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Conversations with Coleman
The Secret To A Fulfilling Life (Backed by Science) w/ Arthur Brooks
01:14:43
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- [00:01]
Coleman Hughes
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Arthur Brooks. Arthur is a social scientist, author and public intellectual known for his work on happiness, leadership, and public policy. He served as the president of the American Enterprise Institute from 2009 to 2019. And before entering the world of public policy, he was, like me, a professional musician. In his case, a classical French horn player. He's currently a professor at Harvard, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. In this episode, we talk about what social science can tell us about happiness. We talk about global poverty. And Arthur gives me a public therapy session, which was sort of terrifying, but also pretty interesting. So without further ado, Arthur Brooks, this.
- [00:56]
Arthur Brooks
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- [01:29]
Coleman Hughes
Been on hold to make a doctor's appointment for 23 minutes now. The automated voice has told me 47 times that my call is very important to them. I'm starting to think that they don't think my call is important at all.
- [01:44]
Arthur Brooks
With Amazon One Medical 24. 7 Virtual Care, you'll get help fast without having to remain on the line to make an appointment. Amazon One Medical healthcare just got less painful.
- [01:56]
Coleman Hughes
Arthur Brooks, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [01:58]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you. Great to be with you, Coleman.
- [02:00]
Coleman Hughes
So I've been following you for a long time. You're one of the leading researchers on happiness, global poverty, I would say human progress over the long run. These are themes you've been talking about for years. And the interesting part about your story is that like me, you came from the music world and not just dabbling. We were both professional musicians that made a transition to the public policy space, which is pretty rare.
- [02:33]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, that's not the case.
- [02:34]
Coleman Hughes
You later in life than me. And you played French horn, right?
- [02:36]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, I was a French horn player until I was 31. I made my living doing that. When did you make the break?
- [02:41]
Coleman Hughes
So I went to Juilliard right out of high school, six months in, dropped out and went to Columbia.
- [02:48]
Arthur Brooks
So went to Columbia.
- [02:49]
Coleman Hughes
19.
- [02:50]
Arthur Brooks
And so you. But you planned as a kid to.
- [02:51]
Coleman Hughes
Be a hundred percent.
- [02:52]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [02:53]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. At least as a teenager, after the age of maybe 14.
- [02:56]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Does the audience know your story?
- [02:58]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I think. Well, I think a lot of the audience will know my story. A lot of this audience will know my story. Yeah.
- [03:02]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. And what made you flip? What made you want to change at the age of 19?
- [03:07]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, well, there was an acute cause and a big picture cause. The acute cause was my mother passed away, and that sent me into a period of crisis of meaning in my life. And what do I want to do on this planet? Do I want to be a working musician and scrape for, you know, scrape around for a living when I could just have music be a thing that I love to do and keep doing it without making it my career and try to have a career that involves the ability to ask deeper, more meaningful questions.
- [03:44]
Arthur Brooks
That's very adroit of you. At 19, I did not have the presence of mind.
- [03:47]
Coleman Hughes
I don't know if I would have had the presence of mind had my mother not died and launched me into a kind of crisis. Because that kind of problem is easy to ignore and put aside. If things are going well, if things are collapsing in your life, sometimes in a weird way, that can be an impetus to make a change you should make, but make it urgently and make it better.
- [04:07]
Arthur Brooks
No, that's true. Existential crises based on real suffering are incredibly generative for most people. And one of the biggest problems that we have for people today who are 19. I mean, you're 10 years out from that, but that's a big difference because people who are late teens and early 20s today are being told systematically that their suffering is evidence that they're broken, that there's a pathology and it should be eliminated. There's an eliminationist impulse towards suffering today, and that's one of the worst things that you can possibly do. The best way that you can avoid finding the meaning of your life is to waste your suffering by trying to wipe it out by thinking that your suffering is inherently bad. And the truth is, you didn't want to suffer. You didn't say, oh, my mom died. This is a great opportunity for growth. But it was foisted upon you. And for whatever set of really favorable circumstances, you used it in a meaningful way. And that's. That's helped you create the life that you have today. That's super important for everybody to understand. You're going to suffer. You're going to have negative emotions. You're going to have negative experiences. You can either learn and grow from them or not. Your choice and So I have a whole series of exercises that I take people through to make sure that their suffering is not going to waste.
- [05:16]
Coleman Hughes
What are some of those exercises?
