultivating your root system because your life is that next tree, and you need to be, to see yourself in your children, to see yourself in your friends. They're, the Buddhists say that individuality is an illusion that it is literally an illusion that Rich and Arthur are different guys. That's how the Buddhists see it, and that's a very sophisticated philosophy, but it's easier to understand somewhat conceptually and that's what we need to attain.
Yeah, and that really underscores the difference between east and west. I mean, the idea that, you know, there is no such thing as separateness versus the rugged individualism of the west that breeds the striver to build these paeans to his ego and to, you know, harken to the world that he is the self-made man. Yeah. Like, it's difficult for that, you know, identity construct to then say, yes, I'm a root system, you know, tied to everything else. You have to deprogram all of that to get back to that essential truth. For sure, and it's interesting. You know, I have, since doing this work, I've cultivated friendships.
I have a very close friend in Atlanta, somebody that, we talk about things that matter. We text each other about things that matter.
You have a shed. What's that? No sheds, no birdhouses. (men laughing) I have a friend here in San Francisco, here in California that I talk to two times a week on the telephone. I mean, he is 80, I'm 58.
I learn a lot from him. I love him, I love him. I mean, he's just such an interesting person, but we have a real friendship. This is the key. The key to remember is when you're thinking about the people around you, ask yourself, put 'em in a category. I make my students do this at Harvard, you know, because my students are MBA students. They're big achievers, big strivers. I make 'em take all, say take your 20 closest friends and put 'em on a piece of paper and put a line down the piece of paper and put in one column real, and the other column deal, and put your friends in one of those two groups. And it was your kid that came up with that idea, right? Yeah, it was my kid.
Real friends or deal friends. Yeah, I was talking to a guy on the phone and it was, he was, I was actually delaying a fishing trip, 'cause I was talking to a guy on the phone and you know, a long time, a long conversation about a deal. We were doing a deal, and afterward he said, who's that, dad? He's 11, and he said, who's that dad? I said, it was a friend. He said, really? He said, a real friend or a deal friend? Right. Clever boy. Clever boy.
Yeah, that's a, that's gold, that's a good one. It's a good one. Now, that boy now is a sniper in the US Marine Corps. Oh wow. 6'5", 4.3% body fat.
(Rich chuckling) All right. Yeah. Fluid intelligence intact. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fluid intelligence, tattoos, large explosions, and love for America. Wow, okay. Sorry to interrupt the flow. We'll be right back with more awesome, but I wanna snag a moment to talk to you about the importance of nutrition. The thing is, most people I know actually already know how to eat better and aspire to incorporate more whole plants, more fruits, vegetables, seeds, beans, and legumes into their daily routine. Sadly, however, without the kitchen tools and support, very few end up sticking with it. So, because adopting a plant-based diet transformed my life so profoundly, and because I want everybody to experience some version of what I've experienced, we decided to tackle and solve this very common problem. The solution we've devised, I'm proud to say, is the PlantPower Meal Planner, our affordable all in one digital platform that sets you up for nutrition excellence by providing access to thousands of highly customizable, super delicious and easy to prepare plant-based recipes. Everything integrates with automatic grocery delivery and you get access to our amazing team of nutrition coaches seven days a week and many other features.
To learn more and to sign up, visit meals.richroll.com, and right now, for a limited time, we're offering $10 off an annual membership when you use the promo code RRHEALTH at checkout. This is life-changing stuff, people, for just a $1.70 a week, literally the price of a cup of coffee. Again, that's meals.richroll.com, promo code RRHEALTH for $10 off an annual membership. All right, let's get back to the show. Obviously, we're, you know, the driving principle here is to extend your happiness later in life, but like, explain to me how you think about happiness. Like, what is that concept? What is happiness? How do you define happiness, 'cause there's so many different ideas around how to think about this? Yeah, so saying happiness gets people's attention because they know they want it, but then when they think about it, they don't know what it is, and so I ask my students on the first day of class and then look, it's a hard class to get into.
There's a lot of competition to get into the class. So I say, look, you're in this class, you bid your points, 'cause this is sort of a point system for getting electives at Harvard Business School. It's a market and I say, so you must know what it is, right? What is it? And they'll go around and say, it's the feeling I get when I remember. Wrong. Happiness is not a feeling anymore than the smell of the turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. That's evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. Your feeling is evidence of it. If we look at the happiest people and the unhappiest people, the happiest people have in common three macronutrients, like you and I are interested in this stuff. If I say, what is the Thanksgiving dinner, you're gonna say, because you're a, you know, a guy who knows this stuff, it's protein, carbohydrates, and fat. That's what your Thanksgiving dinner, literally your Thanksgiving dinner is proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. You're making your macros or not if you're gonna be healthy.
Happiness has three macronutrients, enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, which you need in balance and abundance, and if you don't have all those three, you're not gonna be a happy person. So when I talk to somebody who says, I'm just, and you know, when you're a happiness specialist, people talk to you like they're a psychiatrist, and so I'll talk to, you know, very powerful people say, frankly, I'm just not happy. I will look at their macronutrient profile in the same way that if you said, ah, my digestion's all goofed up. Well probably, you're not eating, you're not getting the right macros. Yeah. And ordinarily, what I'll find with strivers is that they're very high in stoic work ethic to get a whole lot of long term meaning, and they're very low in enjoyment.
They're very low in enjoyment. What I find if I'm talking to undergraduate students, they're very high in enjoyment on the basis of the high dose of pleasure. They're sort of Epicurious in their outlook and they're very low in meaning. They're not getting a whole lot of meaning or they're, what they're, if they're real success junkies, they're trying to get as much satisfaction as they can, and it's elusive because they're on the treadmill. You know, it's like work hard, get the hit, you know? Okay, well that was good for a week. The new car smell lasts for like a week. You know, the people always say, you know, it's the California phenomenon. There's a lot of research on this, about how long you'll be satisfied if you move to California, and the answer is the sunshine will give you satisfaction for six months, but the taxes are forever, you know. Careful with, I mean, yeah, sorry. I'm not trying to hurt you, Rich. (Rich laughing) I've made my peace with that, but go ahead.
It is a nice place. So the point is that the balance that you need in the macronutrient profile of happiness is really the best way to diagnostically understand how happy you are. That's where I actually start. That's the definition, satisfaction, enjoyment, plus meaning and purpose, and they all have a big science behind them. Right. So enjoyment is sort of pleasure with this elevated sensibility.
Plus elevation, yeah. Plus, it's basically pleasure enjoyed in communion. So, you know, you get pleasure from eating the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner. You get enjoyment from eating it and making a memory of doing it with people that you actually love such that you can actually get happiness from it for a long time afterward.
