Speaker 1: Today. It's great to chat with Arthur Brooks on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Arthur is the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice
Speaker 1: of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor
Speaker 1: of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. Before joining
Speaker 1: the Harvard faculty in July of twenty nineteen, he served
Speaker 1: for ten years as president of the Washington, DC based
Speaker 1: American Enterprise Institute AEI, one of the world's leading think tanks.
Speaker 1: Arthur is the best selling author of eleven books on
Speaker 1: topics ranging from economic opportunity to human happiness. His most
Speaker 1: recent bestseller, Love Your Enemies. Love That title, by the way,
Speaker 1: is a guide to building a better country and mending
Speaker 1: personal relationships amidst our culture of political polarization. Arthur, I'm
Speaker 1: so glad to finally chat with you on this podcast.
Speaker 1: Thank you, and congratulations on the phenomenon litle success of
Speaker 1: the psychology podcast. I'm an avid listener. I love it.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's a great podcast, and I'm
Speaker 1: obviously not alone because it's the number one psychology podcast
Speaker 1: in the world. Congratulations on that. Thank you so much, Arthur.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you remember me. You probably you
Speaker 1: probably don't. There are a lot of people in the
Speaker 1: room that day. But when you came to the Positive
Speaker 1: Psychology Center, you gave a talk about three years ago.
Speaker 1: I I was, can I use the word submitten, That
Speaker 1: doesn't doesn't mean that's not quite the right word, but
Speaker 1: not quite not quite where I was. I was. I
Speaker 1: was just so impressed with the way that you're able
Speaker 1: to balance, uh like kind of extreme views and kind
Speaker 1: of have the nuance about it. Thanks. I appreciate that.
Speaker 1: And you know, you're you've been You're a Marty guy,
Speaker 1: I mean Marty Seligman guy, and so you you know
Speaker 1: that's and so, and I've been a big fan of
Speaker 1: Marty's and those of us who are in the kind
Speaker 1: of the Marty cosmos have a lot in common basically
Speaker 1: trying to make people better off, trying to lift people up,
Speaker 1: trying to bring people together, and then the confidence that
Speaker 1: we can actually do so. And that's actually what I
Speaker 1: like so much about your podcast. It's not just the
Speaker 1: g whiz kind of deal. It's in every episode you
Speaker 1: have the science, you have the application to your life,
Speaker 1: and you have the exhortation to share the wisdom with others,
Speaker 1: and you know that's actually the formula for getting happier. Understand,
Speaker 1: apply and share, and you do it every day. It's great.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. Thank you. That means a lot.
Speaker 1: I love your podcast too. Hey. I thought i'd start
Speaker 1: off with a quote from Jonah Goldberg, who was describing
Speaker 1: you your character structure, and since this is the Psychology podcast,
Speaker 1: I thought this would be an appropriate place to start.
Speaker 1: Jonah Goldberg described you as quote, a strange creature by
Speaker 1: Washington standards. Heck, a strange creature by bipedal standards. A
Speaker 1: former French horn player who decided to be an egghead
Speaker 1: late in life. He's a unique mix of Catholic piety,
Speaker 1: data obsession, sertorial connoisseurism, physical fitness, old soul, wisdom, and
Speaker 1: basic decency. Now, I was wondering, how do you feel
Speaker 1: about this description of yourself. Jonah's a good writer. That
Speaker 1: for the listeners who don't know Joanna Goldberg, he's a
Speaker 1: you know, longtime essayist from the National Review and you know,
Speaker 1: general public intellectual around town. Also, when he wrote that,
Speaker 1: he was my employee at the American Enterprise Institute. So
Speaker 1: we can if anything is nice about it, we can't
Speaker 1: take it seriously. There's some truth there, though, there's like
Speaker 1: a grain. They're great, he's he's fantastic, and he's also
Speaker 1: a really acute sort of you knows a he's a
Speaker 1: good commentator, and he's got a great eye. And so
Speaker 1: this idea of you know, these salient characteristics of my
Speaker 1: personality are all knit in, knit together into this one
Speaker 1: portrait of weirdness. I kind of like it. I like it. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I want to play one thing there, hornplayer. Now you're
Speaker 1: you're you are, like legit a musician, right, that's a
Speaker 1: part of it. Yeah, no, that was that was my
Speaker 1: goal in life. So starting when I was nine years old,
Speaker 1: I had literally one goal in life, which was to
Speaker 1: be the world's greatest French horn player. You know, it
Speaker 1: isn't America great? You know? Yeah, you say, I want
Speaker 1: to be the world's greatest French horn player, and it's
Speaker 1: actually not an impossible dream. So I did nothing but
Speaker 1: nothing but that, I mean, I basically slacked off in school,
Speaker 1: did nothing but play in every ensemble, every competition. I
Speaker 1: started with the best horn players I could possibly find.
Speaker 1: My sort of lower middle class family made huge sacrifices
Speaker 1: so that I could do that, and when I was
Speaker 1: I went to college reluctantly when I was eighteen and
Speaker 1: promptly dropped all my required courses and was invited to
Speaker 1: earn my success outside the college, and so I went
Speaker 1: pro when I was nineteen. I spent my entire twenties
Speaker 1: playing chamber of music and symphony orchestras, winding up for
Speaker 1: a long time in the Barcelona Symphony in Spain. And
Speaker 1: then only in my late twenties did I start doing
Speaker 1: my college education, and I graduated from college a month
Speaker 1: before my thirtieth birthday, left the music business at thirty
Speaker 1: one to start my PhD. And tell me, We'll tell
Speaker 1: me about your PhD topic and what department was it in.
Speaker 1: It was actually at the Rand Graduate School, which is
Speaker 1: part of the Rand Corporation of famous old think tank
Speaker 1: in Santa Monica, as a matter of fact, right, and
Speaker 1: I went there. Part of it was because I was
Speaker 1: at the time older than most PhD students that I
Speaker 1: wanted to, you know, maintain the conceit that I was
Speaker 1: working as opposed to just studying. And so at thirty one,
Speaker 1: thirty two years old, thirty three, I was doing work
Speaker 1: on public policy analysis, which is when I ultimately got
Speaker 1: my PhD in with my fields and applied microeconomics and
Speaker 1: mathematical modeling, and I was doing theater level combat analysis
Speaker 1: for the Air Force Operations Military operations research. Sorry, what levels?
Speaker 1: What level? Military? Well? I was doing theater level commed
Speaker 1: What does that mean? What does that mean? I just
Speaker 1: got too wonky by accident. What that means is I
Speaker 1: was doing large scale military simulations of different theaters of war.
Speaker 1: I see, that's so weird, that's so cool. That's that's
Speaker 1: that's that's the terminology for that. Yeah. Yeah, I just
Speaker 1: learned something new. I love that. I love that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was doing aircraft survivability using a pretty sophisticated early
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence modeling a lot, you know, a bunch of
Speaker 1: mainframes all kind of linked together for large We were running,
Speaker 1: you know, two hundred and fifty thousand lined four tran models,
Speaker 1: et cetera, just to simulate war situations that had never
Speaker 1: actually been fought, and using pretty sophisticated math to do it.
Speaker 1: And that was a really big departure for me, obviously
Speaker 1: from playing the French Horn. But it was part of
Speaker 1: the cognitive development. You know, the great thing those who
Speaker 1: are listening to us. The great thing about doing a
Speaker 1: PhD in any topic is because you get somewhere between
Speaker 1: four and six years of an apprenticeship in hard thinking,
Speaker 1: and you know, there's this whole literature, the literature on
Speaker 1: the ten thousand hours, et cetera, et cetera. But one
Speaker 1: of the things that's actually true, I don't believe that
Speaker 1: we should specialize too much. I believe we should be
Speaker 1: able to do lots of things in life. But I
Speaker 1: do believe you have to do something get a lot
Speaker 1: of reps to get good at it, and that also
Speaker 1: includes thinking. Most people don't actually have time to think.