- [05:17]
Arthur Brooks
Well, to begin with, I keep, I have, my students keep a failure journal, a failure and disappointment journal. So this is not, you know, my mom died. That's, that's, that's a, that's called a life quake in the, in the business where, you know, it's one of these big transitions that, that are unwelcome. But every 18 months or so, there's something that you, you, that's unintentional or that, that you didn't, that you didn't invite that. So therefore it's unwelcome in your life. And, and every few weeks, something happens that's a real disappointment, a real sense of loss to you. When that happens, you don't let it just sit in the limbic system of your brain, this console of tissues that, that processes of emotion. You want to move the experience into your prefrontal cortex so you can understand it and use it. The way to do that is every time something really bad happens, not really bad, I mean, significant enough to write down because it's bothering you, take out your journal and write it down. Now, when you're doing that, you're moving the experience into the part of your brain that actually can manage your emotions. So your emotions don't manage you. You can't write with your limbic system. You write with your prefrontal cortex, you know, the conscious, the executive center of your brain. Then you leave two blank lines below the source of your unhappiness. You come back to it after about three weeks for the first line and write down something that you learned from that experience. You come back to it after another two months and write down something good that happened because of that experience. It's not to say that you're going to say, hooray, that bad thing happened, but something you did learn and something good did happen as a result of that. Therefore, you're locking in your growth, cognitively locking in your growth. And by about the fourth or fifth entry in your journal, you start looking forward to it when something bad happens. You're like, yeah, I didn't like that. But man, bring on the journal, because you're going to be looking at the growth that you had, the progress that you made from past unfortunate events. This is how you can guarantee growth from the things that you don't like in your life.
- [07:12]
Coleman Hughes
So this is a kind of self therapy in a way. I think when Bad things happen. Healthy people tend to eventually recast them in a positive light. So, for example, what I just did with my mother dying, it seems clear to me that I would not prescribe having your mother die to anyone as a treatment. Of course. However, it does seem to me that I got something good out of it because it woke me up and it had me ask all these questions that 19 year old Coleman probably wasn't going to ask himself. And me answering those questions was really good for my life, for my career, for my long term happiness. So the question then, is it good to suffer or is it that emotionally mature people always find the silver lining in suffering?
- [08:10]
Arthur Brooks
Well, so there's a couple of different things going on when you find not the silver lining, but you find the benefit that actually came from difficult parts of your life. That's called fading affect bias. Fading affect bias is that the pain of the, of the immediate emotion has burned off, but the benefits still remain. That's why you look back on times that were really difficult and you look back on them as really beneficial. So, for example, when you go to college, you graduated from Columbia, right? Have you been back to a reunion yet?
- [08:41]
Coleman Hughes
No.
- [08:41]
Arthur Brooks
Okay. When you go back to a reunion, you'll see the people that you met in your first semester in college and you're going to be just yucking it up and talking about super fun times and laughing like crazy and. And you're not talking about the fact that you were bitterly lonely during that first semester because your life had changed so much. You were literally feeling grief because there was so much change in your life. It's a biological phenomenon how grief occurs when things change so quickly in your life. Why? Because those were the memories that you made that were very beneficial to you. And the grief that you experienced has burned off. That's fading affect bias. Laughing about a time that you were crying about. In the moment. In the moment, you have a negativity bias. You focus more on the bad than on the good because that's how your brain is wired. You literally have more tissue dedicated to negative emotions and positive emotions. But the memories that you have and the lessons that you learn, that's the long term phenomenon. And people who are mentally well adjusted, emotionally healthy, they're the ones who get the most fading affect bias, which is exactly what you're talking about.
- [09:41]
Coleman Hughes
So is fading affect bias part of the reason why? You'll hear veterans coming back from Afghanistan, from Iraq and talking about how their time serving was the most meaningful time in their life, notwithstanding the fact that they May have lost a best friend in combat. Is that part of fading affect bias or is that something else?
- [10:06]
Arthur Brooks
No, that's a good example of fading affect bias. And what has faded is the immediate pain, the emotional pain that they endured at the time. And what has remained is the learning and growth that came in no small part because of the brotherhood that they experienced. My son is a marine sniper and left after, you know, four years in the Marine Corps. And it was hard. It was hard, man. It was really, really difficult work. And at times it was very dangerous work. But, man, when he's with his marine corps buddies, they're happy. They're happy, and they're talking about, yeah, we were in the bush for three hours. There was a. Remember that tarantula that was on your arm that whole time? And they weren't loving that at the time, but they're cracking up about it because it's actually part of who they are as people. It's a classic example of hitting effect bias.