Right. Satisfaction, that's, you know, kind of a striver thing, right, like we get that sense of satisfaction in the pursuit of something, right? That's a goal met, the joy of a reward, but, which is very elusive as Mick Jagger reminds us that you can't get no satisfaction, but you can hack it. You can actually hack it if you understand and go against, you can get enduring or at least lasting satisfaction if you'll go against your nature, which is a really interesting body of literature, because it reminds us again, that Mother Nature doesn't care if we're happy.
Mother Nature wants to fool us again and again and again and again to hit the lever because it makes us more genetically fit. It helps us to pass on our genes by having more money, more power, more honor than the troglodyte in the next cave who has fewer animal skins, and, but it won't, but we think that that car will bring us lasting satisfaction. You have to hack that matrix and you can get lasting satisfaction. Right. The purpose piece is a little bit more complicated and elusive though. Yeah. Purpose piece is in a way the most beautiful and one that you're, I know you're well aware of. You know, and listen to this podcast and you learn a lot very quickly. It takes about five episodes before you put together your biography, which is one of struggle and pain and sacrifice because of a lot of things that happened to you in your life, but who you are as a man has everything to do with what you've suffered.
That is, it's part of who you are as a person. It, you know, if I were, not being a mental health professional, but being a listener to this show and a specialist in this area, I would say that that meaning and purpose for you are simply intertwined with the suffering that you've had with substance abuse, for example, with the relationships that suffered as a result of that, and that's the cosmic truth of meaning and one that's really elusive for all young people today who are psychological hedonists. They're spending all of their energy and time trying to avoid unhappiness. What that does is that, when you avoid pain, you're avoiding meaning. You're avoiding learning what your purpose is through resiliency, what you're capable of, and the lessons you're supposed to learn, and you're avoiding your, to avoid your unhappiness is to avoid your happiness, which is that you, we need pain, we need sacrifice.
Yeah, it's so true, and so convoluted to understand, but it's absolutely essential and I think that's a very accurate, you know, sort of notion of how I think about this because my satisfaction and my purpose have been sort of gilded out of unhappiness and suffering and toil, but a search for meaning within that, and then an act of service in trying to return what I've learned along the way, and so it's not an Epicurean happiness. I mean, it's fun to talk to you and we'll have a couple laughs and all of that, but it's really more of a meaning-driven thing, and so I think of happiness as being a byproduct of pursuing meaning, of being of service, of trying to align my actions with my values, because happiness isn't something that you can grab.
It's only the result of these other endeavors and it's fleeting at best. It's, so it's best not to really even think about happiness or be in its pursuit because I feel like it's a trap. Well, the pursuit is of its macronutrients to make sure that you are doing, you have you have proper hygiene, that you have the right habits. Think about the habits as opposed to the happiness itself. So one, the best way for people to get happier immediately is to think in sort of three steps. The first is do the work and to do the work you need to, you need self-knowledge, you need understanding, and you, maybe that comes from your religious practice. Maybe that comes from, you know, reading a happiness book about the science of happiness. Maybe that comes from sitting at your grandmother's knee and writing down everything she says for a week. Whatever it is, do the work. You know, if you said, hey, man, I wish I knew more calculus, I'd say, buy a book, right? I would say, do the work.
Don't wish you knew more math, do the work. The second is to practice it in your life. You know, people, if you can't just read a book about golf and become a better golfer, you actually have to golf. You have to learn, and then you have to golf, and happiness is a hands-on business by practicing the habits of happiness, faith, family, friends, and work, loving other people, intensively, purposively, and then the last is really the most important, which is you gotta share it. You have to teach others. You know, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to create a happiness movement of a nation of happiness professors.
I want us to hold each other accountable for this. I mean, it's so valuable to me that you notice the irony of what I'm actually doing, which is not good for my happiness hygiene and talking about happiness. That's what brothers are supposed to do for each other. I mean that, and when we hold each other accountable, we give each other suggestions, when we actually teach, this is the ultimate act of metacognition where you're not being managed by anything. You're managing it by making it fully human, by observing it, by putting it into the prefrontal cortex of your big, wonderful human brain. One, two, three, understand, practice, share. That's the secret. Yeah. The sharing piece is so powerful. I mean, I just, as you're explaining that, I'm just thinking of Chip, you know, down in Baja with his modern wisdom, modern.
Modern Elder Academy. Yeah, Modern Elder Academy where he is teaching, you know, this elder wisdom and the experience that he had at Airbnb, where he got to, you know, practice that crystallized intelligence to be of service to these young founders, and it's confusing. I said to him, I said, why isn't that experience that you had at Airbnb a case study, Harvard Business School case study that should be taught? Like, why doesn't every company have their version of that that business school students are studying and understanding the value of? Yeah, no, for sure, and one of the things that Chip Conley is, I mean, I think very highly of Chip Conley.
He has magnificently transformed his own career into one that actually is with crystallized intelligence, passing on these ideas to other people and lifting them up. In such a beautiful way, and I feel like he isn't on the hedonic treadmill and his ego is exactly where it's meant to be right now. Like, he has such a healthy relationship with what he does and he's so generous of heart and spirit in that.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, you feel it in his presence. Yeah, absolutely, and one of the things that he's, as a practical matter, that he points out to all of us and some of the, one of the things that I'm at the Harvard Business School that I'm promoting as much as I possibly can is trying to see one of the problems in America, in our business climate today is it's too heavily loaded on fluid intelligence. How is it that social media and the tech industry have gone from the pinnacle of respect for, in capitalism to near the bottom in 15 years, where people are worried that social media's creating a harmful product or has a harmful culture, or is anti-competitive or whatever happens to be? It has everything to do with the fact that there's unforced errors across these business models in the way that these things are working.
Look, I have tons of respect for these people. These are my friends, they're your friends too, but the truth is, there's not enough old people in this process. There's too much fluid intelligence. There's not enough crystallized intelligence. My view is that, and Chip gave me this idea, quite frankly, that every product marketing and team and C-suite of every company in America needs more people over 70. You know, I was saying, I was gonna tell this story. When I was lecturing, I was giving a talk at a tech company in the Valley, and they were talking about, they asked, somebody asked me about diversity, which was, you know, people of color and women who are coding and doing engineering work, and that's, it's a diversity problem for sure, and I talked about that, but then I said, speaking of diversity, how many old people work here? Like, I mean over 30, right.
That's the problem. Yeah. I pointed this out to Chip though, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this. This is certainly true in startup culture, but if you're at a Fortune 500 company or some giant legacy conglomerate, you know, DuPont or Coca-Cola or something like that, I would suspect that the C-suites are filled with, you know, septuagenarians who are well past their fluid intelligence curve, who are sticking around too long, and in that case, you need the younger person to hold those people accountable, because that's equally broken. We need diversity. I mean, that's why diversity is really important, but the kind of diversity that we really lack in America today is age diversity.