Speaker 1: They actually don't think very much. They kind of do do, go, go,
Speaker 1: go all day. And when you do a PhD, and
Speaker 1: you know everything from literary criticism to military operations research
Speaker 1: or whatever you're studying, you're going to have years to
Speaker 1: just smash your brain against the wall over and over
Speaker 1: and over again. And the most important intellectual thing that
Speaker 1: ever happened to me was having all those years to
Speaker 1: learn how to think and learn how to learn. I'm
Speaker 1: just a much linear thinker than I was when I
Speaker 1: was in the music business, and I'm persuaded I could
Speaker 1: have a PhD in almost any topic, and it would
Speaker 1: have largely given me the same benefit because of the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and well one a lot of journalists say they feel
Speaker 1: like they get a lot of mini PhDs, you know,
Speaker 1: doing the work that they do. There's no such thing
Speaker 1: as a problem because you basically, small periods of time,
Speaker 1: don't you know, they're isolated, don't add up to one
Speaker 1: long period of time. It's the same thing that people
Speaker 1: who are meditators understand that. You know, I've been somebody
Speaker 1: who's been deeply involved in contemplative practices for you know,
Speaker 1: most of my adult life. And one of the things
Speaker 1: every day, for example, every day, for you know, twenty
Speaker 1: five or thirty minutes at the end the day of
Speaker 1: my wife we pray and meditate together. And it's nothing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's super important for my equilibrium and for my
Speaker 1: relationships and everything else. But it's nothing compared to the
Speaker 1: large scale, long term of multi day silent retreats. And
Speaker 1: it's because the twenty five minutes doesn't scale when you
Speaker 1: sum it. You actually have to you have to sit
Speaker 1: in silent meditation, you have to be quiet for day
Speaker 1: after day after day, and if you want to think
Speaker 1: a lot. You know, thinking in many PhDs is not
Speaker 1: the same thing as working for several years. That's like
Speaker 1: a multi year cognitive retreat. I mean, do you are
Speaker 1: you concerned about the cynicism towards experts that I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm you know that that seems to be really accelerating
Speaker 1: to extend to which you know, people think they have
Speaker 1: they have the truth and that if someone comes in
Speaker 1: and maybe who did a whole PhD in the topic,
Speaker 1: I feel like people are not just even not taking
Speaker 1: those individuals seriously as much as they used to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well my view is that they actually never took them seriously.
Speaker 1: Good I think at this a lot of I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot and for two reasons. One is that
Speaker 1: one of the great charms of the United States is
Speaker 1: that we don't trust experts. We don't trust elites, we
Speaker 1: don't trust them. And the reason is because you know,
Speaker 1: when the Kaufmans came to the United States, they were
Speaker 1: not landed gentry. You know, we're probably running from some
Speaker 1: godforsaken schettle in you know, Eastern Europe or something. Right. Actually,
Speaker 1: my grandmam escaped the Pagrams in Russia, so there you go,
Speaker 1: you know, and she was, you know, basically everybody listening
Speaker 1: to us, almost everybody listening to us, I'm going to
Speaker 1: assume descends from ambitious riff raff, you know, where they
Speaker 1: were running away from people who had all the power,
Speaker 1: from the experts, from the elites, from the people who
Speaker 1: had the goods, coming to the United States where they
Speaker 1: could build it themselves, notwithstanding the fact that they were nobodies. Well,
Speaker 1: when we're a country of nobody's and the descendants of nobody's,
Speaker 1: we have a kind of a healthy suspicion of the
Speaker 1: people of the bodies. And so, you know, you and
Speaker 1: I have been really, really fortunate, and we've had a
Speaker 1: lot of privilege to be able to develop our intellect
Speaker 1: and to get some expertise, you know, the guys with
Speaker 1: the PhDs, which I just rhapsodized about the PhD. But
Speaker 1: I understand that that you can get a lot of
Speaker 1: conceit with that as well. And so I'm I'm kind
Speaker 1: of I'm not a populist, but I sort of admire
Speaker 1: the healthy, the healthy suspicion of skepticism that people have
Speaker 1: of of people. Q and me too. I love the
Speaker 1: skepticism until it's directed at me and then I don't
Speaker 1: want I don't love it. It's funny. I want people
Speaker 1: to respect me. It's it's it's yeah, yeah, it's funny
Speaker 1: because you know, one side of my family, you know,
Speaker 1: practically nobody went to college. And on on the other side,
Speaker 1: and I'm a third generation at college professor. Yeah, everybody, Harvard, Harvard,
Speaker 1: no less, come on, come on, Harvard. I know it's
Speaker 1: actually pretty interesting Scott, because I remember, you know, I
Speaker 1: teach happiness at the Harvard Business School. Yes, And the
Speaker 1: first thing that I tell them when I get in
Speaker 1: there is that the paradox of the Harvard Business School
Speaker 1: is that if you don't get in, you're not happy,
Speaker 1: and if you do get in, you're not happy. So
Speaker 1: and I know that because I didn't get in when
Speaker 1: I was actually trying to get into graduate school. I
Speaker 1: got my bachelor's degree by correspondence because I was on
Speaker 1: the road as a musician. And it turns out that
Speaker 1: Harvard is not looking for graduate students who are thirty
Speaker 1: year old French horn playing dropouts with correspondence degrees. Weird, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it turns out that's not their chordimographic. So
Speaker 1: I got rejected in like two weeks, and I remember
Speaker 1: feeling just crushed, like I have no future, It's not
Speaker 1: going to be any good. And then I get to
Speaker 1: the weird things. You know, that life. You never know
Speaker 1: what's going to have in store for you. I wind
Speaker 1: up as a professor at Harvard and I'm looking at
Speaker 1: the data on people who graduated with their MBAs ten
Speaker 1: years ago, and they're really just said a lot of them,
Speaker 1: not all of them. Many of them are very happy,
Speaker 1: but many of them are dissatisfied with the worldly rewards
Speaker 1: that they were promised and in their lives. And it
Speaker 1: basically shows that getting in or not getting into Harvard
Speaker 1: is not the secret the happiness unhappiness. It lies within
Speaker 1: each of us. Hence the importance of the psychology podcast.
Speaker 1: Well thank you ed Well in yours podcast, if I
Speaker 1: dare say on happiness, I would like to ask you
Speaker 1: how your approach to the quote science happiness is different
Speaker 1: from others who are studying happiness, because I feel like
Speaker 1: you have some unique spins on this topic. There are
Speaker 1: a couple of ways that that that my approach differs
Speaker 1: from from many others. And one of the great things
Speaker 1: about the science of happiness and all the many experts
Speaker 1: that are out there, is that there's a multiplicity of approaches,
Speaker 1: all of which all the good ones of which actually
Speaker 1: rely on empirical social sciences. In other words, we're looking
Speaker 1: for data that are collected appropriately, and we're looking at
Speaker 1: statistical methods and experimental approaches that are good, and we're
Speaker 1: actually trying to get as close as we can to
Speaker 1: the truth as far as we so everybody believes in that,
Speaker 1: but they're one of the biggest differences that in the
Speaker 1: schools that are that are forming is that there's the
Speaker 1: school that basically has as its as its root the
Speaker 1: world of psychotherapy, the psychoanalysis actually and those that actually
Speaker 1: think of happiness as coming out of the psychoanalytic approach
Speaker 1: of Freud and Jung and the different v Andese schools,
Speaker 1: their basic raison deetra, their basic objective is to make
Speaker 1: pain go away, is to make suffering go away, to
Speaker 1: make unhappiness go away. And so why would you study
Speaker 1: happiness Because you because life is hard and because people
Speaker 1: are suffering, and happiness means means crowding out the unhappiness
Speaker 1: that people feel. That's one approach. Another approach is not
Speaker 1: actually starting from the rationalist or humanist psychoanalysis world. It
Speaker 1: actually starts from the world of philosophy, of theology of spirituality,
Speaker 1: and that's an approach that basically says, guess what unhappiness
Speaker 1: is part of happiness because the macronutrients of the subjective
Speaker 1: well being meal kind of like protein, fat, and carbohydrates
Speaker 1: are actually enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Those are the three
Speaker 1: macro nutrients of happiness. And guess what purpose? Meaning in
Speaker 1: life requires pain, it requires suffering, it requires challenges, it
Speaker 1: requires unhappiness. One of my purpose in life is to chocolate.