- [10:55]
Coleman Hughes
So is there another part of that, though, which is. For some people of a certain cast of mind, it's easier to have one problem than to have many problems. I've heard. I can't remember who phrased it this way, but, you know, when you're. When you're in a war, you're basically trying to stay alive and trying to keep your friends alive and carry out a mission, and life becomes extremely simple.
- [11:16]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [11:17]
Coleman Hughes
When you're back in civilian life, it's like, you know, you're behind on your taxes, your partner isn't happy with you, you're going to visit your family, and there's some weird family dynamic. You know, you got into an argument with your friend. It's like on any given day, you have eight relatively small problems, at least relative to the problem of survival. And some people really suffer in that circumstance in a weird way more than in a circumstance that's life or death.
- [11:44]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's actually related to the statistic that we often hear. Not been validated. Exactly. But I'm sure it's directionally corre correct that in times of war, civilian populations under Siege experience a 70, 75% reduction in clinical depression. Cases of clinical depression go down by 75% when a. When a population is under attack because of the one problem issue is what it comes down to. Now, most of us, at the same time, we try to do this in our lives. So you'll find that you. That you suffer more about one weird thing than all the things together, and that's because one problem will become kind of like a suitcase for all your problems. And you'll focus on this one thing that's really bothering you, about your job or about your relationship, or about you're worrying about your health. And what you're doing is it's kind of crowding out all the other things. And you're putting all of the accumulated anxiety toward one thing. And the mistake that you make is thinking if I can resolve that one thing, then my life is going to be good. But that's not right because you solve the proximate problem right there and you've just opened up the suitcase and all the other stuff comes out right.
- [12:49]
Coleman Hughes
This is also, I think, I wonder sometimes if this is related to the kinds of people that are more likely to get into a big drug addiction. Because if you're really addicted to a drug, you basically have narrowed it down to one problem, which is how can I stay high? Essentially, how can I maintain my addiction? And everything else fades away. And sometimes I wonder if there isn't a profile of a type of person that tends towards drug addiction, enjoying potentially military service or operations where you have basically one mission and everything fades away, or any lifestyle really where you can have that one track mind. Is there research that profiles that type of person?
- [13:34]
Arthur Brooks
That's the so called addictive personality that people talked about in past times. Most of the new studies on addiction, they tend to look more biologically at the problem and what they find that people who tend toward addiction, there are people who react to dopamine less than other people. So they'll have a dopamine allele. So for example, there's interesting research that shows that there's a. What's called the D4 dopamine allele. That's where how dopamine is processed in the brain that's highly correlated. If you have this characteristic in the way that you process dopamine that you're going to look for a lot, you're going to be sexually promiscuous and you're going to have a very hard time being sexually loyal to your partner. And the reason for that is that the way that dopamine works is that you get anticipation of reward when you're offered sexual variety. That's just kind of how humans work, particularly human males work this way. The result of it is that if you have an insensitivity into that reward, you're going to need more variety to actually get the excitement that you crave in your life. And so therefore you're going to Find it really, really hard to be loyal. That's how a lot of the research goes. You know, that was a bunch of gobbledygook that I just spoke. But basically what it comes down to is that people process this catecholamine, this neurochemical reward, which is dopamine or anticipation of reward chemical, in different ways. And if you're insensitive to it in particular ways, you're going to have a tendency to abuse things that give you more dopamine because you need a bigger head so you can actually feel alive than most people do. I mean, most people are actually faithful to their spouse, sexually and emotionally faithful to their spouse because they get enough dopamine from doing it the right way is what it comes down to. And it's probably also the case with alcohol and probably also the case with cocaine and gambling, Internet use and highly glycemic carbohydrates and all the other kind of stuff that people get addicted to.
- [15:21]
Coleman Hughes
So is that one way of saying there is such a thing as an addictive personality and there's a biological explanation for it?