Age diversity. We need, and it's weird because we have this system for, you know, your kids are going through grades in school where they stay with the same age over and over and over again, and that lack of diversity, that lack of intergenerational diversity, but even among students four, five, and six years apart who can teach each other, that's a real debility.
That's a big weakness that we have in our society today, and so we have a tendency to hang out with people more or less our age, you know, hang out with a couple more or less your age, and I made a conscious effort to not do that. I have friends who are younger than me and I have friends who are a couple of decades or 30 years younger than me, and I have have friends who are 30 years older than me 'cause it's way more interesting and fun among other things, but I also had learned more. Yeah. When you're teaching this class at Harvard Business School, well there's, let me say this.
So, in recovery, you know, there's this understanding like, you can't will somebody else to get sober. Like, they have to have their own, you know, intrinsic willingness or receptivity and everybody, it's a timing thing. Like you have to be ready to do the work to get sober. Not everybody is. When you're kind of espousing the virtues of this way of thinking and approaching your life to these young strivers, what is the receptivity level like? Does it land for them or how, what is your sense of how it's being processed by people who are at the very beginning of venturing out into the world and you know, in their attempt to conquer it? Yeah, well one of the things that I tell 'em is, it's useful to them to have a crystal ball, and you know, if I can tell you what's gonna happen to you right now, they're very interested in it. You know, I say, you're here in 20 years. You're gonna see this, I want you to remember this. That's interesting to people that this is a thing that's gonna happen to you, write it out, write it down, and commit it to memory, and you're gonna see this thing when it happens to you.
You're not gonna be surprised, and as a result of it, you're not gonna make the following mistake. They're intensely interested in what that's all about. The second is they're extremely interested in their parents. So my students have parents that are my age. I mean, my kids are in their 20s and when I talk to, you know, people who are in their 20s, I'm the age of their parents. They're, I'm talking to them about people like you and me and a lot of their dads and moms are intensely unhappy, and they understand for the first time why it is, and they, they care about their parents, and so a lot of 'em, what they wind up doing is that I've noticed that there'll be a Zoom link on my, for my classes for people who have, you know, coronavirus or something, they can't go to class, and there'll be parents on the Zoom link. Unofficially auditing. Yeah, kind of. I know, and then a bunch of times I'll see, you know, I'll be in this, right.
You mean, my students are, I have sections of 90. I have two sections of 90, and as the semester goes on, I notice that there's like people my age in the back of the class, and a student afterward'll say, it's my dad. (men laughing) That's pretty good. Well, that's a good indicator. You know, you're onto something. One of the techniques for this, you mentioned, you know, stoic philosophy, et cetera, but you talk in the book about, I can't remember what sort of faith denomination it was, I think these ascetic monks who would do this version of exposure therapy where they would walk amongst, you know, rotting corpses to like, have this, you know, to inject yourself with a sense of impermanence and you know, a connectivity to your own mortality.
Yeah, exposure therapy to the source of your fear. Most people that I talk to, they, only 20% of Americans are morbidly afraid of death. That's called thanato phobia, and it's in the DSM-V manual, but only 20%. I mean, none of us is like, oh, hurray death, but we're not really afraid. You and I are not afraid of death, but we almost all have our own death fear. So if you're afraid of failure, that's your death fear. If you're afraid of irrelevance or being forgotten, that's your death fear and one of the things that I ask my students or anybody to do is to figure out what your death fear is. What is the, what is your concept of your life that you're afraid to lose? That's your death. Anybody who says, by the way, my work is my life, professional failure's your death fear, and then the way to cope with that, because you can't break through, you can't get to the second curve, you can't actually find your bliss until you conquer your fear, because that stands in the way of your love.
That stands in the way of the real love in your life. So I, the way that I do this has been very helpful to me, and now I do it with my students, particularly with fear of failure, 'cause my MBA students at Harvard are ultra-achievers with very little experience of failure, and they're self-objectifiers, a lot of them because they consider themselves to be success monsters, success machines, homo Economicus, like, of course I always get A's. Of course I get into the best schools, of course, because I'm the special one, right, and some of that comes from the parents, but a lot of it is internally generated. So the way that, the meditation on death works, that can be adapted to our own particular death fear is, it's called the Maranasati meditation of the Theravada Buddhist monks. So if you go to a monastery in Thailand or Vietnam, you'll notice that in a lot of monasteries, they'll have photographs of corpses in various states of decay and the monks will stand in front of them and say, that is me, and they'll walk to the next one and say, that is me, and it's just like horrible until you realize it's exposure therapy.
You can't be fully alive when you're afraid of not being alive. It just doesn't make sense and yet, the nature of our brain is to block out this cognitive dissonance, you know. The mortality paradox is that we know we're gonna die, but we can't conceive of non-existence, and that intense discomfort makes us terrified.
So this, it turns out that that meditation, that nine part meditation, if people Google it, the maranasati meditation will come up, and if you do that, you will be free, but if you do that in the case of your fear, you will be free as well. So I have a nine part fear of failure meditation that I ask my students to contem, it's one of the exercises. Every lecture ends with an exercise, much of it in, based in theological or philosophical tradition, and it's like, I'm not living up. I'm not doing well in class. Starts easy, right, and then, and it gets a little bit harder. My friends from college seem to be doing better than me and getting better jobs than me, and then a little bit later, it's like, I think my parents feel sorry for me, and sometimes the students will weep at this point because the concept, you know, confronting that terror of what is effectively their own death, but they will be free when they do that, because you can't, it can't hurt them anymore when it becomes ordinary.
The fantasm, when it's exposed to light, evaporates. And then the ultimate being sort of, yes, you're gonna die, and this attachment to relevance or being remembered in a certain way has to go, right? So nobody's gonna remember you, nobody's gonna care. Like, the more that you can just kind of acclimate to that notion and be comfortable with it, there is a freedom, like in the example of the gentleman sitting behind you on the plane, like if he had just embraced the fact that his time was up and that this is the nature of the way life is, he could have found some peace and comfort with that.
Yeah, I mean, your great grandchildren will not know your name. They won't know your name. I mean, if we can say how many, I mean, you have eight. And that's nothing. Yeah, you have eight grand, great-grandparents. How many can you name? Oh my God. I don't know, two? Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. So there's six that are gone, poof, and it's funny because you get evidence of this as you get older. It's one of the consolations of age is actually experiencing, is actually having this exposure. You know, I ran this important think tank in DC for almost 11 years. I've been gone for three years. I go back, people don't have the slightest idea who I am. Poof. Now that's very DC.
(Rich laughing) And are you able to gracefully kind of like laugh, and, you know, smile to yourself? Yeah. I can't, well, part of it is just, yeah. I mean, it helps that I've got a new thing. I've got a new bag, but yeah, I mean, it's, part of that is the exposure that comes from actually having done this work.