Speaker 1: That can't be your purpose in life. That's enjoyment, different
Speaker 1: metro nutrients. You were thinking your carbohydrates were actually proteins,
Speaker 1: and that's the problem. Who were you to tell me
Speaker 1: what my purpose in life is? And so so that's
Speaker 1: those are I would say that those are really the
Speaker 1: two big schools. And then and then the psychoanalytic approach.
Speaker 1: It basically says that they are all different ways that
Speaker 1: people can you find the source of suffering and try
Speaker 1: to eliminate it. The the let's let's find out the
Speaker 1: nature of what it means to be alive approach, which
Speaker 1: is that second approach which the nature of human life,
Speaker 1: the experience of human life. That basically comes down to
Speaker 1: what you might think of as as you know, the
Speaker 1: pillars of happiness, which are experiential pillars of happiness, and
Speaker 1: they're really only four according to literature, faith, family, friendship,
Speaker 1: and work that has meaning this generative, which is to say,
Speaker 1: where you earn your success and where you serve other people.
Speaker 1: And you know, so I'm really subscribe to a second school,
Speaker 1: the school of the nature of human life. I don't
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't want to suffer needlessly, but I
Speaker 1: have to suffer. And every single one of us has
Speaker 1: to understand that you're suffering is really a sacred thing.
Speaker 1: It makes you who you are, It makes you fully alive. Now,
Speaker 1: it can be too much, you know, it can be
Speaker 1: too much, It can be overwhelming, it can be post
Speaker 1: traumatic stress, can overtake post traumatic growth. There's all kinds
Speaker 1: of cases. And that's the case. But if we actually
Speaker 1: want to anesthetize ourselves from suffering per se, we're going
Speaker 1: to have big problems in the business of being fully alive.
Speaker 1: And you know that's the adventure is really where it
Speaker 1: comes from. So and it comes down to that approach.
Speaker 1: The school that I subscribe to is you know, it's
Speaker 1: kind of summed up George Valiant, Yeah, famous psychiatrist here
Speaker 1: at Harvard who wrote the Or, who wrote many best
Speaker 1: selling books, but also he ran the Harvard Study of
Speaker 1: Adult Development, an eighty year longitudinal study of people's lives,
Speaker 1: and he said, basically, the whole study can be boiled
Speaker 1: down to five words. Happiness is love, full stop. And
Speaker 1: so that's it. There's one is Freud and the other
Speaker 1: is you know love. Well that we're done today. Nice
Speaker 1: to have you on the Psychology podcast. Now it's done, No,
Speaker 1: you know, I I just adored your conversation with your
Speaker 1: most recent conversation with the dialama. I know you've had
Speaker 1: multiple conversations, but I love how you talk about how happiness,
Speaker 1: connection and the fear of being unneeded lies. So the
Speaker 1: fear of being unneeded lies behind much of our feelings
Speaker 1: of anxiety and existential loneliness, right, I don't. It's an
Speaker 1: interesting kind of inversion, you know, it's the opposite end
Speaker 1: of what we often about the need to matter. You know,
Speaker 1: people really want to feel like they matter. But I
Speaker 1: think it's an interesting spin on it where you talk
Speaker 1: about kind of the fear of being unneeded, kind of
Speaker 1: like it's kind of it's kind of like it's opposite poll. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: and there's actually a couple of different things nested in
Speaker 1: that that you begin with. So we think about what
Speaker 1: is what is dignity? And you know, almost everybody in
Speaker 1: the West would agree with the following statement. And there's
Speaker 1: a reason it's in the West. I'll say in a second,
Speaker 1: I'm not being xenophobic here, that they that that people
Speaker 1: there's a radical equality of human dignity. People are radically equal.
Speaker 1: It's just as human beings on walking on the planet.
Speaker 1: Most everybody listening to us, especially from the West, would
Speaker 1: agree with that. But it's actually really important because that
Speaker 1: actually comes from from an ancient concept, a Judaeo Christian concept,
Speaker 1: but from you know, the Jewish notion that that people
Speaker 1: are descended in the likeness of God, and that God
Speaker 1: is worthy of respect, and so therefore people are inherently
Speaker 1: worthy of respect. Dignity is to be worthy of respect.
Speaker 1: Now that's not true in every culture, in every tradition.
Speaker 1: That is certainly not true in the in the cultures
Speaker 1: that say that that that people are not made in
Speaker 1: God's image, that doesn't It doesn't necessarily descend. It's not
Speaker 1: sort of an opinion on the genome necessarily. You know,
Speaker 1: different people disagree with that, and you find different people
Speaker 1: around the world. It's like, no, people don't have inherent
Speaker 1: human dignity. You got to earn it. And I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: you don't have to earn it. The problem is depending
Speaker 1: on no matter which school you're from, East or West,
Speaker 1: we can all agree that not everybody has an equal
Speaker 1: sense of their dignity. To not sense your dignity is
Speaker 1: the essence of despair, and despair comes our dignity is
Speaker 1: absent when you are a liability, when you're not, when
Speaker 1: you're when you're not. An asset. To be needed is
Speaker 1: to be an asset to develop, to be unneeded, to
Speaker 1: be unnecessary, to be expendable is to be is to
Speaker 1: be a liar ability to manage. Think about it within
Speaker 1: the case of our own children. You know, I got
Speaker 1: three kids. I thought three adult kids, and I would
Speaker 1: never have brought up my kids dealing like they're to
Speaker 1: feel like their liabilities that I'm managing. You know, you
Speaker 1: get liabilities off the bottom line of your balance sheet
Speaker 1: as a company. You manage them away as soon as
Speaker 1: you can. Assets can be tremendously expensive, but you develop
Speaker 1: them even if you're losing money on them. And that's
Speaker 1: how my kids are assets. I mean, they were like
Speaker 1: they were resource eaters, man. I mean, you should have
Speaker 1: seen what college bills looked like. It was insanity. But
Speaker 1: that's because they were huge. They were moral, they were psychological,
Speaker 1: they were emotional assets. They were assets to the world
Speaker 1: and assets to my family, and they knew it. And
Speaker 1: that was the empowerment, that was the dignity that actually came.
Speaker 1: That's super important for everybody. And one of the big
Speaker 1: things that we get wrong in our society today, I believe,
Speaker 1: is that we treat some people like assets to develop
Speaker 1: and certain people like liabilities to manage. We treat poor
Speaker 1: people in this country like liabilities to manage the way
Speaker 1: that we run our welfare system, the way that we
Speaker 1: many times that we run our schools, and you know,
Speaker 1: that's discrimination against poor people, and I think it's really
Speaker 1: morally impermissible. Well, I agree. I'm trying to think of
Speaker 1: it within the framework of some personality research I've done,
Speaker 1: because people differ in their need to matter, and I've
Speaker 1: studied the concept pathological altruism where people have an extreme
Speaker 1: need to matter, and I'm wondering to what extent should
Speaker 1: we There's two sides of this coin. So there's absolutely
Speaker 1: I agree with you that we should be treating people
Speaker 1: as assets, betraying each individual dignity. That's part of my
Speaker 1: light triad concept. But from within, it seems the most
Speaker 1: psychologically healthy thing is not to require your self esteem
Speaker 1: to be dependent on the extent to which you perceive
Speaker 1: that you matter in the world. There should be some
Speaker 1: sort of internal stable acceptance of well, I have dignity
Speaker 1: just by my you know, being a human. You know.
Speaker 1: So how do you sort of do you see what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Like, how do you kind of manage that? Yeah? Totally,
Speaker 1: And so I think that that actually gets into a
Speaker 1: slightly different dimension. One thing is to be needed by
Speaker 1: other people. The other thing is to objectify yourself such
Speaker 1: that you're unreplaceable. You know, this is really different, right,
Speaker 1: I mean you can have you can imagine that you're
Speaker 1: running a company, or the CEO of a company, because
Speaker 1: each one is the CEO of our lives, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: each one of us is looking to startup li and Okay,
Speaker 1: so and then you have an employee in your company,
Speaker 1: you have somebody who's really going to help you. That
Speaker 1: person can be organically really really really needed, right, and
Speaker 1: so you want to develop that person because they're so
Speaker 1: necessary or that person can be so kind of devious
Speaker 1: in mouth desent that they can make themselves unreplaceable to you.