- [15:26]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, it's not a personality, it's more of a, of an addictive neurochemical profile. Is, is the way that people are thinking about. Now that said, there are psychological conditions that, that can make you tend toward different sorts of abusive behaviors as well. So for example, if you're a highly anxious person, you're going to have to, you're going to more likely have trouble with alcohol. People who are not an. The reason for that is that alcohol severs the connection between your conscious thought, your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala, the part of your limbic system that has fear and anger and anxiety and the tension of the stress that actually is in your brain. So in other words, you feel anxious, but you don't know it. When you drink alcohol, alcohol is an incredibly, incredibly effective way to cut your anxiety just to that put it out effectively. So if you're a really anxious person and anxious people do anxious things, like you have a very high profile career, if you're an anxious person, you're going to suffer a lot, which is ironic, right? You'd think that anxious people would do relaxed things, but they don't. Anxious people do high profile, difficult things that you're going to find that you have a greater need for something to self medicate. You're going to have a, you're in danger for alcohol abuse. I tell my students this a lot. The, a lot of data from OECD countries Say that socioeconomic status is positively correlated with alcohol abuse. The higher, more money you make and the more education you have and the harder you work, the more likely you are to abuse alcohol. You think of people down and out and in the ditch. It's guys like you that have to look out because you've got a stressful job. You've chosen to do stressful things for a living. So that's the self medicating hypothesis. Then there's the relationship hypothesis. All addictions are relationships. Talk to anybody who's been addicted and what they'll tell you is that like, it's love. It feels like love. You know, you talk to people who've been addicted to opioids, for example. I mean, it really hits the same receptors that, that oxytocin, which is a, which is a neuropeptide of human connection, also known as the love molecule. There's a reason that, you know, when people have normal human relationships, they don't feel like they need opioids as much. That's why getting off a dope is almost impossible. If you don't have family is one of the well known in the addiction literature. And so you have to treat it like a relationship. You know, when you actually say, look, you know, the reason that one of the number one predictors of marital disillusion, of divorce is alcoholism is not because alcoholics can't function. It's because alcoholics don't have space in their life for their spouse. Because that space is taken up by their number one lover, girlfriend, friend, spouse. It's booze, it's a love relationship. So that's another way of thinking about it. And all these things really kind of interact. If you're a highly anxious person, if you have this need for love and you're lonely, loneliness is a big predictor of addiction. And especially if you have these, you know, probably genetic dopamine characteristics, woe be unto you. You got to be really, really careful.
- [18:40]
Coleman Hughes
So you've spoken about how human beings, we kind of exist in this evolutionary predicament where natural selection has made it so that we're, we're not supposed to be, we're not built rather to be happy all the time, right? Yet we've developed this expectation that somehow we're supposed to be happy all the time, where that would actually make no sense evolutionarily, because if you're happy all the time, you're not striving, you're not striving to get another mate, you're not striving to worry about stocking up food by the winter. It should select for a certain amount of striving for things, but then quickly not being satisfied by what you've gotten.
- [19:24]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, that's called the hedonic treadmill. Evolutionary psychologists have talked about this for a long time where hedonic means feeling and treadmill means resetting. And you know, the way that emotions work is they're supposed to, they're an alert system. You know, you're sensing things around you all the time, threats and opportunities. And the way that that's translated into your consciousness is the limbic system actually has positive and negative emotions. Negative emotions say that's a threat. Positive emotions say that's an opportunity. Negative emotions say avoid. Positive emotions say approach. And so you're getting positive and negative emotions as a way to stay alive and thrive and get mates and get your food and not to be happy. You know, Mother Nature doesn't care if Coleman's happy. There's no proclivity in nature to be happy at all. It's to survive and pass on your genes. Being happy, that's what you want. That's a divine task, not an animal task. And the cross circuit that we have in our thinking is I want to be happy and I have an urge to do these things. So therefore if I do these things, I'll be happy. And then we kind of wonder why doesn't work out. You know, hey man, I got the raise and the bonus and the relationship and I'm still not satisfied. What's wrong with that? Right. And you know, all these things keep happening to me and I don't like them. Why? That doesn't seem right. And I wanted to go sleep with that person and take that drug. And I thought it would make me happy because I had an urge to do so, but it made me unhappy. That's wrong. What's wrong with me? The answer is your biology is your biology. You have to go against your biology, you have to go against mother nature if you actually want to be a happier person.
- [21:04]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. This is why I liked Robert Wright's book called why Buddhism is True.
- [21:09]
Arthur Brooks
That's a great book.
- [21:10]
Coleman Hughes
I'm sure you know that. Yeah, because it just connects the evolutionary psychology you just described with the age old precepts of Buddhism about the dissatisfactoriness of life.