I mean, this is, this was work I did and then published. I mean, I actually did the work on this such that, and I'm much more comfortable with my weaknesses. I'm much more comfortable with my professional and prestige mortality than I was in the past. I can laugh at things that scared me before. Yeah, I mean, it's not perfect. I mean, I have, I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, but it's better. I mean, I'm happier. Here's the, I mean, the acid test is basically this. When I stepped down from that job in the middle of 2019, my happiness on a one to seven scale, self-evaluated, which is the best kind of way to do it, where one is the unhappiness person you've ever met and seven is the happiest person you've ever met, that number was three, and now it's 4.8 and.
Wow, that's very specific. Yeah, well, I'm an economist. You know, I'm a quantitative guy, but for me, that's really meaningful. I keep very careful data on not just the macronutrients of my happiness, but the micronutrients that feed into it as well. All of the elements that I need to track, I'm tracking very carefully all the time, such that I can make a strategic plan for my life and it's all been going up. It's all been going up. And do you do that specifically with respect to the numerator denominator math that you talk about where needs and wants have to be correlated in a healthy ratio? Yeah, haves and wants. So this is how you hack the satisfaction rate matrix.
So the problem is not that you can't get no satisfaction, as Mick Jagger sings. The problem is that you can't keep no satisfaction. The real problem is you get it and then it goes, so it's your, you get the high from cocaine or alcohol, for example, but it's gone immediately and you chase it, but if you never got it in the first place, it wouldn't be a problem. If you literally got no satisfaction, there would be no problem, but that you can't keep no satisfaction, that's the real problem. The way to think about it is if you have a concept of your satisfaction in terms of what you have, you're in trouble, but if you understand a more accurate model where your satisfaction is which you have divided by what you want, haves divided by wants, then you need a haves management strategy, but importantly, a wants management strategy.
The secret to being more satisfied is not having more. It's wanting less. That's the secret. Right, and I feel like culturally, that's not unrelated to the rise of minimalism, and so many young people who are interested in living their lives differently than what, the way that we were brought up. Like, I think that there is, and I'm sure you see this in your stoop, maybe not because it's Harvard Business School, but so many young people are approaching their career tracks from a perspective of, you know, how is this gonna be meaningful to me, or what is the impact going to be of my involvement in this, rather than what's my starting salary, what's the raise gonna be, et cetera.
Yeah, no, I do see that, although I still see, I mean we're all human. I mean, we all are chasing the Thomistic. You know St. Thomas Aquinas' four idols, the four substitutes for God, are money, power, pleasure, and fame, and you don't have to be theological to even understand that. What he is basically saying is these are the things that distract you from your happiness, because they're instrumental to good things. There's nothing wrong with money. It's when you make it intrinsic that it'll be what you chase and you never find your satisfaction.
You wind up unhappy. So what you find is that there's a natural human tendency based on our evolutionary biology to chase these extrinsic goals, these instrumentalities as if they were the secret to our own happiness, and then we can't quite figure it out. So hacking the matrix means wanting less of that. It's okay if we get it. I mean, I play a game with my students called What's Your Idol, and the way that What's Your Idol works is I say, okay, you got there's, it's a very comprehensive taxonomy of, you know, your idols, which is money, power, pleasure, and honor, which is usually admiration or prestige.
Sometimes it's fame, some people actually wanna be famous. Okay, don't tell me what your idol is. Tell me what it's not, so let's play. You wanna play? Sure. Okay. Tell me of these four, money, power, pleasure, and fame, which is the one that you care about the least and would kick away in two seconds? Money, power, pleasure, fame. Is that what it is?
Yeah. Yeah. Probably pleasure. You'd kick it away? Yeah. But you chased it for years. Yeah, but I was, that was more of a running away. Yeah. You know. It was actually escape, not pleasure. It was the, yeah. It wasn't, you weren't looking, you weren't running to pleasure, you were running away from pain. Yeah, so pleasure. Okay, good. Good, and tell me, what's next? Money, power. You got money and power and fame. Power can go.
Power, you don't care. Don't want power over people. You probably, and part of the reason is because you don't want anybody. Power might even be the first thing. Yeah, because you don't want anybody to have power over you. No. That drives you crazy, right. I don't seek, I don't, I'm not like motivated by power. Yeah, okay. You got two left. So it's money, and fame.
And fame. Fame would go. I got your idol. So, the money's my idol. Well, and it, and again, you might be pretty good.
But it's weird because I don't, like this podcast makes money, but I didn't get into it for that. Like, it's a byproduct of doing something meaningful to me, but I think, maybe I'm thinking of it in that way because I've got four kids and I'm worried about making sure that they're taken care of and I've gone through financial hardship and I know what that feels like, and I don't want to go back there.
Totally, yeah totally, and again, there's nothing that's disreputable about that at all. This is absolutely human. The key thing is knowing yourself such that you're not making decisions that militate against your happiness on the basis of chasing your idol. That's how you can self-manage is understanding that that will wind up being your weak point. Now ordinarily, it's because there's a little bit of fear having to do with your past, and you can never be quite secure enough when the people that you love are involved.
The second is that money is a trophy for entrepreneurs. Money is a trophy. In other words, money is good because it represents the value that the rest of the world places on you. So even if you don't care about boats and planes, you can still have that as an idol under these circumstances, and you gotta watch that is what it comes down to. For me, I don't care about power. I mean, running a think tank was hard because I don't want anybody to have power over me, and I hate having power over others. I actually dislike power. I'm pretty libertarian in this way. It's like, or don't tread on me kind of, right. Second is money. Money for me, money, you know. It's, didn't have that much growing up, but you know, it's just, it doesn't have any allure for me particularly. Now things get a little bit uncomfortable. I like pleasure. I like it, right, but, okay. I'll give it up. I just found my idol. I wanna be admired. I want admiration. Yeah. I want the admiration of strangers. I mean, how stupid is that to want the admiration of strangers? What could be less satisfying and more idiotic than that? And yet, and yet.
But that brain neurochemistry gets lit up when Anderson Cooper calls, and says, we need Dr. Brooks on tonight. (Arthur laughing) Yes, sir. Two thumbs up. I am available. Oh yeah, and it's funny because, you know, we understand how the neurobiology of that would be wired, right, and yet, you know, the whole idea that the reward would've been multiple mates and lots of offspring, I don't want that. I don't want that, no. I don't want that. I don't want a secret second family. I want, you know, I. So what do you do with that self-understanding? You make sure that you're not making decisions on that basis. So I will interrogate my decisions. So my decision to go on Anderson's show, I'll say why, and I'll interrogate myself. Now fortunately, I have a partner, my beloved wife, who will interrogate me with, you know, great acuity. She said, why do you wanna do that? Why do you actually wanna do that? Why did I wanna do your show? Because I love your show and I'd never been on it before. I always wanted to.