Speaker 1: And we see this in companies all the time, the
Speaker 1: sort of sycophants and yes men that are following the
Speaker 1: CEO around, creating problems and then being mysteriously the only
Speaker 1: person who can clean them up. That's a very different
Speaker 1: kind of phenomenon. Now, So the balance that's actually really important,
Speaker 1: I think for achieving dignity and interurn happiness is to
Speaker 1: be at once necessary needed, therefore an asset in other
Speaker 1: people's lives, but at the same time profoundly useless. And
Speaker 1: this is a different and competing concept that actually comes
Speaker 1: from Aristotle's notion of complete and incomplete activities or telic
Speaker 1: and atellic activities and experiences. So he talks an awful
Speaker 1: lot about you know, what it means to be a
Speaker 1: true or a perfect friend. That's not somebody that you're
Speaker 1: going to objectify. You don't have a friendship with them
Speaker 1: because you want to buy something or sell something to them.
Speaker 1: And it's not just because you admire the person. It's
Speaker 1: because you have a shared love, you have a shared
Speaker 1: set of values, and it's inherently and it's a completely
Speaker 1: satisfying experience just to hang out with somebody. It's useless,
Speaker 1: and so that's really really important. One of the things
Speaker 1: that I often write about is the is the importance
Speaker 1: of having useless friends and having people who consider you
Speaker 1: to be useless in this profound way. Sound's terrible, right, No, no,
Speaker 1: it sounds one. I actually because I know exactly what
Speaker 1: you're what you mean by that? Can I glink it
Speaker 1: to my favorite psychologist, Abraham Maslow's notion of be love,
Speaker 1: b dash love, love for the being of others. I'm
Speaker 1: a huge, huge promoter of this, you know, and be love.
Speaker 1: You're exactly right. Maslow has exactly this perfect balance between
Speaker 1: at once being needed and being useless. He can yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he calls it unneeding love, and he distinguished that from
Speaker 1: needing love. Yeah you no, no, exactly right. So so
Speaker 1: you know this is it takes a whole a lot
Speaker 1: of sort of thought and contemplation to net this out
Speaker 1: to say, at once, I need to be needed and
Speaker 1: at the same time I need to be useless. Because
Speaker 1: those two ideas are actually profoundly compatible with each other.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and so so easy to misunderstand. It's so
Speaker 1: easy to misuse, it's so easy to become neurotic about it,
Speaker 1: such that we become unreplaceable, such that we become artificially useful,
Speaker 1: and in that way, we can't experience the love that
Speaker 1: comes from complete friendships. And at the same time, we
Speaker 1: don't get the dignity a feeling like like we're needed
Speaker 1: cosmically in in you know, in some really important way,
Speaker 1: we need useless things. I couldn't agree more. I want
Speaker 1: more useless friends. Will you be my useless friend, Arthur?
Speaker 1: I would be delighted to be used, because I'd be
Speaker 1: useful to you right now on your podcast. But you're yes,
Speaker 1: But we share values and that's actually the baseless of
Speaker 1: useless friendship. Exactly, but exactly, like a useless friend of
Speaker 1: me conjures up a friend that we can just like
Speaker 1: watch a sunset together, like you know, like you know,
Speaker 1: do some edibles like chill on the beach, like you know,
Speaker 1: like discuss philosophy, discuss free will, and and there's no
Speaker 1: it's just it's just there's nothing we're trying to get
Speaker 1: out of each other, you know. Yeah, no, that's right.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the reasons. It's actually pretty interesting
Speaker 1: you know this literature better than I do, but about
Speaker 1: about mature friendships. So people in their fifties and sixties
Speaker 1: and seventies that that men tend to have useless friends
Speaker 1: on the basis of a shared useless activity. So it's like,
Speaker 1: we're super into baseball. Baseball the most useless thing ever.
Speaker 1: And that's the reason it creates so much joy in
Speaker 1: people's lives because it's a complete activity, and incomplete activity
Speaker 1: is one that's instrumental to some greater end. And a
Speaker 1: complete activity is basically you consume it, and that it
Speaker 1: is the meal and the nutrition in itself that's useless,
Speaker 1: and it's really profound and wonderful way. And so men
Speaker 1: tend to consume useless things together as the basis of
Speaker 1: their useless friendship, whereas women, especially in their fifties and sixties,
Speaker 1: they tend to have relationships that are useless but based
Speaker 1: on a common understanding of feelings. They discuss intimate things.
Speaker 1: Now this is important. It's an important distinction because the
Speaker 1: friendship between women under the circumstances tend to be more enduring,
Speaker 1: and it tends to be stronger than it is. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like if all Off, all Scott and I have
Speaker 1: in common is like love for the red Sox, you
Speaker 1: know it might endure. On the other hand, you know,
Speaker 1: it might only endure as long as the socks have
Speaker 1: a good season, which you never know. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: good point. It's it's a good point. Well, So with
Speaker 1: keeping on the notion of love, I'm really curious why
Speaker 1: you precisely define fear as the opposite of love. So
Speaker 1: fear is and you know, I say this appropriate humility
Speaker 1: with a guy with a you know, a union card
Speaker 1: and in you know, social psychology and emotion specially please
Speaker 1: don't be insecurity. Yeah, it's you know, I'm an economist,
Speaker 1: so we're the most imperialist of all the social scientists.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean we know the most. And and fear
Speaker 1: as a philosophical matter, and if you go back to
Speaker 1: Laosu or you know, the Apostle John, or you know
Speaker 1: any of the Aristotle for that matter, fear is the
Speaker 1: ultimate negative emotion and that's actually a physiological truth as well.
Speaker 1: So the amygdala, which governs fear, makes us, gives us
Speaker 1: the responses to fight for lighter freeze, is more potent
Speaker 1: than any other part of the Olympics system. It will
Speaker 1: crowd Fear will crowd out all emotions, positive or negative.
Speaker 1: So the negative emotions are generally classified as sadness, fear, anger,
Speaker 1: or disgust, and the positive emotions joy, love, and some
Speaker 1: people put an interest, which I think is great because
Speaker 1: you know, being interested is so intensely satisfying. But of
Speaker 1: those seven emotions, the most powerful is fear because as
Speaker 1: an evolutionary matter, fear will has to be able to
Speaker 1: crowd it everything. You've got to clear the debts with
Speaker 1: fear because there's a saber tooth tiger around. You need
Speaker 1: to not be enjoying the smell of those beautiful flowers
Speaker 1: or those tasty berries or anything else. And so the
Speaker 1: amigdal will say ding ding ding ding ding is like
Speaker 1: a fire alarm. It will send off a signal through
Speaker 1: your hypothalamus to signal to your pituitary gland, thus to
Speaker 1: your adrenal glands to send out adrenaline and cortisol and
Speaker 1: put your pull system on high alert. Now that's an
Speaker 1: important thing because what that means is that it's the
Speaker 1: predominant emotion and it's and you can easily see why
Speaker 1: philosophers and later psychologists would say it's the ultimate negative emotion.
Speaker 1: It's good for you, but it's a negative emotion, not nonetheless,
Speaker 1: and so therefore it's opposite has to be the ultimate
Speaker 1: positive emotion, which is love. Now that's actually coherent philosophically
Speaker 1: because you find that what people typically will say, which
Speaker 1: is hate, is the opposite of love. Hate is downstream
Speaker 1: from fear, and almost every case, pride is downstream from fear.
Speaker 1: Envy is downstream from fear. All of these things are
Speaker 1: fundamentally fear based emotions. You know, you don't hate something,
Speaker 1: really really hate something that's not a threat. You know,
Speaker 1: if it's not a threat to hear, it's actually not
Speaker 1: worth hating. And a threat is stimulating the amigdala, it's
Speaker 1: stimulating the fear response, it's you're getting the stress hormones.