- [21:24]
Arthur Brooks
The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is the dukkha. D U K K H A is a Sanskrit word that means. I mean, they'll often say it's, it's that life is suffering but that's not actually. That's a. The best translation is life is dissatisfaction. Right? You try and you try and you try, and Mick Jagger was wrong. You can get satisfaction. The problem is you can't keep no satisfaction. And that's how dissatisfaction works, is because of cravings and attachments, which of course is the second noble truth of Buddhism. And the third noble truth is you must detach from the sources of your sticky cravings. And the fourth noble truth is you have to follow the Eightfold Path. And that's where things get complicated.
- [22:07]
Coleman Hughes
Are you a Buddhist?
- [22:08]
Arthur Brooks
No, I'm a Catholic. I go to Mass every day. I'm a daily communicant. As a Catholic, I've studied a lot with and worked very intensively with the Dalai Lama over the past 13 years. As a matter of fact, though spent a lot of time in Dharamsala and his home.
- [22:20]
Coleman Hughes
So we're speaking like one hour after it was announced. The Conclave has chosen a famous pop up and an American Pope for the first time in history. Is that right?
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Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
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Coleman Hughes
Any thoughts? Not really.
- [22:32]
Arthur Brooks
The first American Pope was Pope Francis, because the first Pope from the Americas.
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Coleman Hughes
I see.
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Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Yeah. So the first USA Pope, obviously the first Pope from North America. And I don't know him very much about the new Pope. I don't. I mean, I knew he was an American cardinal and I knew that he was a very influential one at that, and a dark horse candidate in Vaticanology. But one of the things that I do as a Catholic, I'm not a Vatican watcher. The horse race politics of the power in the Church is not something that's ever really interested me. So I've never taken much knowledge in that. I'm a Christian man. I mean, I go to Mass and I do my prayers and I try to maintain a relationship with my Lord and Savior. And I'm glad there's a church and I'm glad that it works. And I'll pray for the new Pope.
- [23:21]
Coleman Hughes
So did you see Conclave?
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Arthur Brooks
I did not. And I didn't have the heart.
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Coleman Hughes
You didn't have the heart?
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Arthur Brooks
I didn't have the heart to see it. I mean.
- [23:30]
Coleman Hughes
Why do you say that?
- [23:31]
Arthur Brooks
Well, because it's funny. Because when you really, really love and care about something and the entertainment treatment of it is by people who want to focus on the entertainment and the, the, the, the aspects of it that really have very little to do with its profound underpinnings and truths, it's always disappointing.
- [23:53]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, that's Why I never saw Whiplash as a jazz musician.
- [23:56]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, that's right.
- [23:57]
Coleman Hughes
And I imagine a lot of ballerinas felt weird about Black Swan.
- [24:02]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I saw Whiplash and as a musician is profoundly disappointing. It's profoundly disappointing. I mean, it just gets everything actually wrong. About what? The actual experience of being a serious musician. I mean, it was so wrong, as a matter of fact, that my wife, who was also a former professional musician, we were openly laughing during the movie.
- [24:23]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, good cinema play for me.
- [24:25]
Arthur Brooks
Except that I'd probably be annoyed and at this point in my life I'm trying to be annoyed less.
- [24:30]
Coleman Hughes
Are you going to watch it? I don't want to spoil it for you.
- [24:33]
Arthur Brooks
No, I mean, I know it happens because everybody's been talking about it and the whole thing. And I hear it's a very beautiful movie too. I hear it's beautifully shot. Really beautifully beautiful movie. I mean, apparently the art director changed the color of the robes because the actual garments, the actual cardinals, what they wear has a little bit of orange in the red. He said, no, no, no, no, that's not the right color to make the College of Cardinals actually look more beautiful. And for cinema, they change the color of that. I respect these aesthetic decisions, of course, but you know, when non Catholics are informing people about the Catholic Church, I, I get nervous.
- [25:15]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. Okay, so let's, let's talk a little bit more about happiness. There is a famous factoid, I think it, I think it, it either came from or is often attributed to Tversky and Kahneman that something like after $70,000, income has no effect on happiness. What is actually true there?
- [25:39]
Arthur Brooks
So that's the, that's the paper by Danny Kahneman and Angus. And Angus Deaton.
- [25:44]
Coleman Hughes
Angus Deaton, right.