That's actually meritorious. It's interesting to me. It's not because it's gonna bring me this, the cosmic admiration that I seek. It actually gives me the intellectual enjoyment that is part of how I'm trying to live a good and happy life. I would actually take the time even if we weren't airing this, but that's kind of how I interrogate it, expose it to empirical scrutiny, and make a decision properly. I don't always make the proper decision, but at least I know my weakness. That's power. Yeah, that's cool. Let's talk about the faith piece. Right on.
We kind of kicked this off. You were sharing about your trips to India and your Catholic faith, but this is a big piece here, and it gets tricky. People don't like to talk about this stuff. Makes them uncomfortable, but you know, if you look at the blue zones and where people live the longest and live the happiness, happiest, you know, faith is a big, big piece here.
Yeah. And a lot of people have very unhealthy relationships with how they were reared in a certain faith, and it's, you know, whether it was traumatic or just, they're not interested anymore, and then they live this secular life where they're in pursuit of the very things that we were just talking about and now are faced with the prospect of being told, like, you gotta figure this out. It's tough, right, but as the statistics interestingly bear out and you talk about this in the book, like, there is this receptivity to a more transcendent way of approaching your life that kind of begins to bloom and blossom as we get older. Yeah, it's a real mystery and it was for the longest time, because the belief was with the enlightenment, that faith and reason were naturally antagonistic and that science was gonna crowd out faith entirely because faith was nothing more than a bunch of superstitious theories that helped us understand the world.
Now that's been overtaken by the observation that you don't, that there's no antagonism between a Picasso painting and Picasso. There's no antagonism between the two, and it's worth understanding both the man and the painting, and that is, the painter and the painting is the better metaphor, as opposed to, you know, when the Soviets in the 1970s sent a rocket, a telescope into orbit and pointed out into space and announced to the world that there was no evidence of God. Well, you know, that sort of sounds idiotic, 'cause it is. It's like looking in the Picasso painting for evidence of Picasso. That's not actually where you find it. These are different lines of inquiry that are actually complimentary and people start figuring that out ordinarily in their 40s. You know, you find that people tend to walk away from faith or spirituality in their 20s, and the reason is 'cause the world's messy, you know? And you say, how can there be a benevolent creator with so much pain in the world, et cetera, and I understand that these, that this is troubling to a lot of people, but when you're our age, you're like, yeah, everything's messy.
Nothing's consistent. I can accept a whole lot of cognitive dissonance now that I was unable to accept when I was 28 or 32 years old, just couldn't do it, and so the result of that is that whereas superstitions tend to fall away, I don't believe in the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, I'm more willing to be childlike in understandings of the supernatural. Now for some people, it doesn't work that way, but here's the deal when it comes to happiness. If you're left to your devices, your ordinary quotidian devices, you're going to, your life is gonna be like a continuous tape loop of one episode of "Better Call Saul." Like, it was okay the first time, and then it's the same and the same, and you'll go mad with tedium, with boredom. It's just, really? My job, my car, my money, my friends, my time, my show, my me, me, me. Just give me a break. The Dalai Lama always says, every time I see him, he says, remember, you are one in seven billion, by which he does not mean that I'm an ant, that I'm insignificant, by which he means, don't forget the adventure of looking at things from a distance.
Don't forget the adventure of seeing life in its spectrum, its majesty, its scale. At 40,000 feet, looking at the whole world where you're part of it gives you perspective and it gives you peace. You need that. Everybody has a transcendental walk. Now it comes, maybe it comes from the, you know, the incredible, I mean, it's like I hang out with a guy named Ryan Holiday. Yeah, I just talked to him like two hours ago. I talk to Ryan all the time. He's fantastic, he's fantastic, and he's cut his teeth by introducing Marcus Aurelius to a generation of Gen Z'ers. Like, wow, Ryan Holiday discovered Seneca.
It's awesome, but he's so smart and so good. He's such a, Ryan's a visionary guy, and you can study this, the philosophers, or as I mentioned before, the works of Bach, or understanding nature in a very metaphysical way or a traditional or non-traditional faith or spiritual practice or a meditation practice. There's lots of ways to do this, but we must have a transcendental walk because life is simply too intense and exhausting and boring if we don't do that. So how does one embark upon that if this is a new alien concept? Yeah, I've asked the Dalai Lama that very thing. You know, it's like asking for a friend kind of, but in, and I have a, my more traditional religious life actually proceeds from this because I realized, I mean, there are times when I was more religious and times when I was less religious, but in my 30s, I recognized that this was a big hole in my soul and I didn't need to go across state lines to go to a different supermarket.
What precipitated that? A need, I recognized a need, that I needed better, more peace and better perspective, and I just have a sense that this is right. Now, what part is right, I don't know. I don't actually know, but I need a physics of spirituality and just as I would not try to create my own mathematical structures, you know, to create my own alternative system of mathematics, I don't feel like I have to do so in a religious way. Other people feel differently about it, but the Dalai Lama talks about kind of a pyramid where the basis of the pyramid is moral living, figure, and this is a Jungian perspective too. Carl Jung said that happiness comes from defining your values and living according to them. If you know what your values are and you don't live according to them, or you don't know what your values are, you won't be happy.
Defining your values and your morals and living according to them with impeccable integrity, that means, you know, when they say make your bed, I mean, that's just a, that's a boring example of living according to what you think is right, and even when nobody's watching, living according to it, I, what I recommend is that that people don't lie ever. Just don't lie. Now, now, when the murderer is at the door and says, you know, where's the victim? Fine, but that's not what we're talking about.
That's a different podcast. That's a different podcast. That's a Wondery podcast, you know. Or a Sam Harris podcast, maybe. So figure out, write down what your moral values are and make a plan to live according to them, step one. Step two is build a meditative practice, build a practice of contemplation. Maybe that's formal meditation. Maybe that's walking in the woods, but you need a practice without devices where you can be at peace, and finally, you need to read wisdom. You need to expose yourself to people who have had deeper thoughts and more profound thoughts than you. So number one, act according to your values. Learn your values, act according to values, practice your values, write it down, journal it. Number two is get your contemplative practice in order and make sure you start with at least 15 minutes a day, and number three is actually read the wisdom literature in whatever tradition you you want and do that daily for at least 15 minutes. Starting there, your life will change.
It will, your world will rock. What does the science say about the service piece, the giving back piece, 'cause I just know for me, like when I have those moments of bliss, you know, they come in the most unlikely packages. They generally come when I'm not self-seeking, but I'm able to get outside of my own self and my own egocentric, you know, looping and avail myself for the betterment of somebody else. Like, it's just, if you are going through something difficult, if you're having a hard time, if you're, you know, meeting a roadblock to just like, pick up the phone and like see how someone else is doing, not in a complicated way necessarily, but to kind of reflexively develop that skill is such a relief and such an amplifier of that thing that we're seeking, which is a sense of connection and fulfillment and purpose, et cetera, and I suspect the older we get and the more our crystallized intelligence becomes more important and paramount as we're searching for outlets or ways to kind of engender more meaning in our lives that this is such a beautiful and obvious thing for people to channel their energy into.