Speaker 1: So both physiologically and psychologically and philosophically, we find that
Speaker 1: the ultimate negative emotion is fear, and that puts it
Speaker 1: one hundred and eighty away from love. Yeah, I'm continually
Speaker 1: amazed how so many things, so many phenomena can can
Speaker 1: be reduced to the avoidance approach distinction in psychology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, oh yeah, no, it's amazing. It's actually one
Speaker 1: of those one of those fundamental ideas that winds up
Speaker 1: organizing most of the rest. I mean, yeah, like everything
Speaker 1: like ultimately reduced to like are you avoiding it or
Speaker 1: are you go? Are you engaging in it? You know?
Speaker 1: And that's right. Love is an engaging emotion. Here is
Speaker 1: an avoidant emotion. So that's another way of organizing this
Speaker 1: whole set of ideas. But you know, and then there
Speaker 1: are actually are implications of this for all of our lives,
Speaker 1: you know. And again because the psychology podcast, which is
Speaker 1: understand the science, then work on the applications, and so
Speaker 1: the application of this is, you know, when you're suffering
Speaker 1: from something negative, one of the best ways to deal
Speaker 1: with it is not taking it on on its face,
Speaker 1: but looking for its opposite and cultivating that right. And
Speaker 1: so basically, if you're engaging in all kinds of avoidant behavior,
Speaker 1: one of the best ways of coping with this and
Speaker 1: therapy is to actually find something in which you can
Speaker 1: engage because that induces this cognitive dissonance that you don't
Speaker 1: avoid everything, and then you you know, it changes your
Speaker 1: approach to life. Is behavioral matter? Well, the same thing
Speaker 1: is true with fear. When people come to me my students,
Speaker 1: for example, they'll say they're really afraid of something, and
Speaker 1: what I'll look for is ways that they can love more,
Speaker 1: that they can surround their lives more in love, which
Speaker 1: thus neutralizes fear. Perfect love drives out fear. According to
Speaker 1: the apostle John that and you know, philosophers have said
Speaker 1: this in non religious context forever and at the same time,
Speaker 1: but people will say to me, I don't have enough
Speaker 1: love in my life. I'll say, let's examine your fear,
Speaker 1: because you know, the fact that they have a lack
Speaker 1: of love probably means they have an excess of fear.
Speaker 1: So let's not look at the love directly. Let's look
Speaker 1: at the fear and find out if there's something that
Speaker 1: we can do to treat the level of fear in
Speaker 1: their lives, and so doing they can create more space
Speaker 1: for love. I love that. But can I ask you
Speaker 1: a cheeky follow up question, Yeah, yeah, that's my favorite kind.
Speaker 1: Can't you have too much love, which is really fear.
Speaker 1: Tell me give me an example. You know, do you
Speaker 1: know how there are people that like that's all they
Speaker 1: ever every third world is like we need love, We
Speaker 1: you need love, we love blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: And they won't shut up about loving and they're obsessed
Speaker 1: with it. They're obsessed with the word love like it's
Speaker 1: like the only thing they ever think or talk about,
Speaker 1: and it's like that's the only thing we ever should
Speaker 1: have in the world. And at the slightest sense that
Speaker 1: like something like a conversation makes someone feel uncomfortable, they're like,
Speaker 1: we just need more love. Stop the conversation. We need love.
Speaker 1: I mean, isn't there a point at which that's actually
Speaker 1: because the person has fear? Like they they they're they're
Speaker 1: using love as a way to like cover up. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: fear for sure. It's nice. Actually not love too. I mean,
Speaker 1: Paul Blue right, fair Enoughal he has this great book
Speaker 1: called against Him. Oh yeah, it's fantastic. He's my homeboy, Paul,
Speaker 1: my homeboy. He's great. Yeah, he's I mean, he's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a fabulous book because you know, it's
Speaker 1: got to it's on the cover. Is a great coverer too.
Speaker 1: It's a picture of a heart frozen inside an ice cube,
Speaker 1: you know, and against empathy. But it's actually the wrong
Speaker 1: image because what he argues for is compassion and rational distinction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he makes the distinction between compassion and empathy. And what
Speaker 1: you find is the people who are excessively empathetic, they
Speaker 1: tend to be insufficiently compassionate. Why because empathy is easy
Speaker 1: anytime there's any conflict. If you say you need more love,
Speaker 1: you're twisting the concept of love away from doing hard things.
Speaker 1: What is love? Corny? To Saint Thomas Aquinas, the love
Speaker 1: is to wiel the good of the other. You know,
Speaker 1: there's nothing about about about feelings and love. Love is
Speaker 1: a commitment. Love isn't is a commitment to act in
Speaker 1: a particular way, notwithstanding your feelings. If you truly love
Speaker 1: somebody and you know, this is the secret to a
Speaker 1: happy Marrior. I've been married for thirty years. Wow, the
Speaker 1: secret of a happy marriage is not feelings. It's not feelings.
Speaker 1: It's commitment, it's action. It's work. Love is work. Love
Speaker 1: is the greatest work, is the most satisfying work. But
Speaker 1: the problem that we have in our in our mondern society,
Speaker 1: among others, is that we've reduced love to a feeling.
Speaker 1: And that's the reason that marriages don't last, because we
Speaker 1: have unrealistic expectations. It's the reason that we have a
Speaker 1: public policy system that's excessively empathetic and insufficiently compassionate with people,
Speaker 1: that treats adults like children. That reduces them to liabilities
Speaker 1: in our society because empathy is easy, and anytime there's
Speaker 1: any conflict, you say, well, we just need more love.
Speaker 1: That's exactly the problem that we're talking about. That is
Speaker 1: anybody who says that has reduced love to a feeling
Speaker 1: thus devalued it by understanding it incorrectly. Cool. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for getting my question. Like, I feel like
Speaker 1: you immediately got what I was what I was getting at,
Speaker 1: and yeah, yeah, yeah, you totally. It's a great question.
Speaker 1: It's an important question. It is something we all need
Speaker 1: to grapple with because we all have a tendency to
Speaker 1: do just that. Yeah. When when we fail in fear,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, sometimes we won't even speak our mind because
Speaker 1: we're so afraid of not being loved by the other person,
Speaker 1: you know. Oh yeah, everybody does that, and it's particularly
Speaker 1: easy to do given the current cultural currents that we
Speaker 1: see in society today, where people wheeld power by willfully
Speaker 1: misinterpreting or taking the worst possible spin on you know,
Speaker 1: it's the bullying tactics of the current moment of extremism
Speaker 1: are such that everybody right and left is trying to
Speaker 1: cancel everybody else, and so everybody's walking on eggshells all
Speaker 1: the time. You can't say what you think because people
Speaker 1: who bear you ill will are looking for an opportunity
Speaker 1: to not give you the benefit of the doubt. Now,
Speaker 1: everybody who's listening to this is thinking about either one
Speaker 1: side or the other. The way to combat that is
Speaker 1: to look on your own side. So if you're a conservative,
Speaker 1: don't talk, don't don't don't only be worried about cancel
Speaker 1: culture on campuses, be worried about the extent to which
Speaker 1: you actually get no quarter. You give no quarter on
Speaker 1: your own political side when somebody doesn't toe the line. Well, well,
Speaker 1: let's talk about conservatives. Can we talk about conservatives? We can?
Speaker 1: We can because you we have a very interesting take,
Speaker 1: because some people will you know, you have like was
Speaker 1: it bleeding heart? Liberals. Is that can't you have bleeding
Speaker 1: heart conservatives? Yeah, I guess I am one. I suppose
Speaker 1: you are fair to say it's I mean, if I
Speaker 1: believe that happiness is love, full stop. And furthermore, the
Speaker 1: public policy issue literally that I care about the most
Speaker 1: is poverty. But I actually take what are traditionally thought
Speaker 1: of as conservative approaches. It doesn't really matter if they are.