Absolutely. No, you're absolutely right. Crystallized intelligence in this expression requires serving others, requires serving others. You can't teach without students. There's no reason for you to have pattern recognition, and pass on the knowledge, if there's nobody to pass it on. It's not just a question of you creating value on the basis of your clever ideas. It's collecting clever ideas in service of other people who need to learn from you. The professor requires students and that is an act of love at its best. All of the evidence, all of the empirical evidence, all the social science shows that you will be happier, healthier, richer, and even better looking if you give more.
Better looking. Yeah, I can't. How do they evaluate that? I know, there's this great study. It's a British study where this, the social psychologist, they bring couples into the lab, married couples in the lab, and there's a guy in a white lab coat, and he says to the married couple, some have been married for a long time, some just for, you know, a couple of years, and he says to the couple, okay, here's how the experiment works.
I'm gonna give you this pocket full of change to the gentleman. He takes the coins and puts it in the man's pocket. You two need to walk down that little path over to that building over there outside, he says, and I have a colleague who's gonna wait, and he is gonna interview you for five minutes and you get to keep the money and go home. Simple experiment. Cool, okay. Now, turns out when they're walking down the little path, there's another pathway that comes from between the buildings, from which a hobo comes walking out, a homeless guy comes walking out, and he panhandles the husband, right? He's a confederate to the experiment, right.
He's a collaborator. You got some change? He does. They put the change in his pocket. He has to make a decision. Am I gonna give to the homeless guy, or am I not? He makes a decision. They go on walking to the next building where the other scientist is waiting to interview them. He says, first, sir, did you give to the homeless man and how much? Writes it down, says to the wife, how attractive do you find him right now? (Rich laughing) It turns out, the more.
It's sort of rigged though, I mean. Totally rigged, but the whole point is that she likes him if he was just more generous, which is why, if you're in the market, when you were in the market back in the old days, when you were, you know, dating your wife, you were extra nice to puppies and babies around her because you wanted her to see that you were a giving person, you were a loving person, that it brings out the best in you because you actually became more attractive on the basis of your love for your fellow men and dogs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. You actually get better looking. You, women find men better looking if they are more loving and philanthropic and serving, or serve others. All right, so if you take away no other idea from this podcast. News you can use, man. That's right. We were talking a few minutes ago about reducing your wants. Like, if you can, if you can really, you know, curtail that, that's a good recipe for putting you on a, like, a happiness trajectory, right, but like, how do you do that? How do you reduce your wants? You want what you want. Yeah, no, no, except that there's all kinds of interesting ways to do that. So one, there's an image that I really like that's really helpful that a guy, a philosopher of art in China taught me, and I was actually touring the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and we were looking at this sculpture of this chipped, you know, piece of jade that, and it was sculptured to a Chinese village, and I said, look, even if you didn't tell me it was Chinese, I would know it was Chinese.
How do I know just by looking at it it's Chinese, you know, if it didn't have a pagoda in it, but it's just a, you know, it's just, it looks Chinese. He says why, he says, because it's a different concept of what art is. He said, you think of art as starting with an empty canvas and being filled up with brushstrokes. We think of art as already existing inside the block of jade, which we have to chip away until we find the work of art. He said, this is also how you see success in the west as starting from nothing and building up, and then after a while, it's so full that you actually can't get any more satisfaction because you, it's just more brushstrokes. You know, if you've got a completely full canvas, effectively, metaphorically, and you're like, I don't know, I'm not satisfied.
Maybe I'll get a boat. It's not gonna work because the canvas is already full. To find real satisfaction in the second half of life, this is a second curve phenomenon, this is one of the things that all happy older people have in common, they've stopped adding and they start taking away. They start chipping away, and each year I throw away more stuff until I can find me, which is intensely satisfying. So the key thing is, what are you gonna throw away this year? Don't have a bucket list, have a reverse bucket list. The reverse bucket list is the list of your attachments and your strategic plan for look, if I get it, I get it, but I no longer am going to consider myself a loser if I don't, you know, ride in a hot air balloon or you know, have lunch with the President. I am detaching myself officially, and that metacognitive exercise really, really works, and I do that. You know, one year I gave away two thirds of my clothes.
Simply by making a, like making a decision to do it? Making a decision to be detached and then act accordingly, I gave away two thirds of my clothes.
Last year or the year before on my birthday, I gave away half of my political opinions. I wrote down all my political opinions. I detached myself from half of them. That's so interesting, well, for two things, first of all.
It's just, it's hardcore. You're kind of a clotheshorse, right? Like, you're a sartorial maven. So giving away your clothes was, probably there might have been a little pinch there. I might have not given away the best ones but. Okay. All right, fair enough, and it is interesting because you were once known and have written many books about politics. Yeah. But if you kind of go online and research everything you've been talking about, there's none of that. Like, you've really kind of put that aside and said, I'm focused on this now.
That is, and it is pursuant to the decision in my reverse bucket list birthday exercise to detach myself more consciously from something that had been quite important to me, quite frankly, but was holding me back. It was holding me back from bonds of love with people who are different than me. Are you happier you're not part of that conversation?
Yeah. Hell yeah, I really am, and again, I've got nothing against the conversation. I want a responsible country that has good public policy and better politics, but I actually don't think I have an oracle on truth. I know I'm wrong, I just don't know on what, and actually getting away from intense opinions and big arguments has been a kind of detachment that has truly set me free.
It set me free to.
Do you have to just stay off Twitter? Well, I mean, I can stay.
I mean, that's gotta be provocative when you see a bunch of craziness. Yeah, yeah, but it's actually. And you have this urge to jump in and. (Arthur laughing) Right. Well, since I made the detachment decision about my, about political opinions, I get a lot more, I get more laughs from people, you know, who are, you know, saying outlandish things, I have to say. I mean, look, I'm alarmed about what's happening in this country, and I believe we need to love our enemies politically a lot more than we do.
That's super important for us to do, and I'm just better able to do it, and to model that, to build alliances with people who would ordinarily be very, very different than me politically when I'm not attached. I mean, look, I got these opinions, but I can take 'em or leave 'em is the whole point. It's a, it's interesting, and you know, Thich Nhat Hanh, you know, the great Vietnamese Buddhist master, he said the greatest attachments that many have is to their opinions.
That had a big effect on me 'cause we never think of that. It's like, yeah, it's my material possessions, and. Well, there's an identity construct in that. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely, for sure and by the way, give away parts of your identity, give away your concept of who you are, detach yourself from these things about who you actually are, and that's been really helpful to me too, I have to say.