Speaker 1: I mean, I believe that the enterprise system is the
Speaker 1: greatest system in the history of humanity for pulling people
Speaker 1: out of poverty. I don't believe that because I want
Speaker 1: it to be true. I believe that because I've been
Speaker 1: looking at the data, and we have pulled two billion
Speaker 1: people out of poverty through largely through globalization and free trade,
Speaker 1: property rights, the rule of law, and the culture of
Speaker 1: entrepreneurship since nineteen seventy. You know, that has changed the
Speaker 1: world to changed my life. Actually, that basic truth, and
Speaker 1: you know these are my sisters and brothers, and I
Speaker 1: want the next two billion to be pulled out of poverty.
Speaker 1: So that kind of defines the contours traditionally what you
Speaker 1: be thought of as politically. You know, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's a conservative guy. But now the reason I think
Speaker 1: those things is not because they care about capitalism. Actually
Speaker 1: they care about money. It's because I believe that people
Speaker 1: should be able to build their lives like I've been
Speaker 1: able to build my life because I'm a I want
Speaker 1: to be a warrior for human dignity. So it's complicated, right,
Speaker 1: it's complicated. But I but you're adding that level of
Speaker 1: nuance that that I don't see that prevalent in these
Speaker 1: kinds of discussions. Yeah, it turns out the political discussions
Speaker 1: in America that they are not very nuanced. I mean,
Speaker 1: if the left and the right cancel each other, will
Speaker 1: there be a center that they'll They'll just be a
Speaker 1: center that exists. Yeah, that's called ordinary everyday life, and
Speaker 1: that's where most people exist in the better part of
Speaker 1: their lives. People have political opinions, but for most sentient humans,
Speaker 1: their politics are not the most important part of their lives.
Speaker 1: The problem is that politics has taken on an outsized
Speaker 1: role in the American discourse, and it's been contemporaneous with
Speaker 1: the retreat of traditional religion. You know, people need moral camps,
Speaker 1: they need tribes that they can belong to, and you know,
Speaker 1: as the percentage of Americans under thirty who say they
Speaker 1: have no religious affiliation has gone from three percent to
Speaker 1: thirty percent for the last two generations. You're going to
Speaker 1: see more and more young people who affiliate and who
Speaker 1: expressively use a framework of moral ideas to say to
Speaker 1: say I attached themselves to. And it's not going to
Speaker 1: be necessarily the United Methodist Church. It might be the
Speaker 1: you know, the American Democratic Party instead. You know, people
Speaker 1: need that fundamentally. But then there's also been this this
Speaker 1: political entertainment complex largely perpetrated by social media and the
Speaker 1: cable news networks, and what they have done is they've
Speaker 1: made it really really easy for people to exist in
Speaker 1: filter bubbles and caricature. The other side, when they get
Speaker 1: out of those, you know, when they're actually trying to
Speaker 1: deal with their neighbors and friends at Thanksgiving dinner and
Speaker 1: that the soccer games, and that the choir practices, if
Speaker 1: they still go to choir practices, they you know, politics
Speaker 1: for most Americans is not the salient feature of their lives.
Speaker 1: And I think that's really really good. You know, I'll
Speaker 1: read these surveys that you know, written by guys like
Speaker 1: you and me that are extremely you know, sad about
Speaker 1: the fact that the average American can't name both her senators,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, right on, man, that's exactly the country
Speaker 1: I want to live in. It's not that I want
Speaker 1: people who are apathetic, but I want people who are
Speaker 1: able to live their lives and live in such a stable, strong,
Speaker 1: upwardly mobile, charitable and rich country that they don't have
Speaker 1: to be thinking all the time. Okay, it is my
Speaker 1: senator who's going to come and get my stuff, right,
Speaker 1: God Bless America. That's all I can say. I hear you.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of people in this in this
Speaker 1: country right now that don't love America. I mean, I
Speaker 1: hear the conversations on Clubhouse and things. They wouldn't say
Speaker 1: God Bless America. They say what has America done for me?
Speaker 1: You know? But you're certainly saying that you want to
Speaker 1: to move in the direction where everyone will say God
Speaker 1: Bless America. Yeah. Well, I want everybody to to say
Speaker 1: that they love America. I don't necessarily want people, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I breaks that properly. You're not a dictator. You're not
Speaker 1: a dictator. No, I know, you know, I didn't you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? No, But and and and more
Speaker 1: to the point. To be quite literal about it, I
Speaker 1: literally believe in God. You know, I'm I'm you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a religio. I'm a traditionally religious person. But
Speaker 1: I'm so happy to live in a country where not
Speaker 1: everybody is. I mean, I want everybody to share faith
Speaker 1: because it's such a source of joy. And I think
Speaker 1: that my faith is correct, So I would you recommend
Speaker 1: it to anybody, for sure, But I want to live
Speaker 1: in a country where we all don't think alike. That's
Speaker 1: my I want to live in a family where we
Speaker 1: all don't think alike. You know, in the Proverbs they
Speaker 1: say that iron sharpens iron. That's such a source of joy.
Speaker 1: And this gets back to the original premise of your question,
Speaker 1: which is that we don't get we're not getting happiness
Speaker 1: from that, and we really should. We should be, you know,
Speaker 1: down on our knees with gratitude that we live in
Speaker 1: a country where you can disagree politically, where you can
Speaker 1: write something on the Internet saying that the President of
Speaker 1: the United States is a criminal and a jerk, and
Speaker 1: there's no knock in the night and no jack booted thug.
Speaker 1: But instead we're we're such ingrates that we're saying all
Speaker 1: the time that this is a terrible, terrible country, isn't
Speaker 1: it horrible? We're as bad as Nazi Germany. It's just,
Speaker 1: you know, as Stalinist Russia. It's it's nuts, it's nuts
Speaker 1: what we're doing it. And it's basically it's ingratitude, and
Speaker 1: ingratitude is a product of the lack of love, and
Speaker 1: that comes down to too much fear. And that's where
Speaker 1: we started. Yeah, there are multiple things there. I want
Speaker 1: to zoom in on. That's so interesting. This is such
Speaker 1: an interesting conversation. So I'm really curious to hear more
Speaker 1: how your religion and spirituality impacts your approach to human
Speaker 1: happiness in contrast to like the rationalist humanist approach for instance. Well,
Speaker 1: so we talked a little bit ago about the fact
Speaker 1: that there are two basic strands of happiness researchers, one
Speaker 1: that's on the rationalist humanist, psychoanalytic approach, to the other
Speaker 1: that's in the spiritualistical, love based approach. And there's some
Speaker 1: people who are in the middle who actually don't come
Speaker 1: down it either. I mean, I don't mean to it's
Speaker 1: kind of an artificial distinction. But if there is a distinction,
Speaker 1: I'm firmly in the second camp. And part of this
Speaker 1: is just because I've made the decision in my life,
Speaker 1: like every love based decision, like the decision to be
Speaker 1: a husband to my wife, and with my ambition is
Speaker 1: that she is the last person I see as I
Speaker 1: take my dying breath. That's my ambition. That's a decision, right,
Speaker 1: that's not it has feelings attached to it, but those
Speaker 1: are adjunct feelings, and the same thing is true with
Speaker 1: the decision that I've made about But I think is
Speaker 1: the right approach to my life, which is to embrace
Speaker 1: tendets of spirituality, to put them within the framework as
Speaker 1: well established by people who are more sophisticated smarter than me,
Speaker 1: and traditions that have gone back thousands of years, and
Speaker 1: that I understand that there's certain things that I can't know.
Speaker 1: I'm an empirical social scientist, and these are the mystery
Speaker 1: of faith, which is taking things where that are non
Speaker 1: testable hypotheses on the basis of that faith, but understanding
Speaker 1: that doing so is actually a very rational thing to
Speaker 1: do and it makes my life that much better, and
Speaker 1: that sharing it with others can make their life that
Speaker 1: much better as well. And also it illuminates numerous sources
Speaker 1: of mysteries in life. It resolves all kinds of Gordian
Speaker 1: knots that are both cognitive and philosophical. There are things
Speaker 1: that also that I realize that I don't have to
Speaker 1: solve all the time, I don't have to be tortured
Speaker 1: by constantly, and it gives me a tremendous source of consolation.
Speaker 1: So I love it. It's just the happiest adventure in
Speaker 1: my life. Is my spiritual life. I really appreciate you
Speaker 1: sharing that viewpoint. I consider myself more spiritual than religious,
Speaker 1: but I imagine we both are united and seeking very
Speaker 1: similar self transcendent experiences. That's right. And you know, some
Speaker 1: people believe, you know, people I've heard your show, as
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, believe that transcendent experiences are nothing
Speaker 1: more than kind of random synaptic signals in the brain,
Speaker 1: that everything is encompassed by the by the radical and
Speaker 1: material we really listen to my podcast, I'm impressed. Actually
Speaker 1: post is a great podcast and I learn a lot
Speaker 1: from it. And you know that's important because you know
Speaker 1: that materialistic view is ly with utterly at odds with
Speaker 1: this concept that that they're they're they're very well, might
Speaker 1: be a cosmic consciousness that exists before us and after
Speaker 1: us and that we're part of, which is I think,
Speaker 1: I think that's the most the most plausible view. I mean,
Speaker 1: we don't know, but you know, and I know that
Speaker 1: you share the view that that free will can exist,
Speaker 1: and free will can only exist when there's an exogenous consciousness.
Speaker 1: I mean, it really can't exist if if consciousness is
Speaker 1: nothing more than a part of the brain. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not quite a dualist, but I think
Speaker 1: there's you know, all the evidence and my own intuitions
Speaker 1: are pointing to this idea that we're all part of
Speaker 1: one whole of some sort, like you said, cosmic consciousness,
Speaker 1: or there's something there that that people can witness under
Speaker 1: certain conditions such as LSD. But but the certain conditions, Yes,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of we call them spiritual practices, and
Speaker 1: and the research is so exciting in that area showing
Speaker 1: how these spiritual practices, if we can somehow reduce that
Speaker 1: separation between self and world neurologically through own ego practice,
Speaker 1: various practices, it all rise to the same conclusion. You know,
Speaker 1: this this oneness that's right and that's right, and it's
Speaker 1: it's all it's it shows up so many age old mysteries,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's you know, we always say, you know,
Speaker 1: there's that that zen question, that paradox, that the question
Speaker 1: that the master will ask the novice monk what is
Speaker 1: the sound of one hand clapping? And and and that
Speaker 1: you know, it's like one of these it's almost a joke, right,
Speaker 1: It's like in one of these unanswerable Buddhist questions, it
Speaker 1: turns out as not a question. The answer to a question,
Speaker 1: you know, the sound of one hand clapping is your
Speaker 1: individuality and your separation as an entity from the whole.
Speaker 1: It is an illusion. It's a pantomime. It is doesn't
Speaker 1: actually exist. So, you know, the Buddhist masters, you know
Speaker 1: that all Alama explain this to me, that this concept
Speaker 1: that when you feel that you're isolated, that you're an
Speaker 1: isolated individual, that your consciousness is that nothing more than
Speaker 1: a vestige of your physical brain, and that you exist
Speaker 1: out there as a unitary entity. That is an illusion,
Speaker 1: and that illusion is this radical individuality can be resolved
Speaker 1: by seeing yourself as using a different metaphor, you know,
Speaker 1: an individual tree, for example, an aspen tree is just
Speaker 1: one shoot off the same root system. It's one entity,
Speaker 1: but it looks like an individual. So to say, what
Speaker 1: is the what is my individual nature? What is what
Speaker 1: is Scott's individual nature? It is the same thing as
Speaker 1: the sound of one hand clapping. It looks like a thing.
Speaker 1: Excuse me, not a thing. Excuse me, speak for your
Speaker 1: damn self. I'm joking. I'm joking, Nook. They're saying some
Speaker 1: really really cool things. And you know, when we talk
Speaker 1: about self trins and experiences that we call rally around
Speaker 1: you see, I think art and creativity has a lot
Speaker 1: of potential to unify the species, you know, in lots
Speaker 1: of ways. Can you share some of your thoughts on
Speaker 1: how creativity, art and music conturbuts to our sense of
Speaker 1: well being and happiness? Yeah, I think about that a
Speaker 1: lot because of my obviously, because of my background of
Speaker 1: the arts. My mother was a painter, and we have
Speaker 1: you know, we're all basically artists and academics in my family.
Speaker 1: And almost everything that I study now as a social
Speaker 1: scientist stems from observations and questions that I had when
Speaker 1: I was in the arts. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that I find is that when when I have a
Speaker 1: and I come to a particular conclusion on the basis
Speaker 1: of data analysis and research, that I can find these
Speaker 1: fundamental truths embedded in the work of the greatest artists
Speaker 1: in the world. I actually have a series of videos
Speaker 1: that I've done called The Art of Happiness that looks
Speaker 1: at these really big ideas in the search for happiness
Speaker 1: and finds their metaphors in the work and lives of artists.
Speaker 1: And in point of fact, I actually became a social
Speaker 1: scientist because of the world's greatest composer. When I was
Speaker 1: a kid and when I was a working as a
Speaker 1: professional musician, my favorite composer was Johann Sebastin Bach. And
Speaker 1: there's nothing extraordinary about that. I mean, everybody knows who
Speaker 1: almost everybody knows who Bak is, and Bach is half
Speaker 1: of the world's favorite composer. But the interesting thing about
Speaker 1: Bach is not the fact that he was just a
Speaker 1: great and fertile and productive composer and productive person. By
Speaker 1: the way, he had twenty kids. Now that's pretty productive.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing about Bach was his philosophy of his work.
Speaker 1: And I remember reading this quote near the end of
Speaker 1: his life, and you know, surrounded by his kids and grandkids,
Speaker 1: surrounded by love. And he was a very religious guy
Speaker 1: and knows a deep, deep, deep Christian And he was
Speaker 1: asked by a biographer, Hair Bach, why do you write music?
Speaker 1: You know, it's weird because you know, all of us
Speaker 1: who have been able to do something with our lives
Speaker 1: and achieve some things and some success. People always ask you, Scott,
Speaker 1: what do you do when they meet you, But they
Speaker 1: never ask you why do you do what you do?
Speaker 1: And you need an answer, You morally need an answer.
Speaker 1: And Box's answer was immediate, apparently, he said immediately to
Speaker 1: the person who's interviewing him about the like seventeen forty
Speaker 1: nine or something when this happened, he said, the aim
Speaker 1: and final end of all music is nothing less than
Speaker 1: the glorification of God and the refreshment of the soul. Woweh,
Speaker 1: I know. And so for people who are not religious,
Speaker 1: don't be distracted by that. He said, the point of
Speaker 1: your work is sanctified service. That's the point of your work.
Speaker 1: And I heard that I was still in the music
Speaker 1: in this. I'm like, can I say that? You know?
Speaker 1: I'm out every night on stage. I don't feel like
Speaker 1: I'm refreshing souls. And I don't feel like I'm glorifying God.
Speaker 1: And I literally went in quest, in a vision quest
Speaker 1: to find that what I could do, what I could
Speaker 1: do professionally, so I could do it wasn't actually so
Speaker 1: it was I wasn't using the hallucinogens, but I didn't
Speaker 1: have an ayahuasca experience. But through through my meditation and
Speaker 1: my prayer, through the search for cosmic truth, so I
Speaker 1: could find my answer to box question, so I could
Speaker 1: actually find what and I became literally I mean talk
Speaker 1: about the from the sublime to the dismal. You know,
Speaker 1: I became a social scientist because I felt like I
Speaker 1: could refresh souls and glorify God. And Scott, I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm doing it right now. I mean, it's unbelievable
Speaker 1: to me. I mean, I'm just I'm so happy. Not
Speaker 1: all the time. I'm not, you know, a particularly happy person.
Speaker 1: I'm so happy to be able to do something. If
Speaker 1: somebody's listening to us right now, they're like, those are
Speaker 1: good ideas, those are things I want to take on board.
Speaker 1: Those are life enriching ideas. These are ways that I
Speaker 1: can actually love a little bit more then that in
Speaker 1: some weird little way, I've composed the kind of a
Speaker 1: little box pintata, and I got it because of box?