That's very liberating. Hugely. It's actually one of the greatest secrets that I've ever been able to come across is the reverse bucket list around ideology, identity and opinions. Yeah, it's sort of, it's a PhD in minimalism because it's really a mindful practice. It's not about, I mean, cleaning out your closet is an activity, but it's not really about getting rid of your possessions. It's about clarity of purpose and thought, and removing the clutter of your conscious experience and the traps of your identity that are getting in the way of you being a more fulfilled human.
Yeah, and when you make a commitment to it and somebody says something that you would've snapped at before, you're more likely to go, huh. Right. Huh. Tell me more about that. Come sit next to me. (men laughing) So, when you go back to the think tank and walk the halls, can you like, it must be, you know, like, did they, like your old colleagues, are they confused? I don't know. You don't know? I don't really know. You transcended that. Well, I mean, I've gone back a couple of times and like, I love these people and I think they're doing absolutely outstanding work. I just love the work they do. I'm so proud to have been part of that, but I also recognize that I did go poof and it's okay. It's absolutely okay, and I'll talk to people and they'll kind of be like, what happened to you, man? It's interesting 'cause I used to be, I was a musician for so many years.
Yeah, we didn't even talk about that. Yeah, and I was a classical musician, but I also toured for two years with a jazz guitar player, Charlie Byrd. Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah, and I was on tour with Charlie Byrd all over the place and years ago, probably six or seven years ago, I was doing this, I was hosting this big event in Washington, DC. You know, 2,000 people, black tie at the National Building Museum, you know, and we had this big event and Benjamin Netanyahu was this guest speaker, and it was a huge thing. The press corps was all there and we had protesters outside. It was a great night, it was a fantastic fun night, and we hired a band and the, you know, the band was playing and they were pretty good, and at the end, you know, we're kind of cleaning up and you know, I was the president of the organization.
I'd given the remarks and one of the keynote addresses and afterward, you know, my my bow tie is untied and it's 11 o'clock at night. I'm pretty satisfied, and I noticed the drummer is coming down from the bandstand. He's walking over to me and this, you know, the place is clearing out. He says, are you Arthur Brooks, the French horn player, 'cause that's what I did for a living, and I recognized him.
He was the drummer for Charlie Byrd and I'd made two records with him 20 years earlier, 25 years earlier, and he's looking at me and he says, are you the boss of all this now? I said, yeah, yeah, I am. He says, what happened to you, man? (men laughing) It's the same thing, right? It's the same thing. It's a crazy story to be this French horn prodigy and to have this whole career throughout your 20s and be playing in these orchestras and really be being, you know, in pursuit of this career of mastery of music and then to discover in your 20s that you just couldn't play as well as you once could, and the struggle to try to figure out how to solve it until ultimately you just, you have to give it up.
Yeah, yeah, I gave it up. And then it bursts this whole other career. It reminds me of, do you know Maya Shankar? Yeah. It's a similar, very similar story. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the violinist? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, playing a classical instrument is hugely coordination and strength endeavor, strength-oriented endeavor. It's like being an athlete, but with fine motor skills as opposed to gross motor skills, and there's a lot of things that can go wrong, and there's a lot of things that we don't understand that can actually go wrong.
There can be repetitive stress injuries. There can be nerve damage. There can be actually muscle tears at the finest level. You can be a French horn player like I am and tear a tiny muscle in your upper lip, and you're cooked. I mean, you just, you'll be, you'll go into decline. You'll be able to play, but you'll go into decline and who knows why, but in my 20s I was getting better.
Man, I was getting better. I was on this upward trajectory and I frankly wanted to be the greatest French horn player in the world, and it's like, what a great country. You can have an ambition, like it's so crazy, and things looked good, but when I was 21 or 22 years old, I started to get worse and I couldn't quite figure it out, and, you know, then I played for a bunch of seasons in the Barcelona symphony and I was getting worse. I mean, no matter what I, it's, nothing worked and I went to the greatest teachers. I, and it was like this master class in understanding decline, which is very helpful to me, I have to say, because, you know, declines that came later because of fluid intelligence, not because of a small muscle tear in my lip or whatever happened, I was actually able to experience what decline meant, but I had to retool my career and leave, and, you know, I went in, I just reluctantly and sorrowfully and ashamedly left music and went, you know, got my PhD and went into the family business, which is academia because my dad, my father, my grandfather, they were both academics and, you know, most people would be like, awesome.
What's your problem, man? It's because this was my dream. This was my dream. It was like, I was, I wanted to be a major league pitcher and I just got kind of got to the, you know, three games in AAA or something like that and had to give it up and thought about it, and I thought it was gonna be sad about it for the rest of my life quite frankly, I have to say. Do you play today just for joy? Never, never because there's no joy. Right. There's actually no joy. There's just.
Wow. I love music. Now I actually love music for the first time. I didn't love music when I played, and it's interesting. You know, there's all this literature about humor. I've done a lot of research on humor.
There's two, sense of humor means two things. It means enjoying jokes and making jokes. Happiness is only associated with enjoying jokes. It's not associated with making jokes. It turns out that if you're a funny person, that does not improve your happiness. Quite the contrary, but if you enjoy funny things and you have the humility to laugh at other people who are funny, you get the benefits. It's, the same thing is true with a lot of enjoying music and making music. Now, some people get a lot of joy from it, but for me, it was like being a standup comic. It was just this pathos and drive and ambition, and I wasn't happy and I'm much happier than I was then. Yeah. It's interesting, because then that becomes almost a test case for, you know, what you focus on later in life.
Like, you had this experience where you had to weather a career transition at a very early age and you understood disappointment and loss and all of that and how to rebuild. So you did it at a period of time where you had a lot of fluid intelligence and when you're younger, maybe the stakes are lower and you have all this upside because you have so many more years to do other things, but it's almost like that maybe that like, you know, planted something. Yeah, and I've taken my career down to the studs four times. I mean, went, did 10, 12 years a professional French horn player, 10 years in academia, 10 years running a think tank, and now this happiness operation.
Whatever this is. This happiness startup. This is like, you know, make America happy. Well, there's a cabal of like happiness experts and, you know, out there, like there's Gretchen. We're all trying to get happy. (men laughing) You don't study what you have. Yeah.
You study what you want. Yeah. Well, let's like round this out with maybe a little bit more practical advice.
Like, as I think about this in relationship to myself and my own career path, I'm thinking, okay, I'm 55. Like, I wanna keep doing this. How long can I keep doing this, I don't know. I'm trying to make it as sustainable as possible so I can continue to have a joyful relationship with it and maintain that level of enthusiasm and kind of like, connection to it so that it can maintain that level of quality, but how long am I gonna be able to do it? I don't know. I do know that at some point I'm gonna be like, I don't wanna talk into a microphone anymore, or I'm not able to do it at the quality level that I want to. So what can I do now? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I want to develop my friendships a little bit better. My kids are getting older. I want to make sure that those relationships are intact, that there is a bond there that, you know, will transcend my career path without doing it in an unhealthy way where I'm creating expectations for what our relationship, 'cause they need to go and be in the world.