Speaker 1: Why not because of box? What that's an answer to
Speaker 1: your question about how the creativity informs the science. Well,
Speaker 1: I love it. I feel like that. You just explain
Speaker 1: why I do everything I do. Well, everything I do,
Speaker 1: there's always that ten percent You're like, what the fuck
Speaker 1: was I thinking? But the other ten percent is like
Speaker 1: paying the rent. Yeah, well, you know, we're still human
Speaker 1: at the end of the day. But no, I I
Speaker 1: love that, you know, my intentional purpose that explains why
Speaker 1: I do that. Love it? Love it? Love it? Can
Speaker 1: you you know? Kind of ending this interview today, can
Speaker 1: you tell me about your upcoming book on strategy Strategies
Speaker 1: for getting Happier as we aag because you make a
Speaker 1: very interesting point. You say that as we get older,
Speaker 1: our sense of attachment to achievements makes us more susceptible
Speaker 1: to noticing our long term decline. Wow, that's really profound. Well,
Speaker 1: what happened was I started a personal research project to
Speaker 1: understand how I wanted to design the second half of
Speaker 1: my life because I realized there's not very much stuff
Speaker 1: out there for that. You know, I teach Leadership and
Speaker 1: Happiness at our business school to talk about people who
Speaker 1: are launching their careers on how they can use the
Speaker 1: science of happiness. But there's very little. And you know,
Speaker 1: you're twenty years younger than I am, but you're going
Speaker 1: to get where I am, and you're going to need
Speaker 1: everybody your age is going to need something that's based
Speaker 1: on the science, based on truth, and based on philosophy,
Speaker 1: and based on wisdom. To talk about how after you're
Speaker 1: fifty years old you can design your life where the
Speaker 1: slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are not, you know,
Speaker 1: deciding whether or not you're going to retire happy and
Speaker 1: go and go to the grave a happier man than
Speaker 1: than when you were younger. You shouldn't have to leave
Speaker 1: it up to chance. There's got to be some signposts,
Speaker 1: you know. I had some very profound experiences with older
Speaker 1: people when I was about the age of fifty that
Speaker 1: suggested that if you leave it up to chance, some
Speaker 1: really bad things can happen. You find that there's certain
Speaker 1: dynamics that are really really solid earlier in life. You
Speaker 1: find that people generally speaking from the early twenties until
Speaker 1: the early fifties, they gradually decline in happiness, not profoundly,
Speaker 1: and then in the early fifties to about seventy most
Speaker 1: people increased dramatically in their happiness. And those are those
Speaker 1: are strong empirical tendencies. But after seventy or so people
Speaker 1: break up into two big groups. Half get happier and
Speaker 1: half gets sadder as they get older. Now the group
Speaker 1: that gets sadder, here's the weird thing they have in common.
Speaker 1: They tend to be the strivers and the high achievers.
Speaker 1: That's the paradox of it. And that's the thing I
Speaker 1: kept finding. And so you know the work of Charles
Speaker 1: and Carrol Holahan at University of Texas at Austin, who
Speaker 1: do work on the burden of high achievement, and basically
Speaker 1: if you read their work, what it comes down to,
Speaker 1: at least my of their work is this, like law
Speaker 1: of psycho professional gravitation. The more you do with your life,
Speaker 1: the more you know when it's in decline. If you
Speaker 1: don't do anything, if you don't live up to your potential,
Speaker 1: you don't know the slightest idea you're in decline because
Speaker 1: there's no bump that you're coming down from. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, if you do a lot. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you're you know, you know, Scott Barry Kaufman, and you've
Speaker 1: got the most important psychology podcast, well, sooner or later,
Speaker 1: this is not going to be the most important podcast.
Speaker 1: Sooner or later, this is not going to be the
Speaker 1: thing that you have right now, and you're going to
Speaker 1: actually suffer more from the loss. This is condiment and Taversky,
Speaker 1: this is prospect theory. And then there's the rich large
Speaker 1: phenomenon where all the stuff that you can do, I mean,
Speaker 1: why are you so successful right now? And the answer
Speaker 1: is that you're You're you're cranking on your fluid intelligence,
Speaker 1: which is your analytic capacity, your ability to solve problems,
Speaker 1: your building that's going down the hill, that's going down
Speaker 1: the hill as I mean it does here, it goes
Speaker 1: in your forties. You're not forty yet, are you. I am?
Speaker 1: I am okay, you look good of that hair. I
Speaker 1: could have President of the United States with that hare. So,
Speaker 1: but you know, in your forties it declines. In your fifties,
Speaker 1: it's like really getting low. But there's another curve behind
Speaker 1: it called your crystallized intelligence, which is based on the
Speaker 1: stock of stuff you know and your ability to use
Speaker 1: it not solving new problems, but assembling information by yourself
Speaker 1: and others from earlier in life. That's wisdom, which is
Speaker 1: actually a virtue. And so one of the things that
Speaker 1: I talk about is, you know, when people feel like
Speaker 1: they're in decline and they're very depressed, those who get
Speaker 1: worse and worse and worse off after age seventy, it's
Speaker 1: because they regret what they think of as their only
Speaker 1: success curve. So the key thing is jumping off. You know,
Speaker 1: Scott Berry Kaufman's success curve under Arthur Brooks's success curve.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the greatest things in my life
Speaker 1: was I mean, I read my early academic papers for
Speaker 1: right when I finished my PhD. And I literally can't
Speaker 1: understand the math anymore of what I was doing. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's left me behind. I've left myself in the dust.
Speaker 1: But now I'm teaching, I'm writing, i'm speaking, I'm doing
Speaker 1: what I'm doing with you, trying to explain things clearly
Speaker 1: in in a way that people find inspirational. And I'm
Speaker 1: better at way better at it. You know that at Columbia,
Speaker 1: where you teach, Harvard Wright teaching, the best teaching evaluations
Speaker 1: are uniformly for professors from over seventy These are not
Speaker 1: pity evaluations. It's because they're the best teachers. Because that
Speaker 1: relies on crystallized intelligence. So I talk in the book
Speaker 1: about how you can jump from your understand your fluid
Speaker 1: versus your crystalized intelligence curve, get into the liminal space
Speaker 1: between them, and to get on your crystallized intelligence curve.
Speaker 1: What are the techniques for doing it, what are the
Speaker 1: joys of doing it? How do you do it well?
Speaker 1: I mean, frankly, I think I think I actually cracked
Speaker 1: the code to getting old and loving it. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: I can't wait to read this, you know, especially my
Speaker 1: editor says the same thing. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: you know, especially as my fluid reasoning is notably declining
Speaker 1: by the second. I can't wait to read it. By
Speaker 1: the way, you said, my podcast is inevitably not going
Speaker 1: to be the most important psychology podcast. Do you know something?
Speaker 1: I don't know. What are you talking about? Arthur Brooks,
Speaker 1: He's like, are you coming for me? I know, No,
Speaker 1: it's just the same ends of time my friends. Arthur's like,
Speaker 1: it's all a matter of time. You're no longer a top.
Speaker 1: But no, I'm joking. Look, I love talking to you today.
Speaker 1: You are such a breath of fresh air in our
Speaker 1: society that has such polarization, but also such extreme views
Speaker 1: on things that doesn't incorporate spirituality into the discussions, doesn't
Speaker 1: treat people as sacred. I've been arguing we need to
Speaker 1: start treating people sacred. I feel like you would agree
Speaker 1: with that absolutely. Yeah, I really, I really appreciate you,
Speaker 1: Arthur and wish you wish you well. Thank you, Scott.
Speaker 1: Congratulations again on the podcast, and thanks to all the listeners.
Speaker 1: Who are you making this the most popular thing because
Speaker 1: it should be because it's high quality and you're doing
Speaker 1: a great key. Thank you so much. Thanks thanks for
Speaker 1: listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd
Speaker 1: like to react in some way to something you heard,
Speaker 1: I encourage you to join in the discussion at the
Speaker 1: Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast. Also, if
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Speaker 1: time for more on the mind, brain behavior and creativity