Like I don't want to be, you know, like, I think some parents make the mistake of like, putting all this pressure on their kids to now be their friends, because they're in that weird space. Big mistake. But you know, what else should one be doing? Or should I be thinking about, or even you be thinking about as we, you know, walk this path. To you need, we need to be purposive. We need to be thinking in a very specific way about the engineering of this, and that requires discernment. See, discernment is hard. We think that the world is gonna tell us what we want through these experiences. That doesn't work. It doesn't work that way. You know, my students will say, you know, I thought when I went to college, I would figure out what my passion is, and I got out of college and I still didn't have it. So I went to business school and I thought that I would find it there, and then I went to McKinsey or, you know, I went to, you know, the Boston Consulting Group or Goldman Sachs and I thought I would find it there and I, you know, I'm 31 years old, still look, I'm still waiting for my passion, but we're, we do sort of the same thing too.
I like this thing, and what the next thing that should be will present itself to me, but that's actually not the way it works. We need to be highly purposive about our discernment, and discernment has an, is an ancient tradition. You know, discernment, sunesis in, from the ancient Greeks. Panna for the Buddhists in Pali or Sanskrit, and you know, there's this Ignatian spiritual discernment for Catholics and so every spiritual tradition has discernment and it requires work. You know, when I was thinking about this, when I stepped down as the president of the think tank, I went for a walk. I walked the Camino de Santiago. I walked and walked and walked and asked for help and thought about this and what am I supposed to do next, and I've done it since then too, and I'm gonna do it regularly because I need to this constant process of discernment, which it exposes me to the most boring thing ever, which is the exposure therapy to something that's not exciting, that is actually excruciatingly boring and painful and during which time I can actually contemplate actually what the next thing probably should be, but you, we need to get out of our routine and do the work of this.
What I recommend is that you're 55 years old. Say, what's 60 year old Rich, what's he doing? You know, what does this actually mean? Now what is your, a happy version of you look like? Okay, so here's the exercise. Five years from now, you imagine yourself, you are happy. You know what that means, 'cause you know how that feels, and you've got some of the data on this too, with your enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, et cetera, et cetera.
Now list the five things that are most responsible for you being happy in order. Okay. The podcast is not number one. Your marriage and your relationship with your children and your friendships are probably number one, two, and three, and probably number four is your religious enlightenment, and maybe number five is what you're doing professionally all day long. Maybe, I'm just guessing. Put 'em in order and then ask yourself, what am I managing to? I bet you're managing right now to number five. Switch the order, switch the management imperative, switch the, how you need to more intensively manage one, two, three, and four than number five. My students do this all the time, and part of the reason is because it's easier to manage the things that are are more professional.
It's easier to manage your career than it is to manage your friendships, but you can manage your friendships, and that means starting to do that every single day. Maybe in five years, you'll be doing the podcast. Maybe you won't, but in five years you should have closer friendships, a better marriage, a better concept of your relationship with your children, and a much deeper spiritual walk, and if you do the work right now, then the job will take care of itself and your priorities will be in order. That's super sound advice. I feel like I am doing all of those things on some level, but just to kind of label it in that way and then to inject it with like a higher degree of intentionality and structure, I think. For sure, and we can all do that. I mean, this is the wonderful blessing of having a big prefrontal cortex, is that you don't have to take life as it's given. You can actually be the manager of You, Inc., which is your ultimate enterprise of importance.
And what you kind of didn't say explicitly, but is implicit is when you're in this mode, in this practice, you are making space for the mystery, right? Like there is the, like if you walk this path and you're taking care of these things and you're aligning your actions with your values, you and you're exercising that level of discernment, there is a faith and a trust that like, the next step will be revealed, and that's like, that's an embrace of, you know, the mystical nature of what it means to be, and the beautiful mystical nature of being human. You're willing to walk off that edge. You know, it's one of the, I talk about this, you know, it's for, my little girl, she returned 19 last week.
Is she your youngest? Yeah, and she was 18 a year ago, obviously, and for her 18th birthday, she wanted one thing, one thing, one thing. She wanted to jump out of an airplane with me. She wanted to go skydiving, right. Okay, so, and my wife's like, forget about it, and I have a son, as I mentioned in the Marine Corps.
He's done it a million times, and my older son is like, that's stupid. She said, no, no daddy, I wanna do with you, so we. But how sweet is that? And the awareness like, those calls don't come around all the time.
No, I know. No, no, she's the best. She's the one she truly understands me and she's rock solid, and so we did that and it's not scary. It's just the most unnatural thing ever. I mean, now my heart didn't even elevate, but it was, I was intensely aware of how unnatural it was and this unnatural thing, and it could have been scary for some people find it very frightening, but for whatever reason, it didn't frighten me exactly, and, but the guy's like, jump, and he was telling me to do something that was, that seemed literally impossible, and I did it. This is it. If you're actually doing the work, you're doing the work of having your spiritual and moral and values, your life in order, then it will still feel unnatural to make these jumps, but you can do it.
You can actually, just because all you do is you fall outta the plane. You just literally fall out of the plane. You, and you can do that, and that's an incredible gift to be able to do it, but you can't do that if you don't actually have somebody who's, that you trust and you know, a parachute strapped to you and a guy strapped to you and you can't do all that stuff, and that's what this work really is, is actually making it so that with complete confidence, you can do the least natural thing possible. But there is a level of like self connection, interconnectivity, like a self-awareness and a commitment to that inside work so that you're intuition can be somewhat trustworthy, right? I think for a lot of strivers, that's not really part of their mental, emotional, or spiritual equation.
So there has to be some cultivation to that. So I guess that's, you know, when you talk about, you know, faith or pursuing something transcendent in your life, like that's a big component of whatever that modality is gonna look like. Yeah, no. If you've only developed your exterior self, it's a problem. If you've developed yourself as a full person, a lot of strivers, when you talk to 'em deep down, they think they don't really exist. They think of themselves as a hologram because they've been working on it. They think of themselves as a 2D person on Zoom to themselves. That's the weirdest thing, and in my worst days, it's been like that too. You know, I'm a guy, I'm a guy that I've invented.
I've invented this guy. The avatar. Yeah, I'm an avatar of a real person, and that's what a lot of strivers do, and you have to actually do the work so that you come to life in 3D to yourself. Cool. Super inspiring to talk to you. I'm so glad we were able to do this. It's really nice to meet you. It's nice to meet you in person too. I love all the writing that you're doing. I love the book. It's fantastic.
Thank you. So everybody should pick it up. "Strength to Strength," and come back and talk to me again sometimes. Thank you. Thank you for what you're doing. You're lifting a lot of people up and you're bringing a lot of us together around these values that matter. I appreciate that, man. Cool. Peace. You too. (smooth music).