- [25:45]
Arthur Brooks
So that was Kahneman and Deaton and that was the paper that was published in, in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences 2010. That was the famous 70 or 75 thousand dollar paper, depending on, you know, where you actually read the lines in their graphs. And that said that, that happiness satiates at $70,000 in income. Now of course, your results may vary. You live in New York City. It's like, sorry, that's a little bit different than living in Topeka. I got it. And they were humble about that. The whole point was it satiates earlier than you think. And that, as grandma said, money doesn't buy happiness. Okay, fine. And people, a guy named Matt Killingsworth at Penn, who's a Harvard Business School PhD, fantastic economist, he retested it and Found that it's a much higher threshold, but that's not the point. The point is that it gets really flat and it's a pretty bad life goal to keep trying to earn more and more and more money. So a lot of my work asks why do people think that it's going to bring happiness when everybody knows it doesn't and even scholarship shows it doesn't? Why do we do that? Why do we make this mental error? That's what a lot of my work goes into. And almost certainly the case is that what happens is that money at low levels never buys happiness, but it eliminates sources of unhappiness. Happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. Unhappiness is not the absence of happiness. They're actually processed the emotions, the positive, negative emotions are processed in different organs in the limbic system for different reasons. You have sadness, so you'll be averse to losing people and things that you love. You have anger or fear so that you can protect yourself against threats. You have disgust so that you'll avoid pathogens, for example. You have interest, which is a positive basic emotion. So you'll learn and grow and prosper and pass on your genes. You have joy, so you can get a neurochemical reward for something that actually will give you calories or mates, for example. All these things have a reason, have a biological, evolutionary reason to them. And so these positive and negative emotions are. You're weighing them against each other in your well being, even though they're not opposites. So the result of it is that you don't know if you're feeling better because you're less unhappy or more happy at any given time. You can't do the sums very well early in your life because you were a lot poorer when you were younger than you are now, obviously. And a little bit of money felt awesome. Felt awesome.
- [28:14]
Coleman Hughes
I remember I noticed that the awesomeness dissipated within minutes or days.
- [28:19]
Arthur Brooks
Well, between minutes and days. And also it doesn't have. Once you get past a certain threshold, the awesomeness isn't there anymore. And the reason is because it was lowering sources of unhappiness. And that's what wears out. The problem is you've wired your brain, you've programmed your mental computer to think that more money will make you feel more awesome because of these early experiences when your brain was still highly plastic. That's what's going on. I mean, basically when you're synaptically forming, you say, these rewards made me feel better, they just made me feel better. So Therefore, going from $650,000 a year to $700,000 a year is going to make me feel better, because $50,000 a year when I was 24 made me feel so awesome. And that's what you think. And so you're chasing, you're chasing. It doesn't work, but you chase it and you chase it. And I remember this distinctly. You know, when I was, I was living here when I was in my early 20s, I was living in New York City where we're taping the show. And I was a musician and I was poor. I didn't have healthcare. I couldn't go to the doctor, I couldn't go to the dentist. I had no money and no insurance. I needed to go to the dentist. I really needed to go to the dentist. And I didn't. And my teeth were bad and they hurt, right? And when I was 25, I took a job in the Barcelona Symphony in Spain with benefits and a salary. And the first thing I did when I got there is I went to the dentist. And I felt so much better. And remember thinking that money raised my happiness. Money buys happiness. No, no, no. It eliminated a source of unhappiness from poverty to slightly above poverty. And that chasing behavior really will mess you up. Now, that said, there are ways that you can buy happiness. Just not buying stuff. Buying experiences with people that you love brings happiness. Buying time and spending it in edifying experiences or with people that you love brings happiness. Saving your money brings happiness. Going into debt brings unhappiness. Giving money away to causes that you care about brings happiness. That's four different ways to do it. But the one that your brain tells you to do, the new car, the new house, the boat, the watch, those don't bring happiness, right?
- [30:34]
Coleman Hughes
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- [31:04]
Arthur Brooks
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- [31:22]
Coleman Hughes
Sold.
- [31:23]
Arthur Brooks
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- [31:35]
Coleman Hughes
Many celebrities have said, I think most famously Bill Murray, but also Ben Affleck had almost the same exact quote, that whenever they meet someone who wants to be rich and famous, they say try rich first and see if that doesn't get most of what you want. Because fame, like money though it doesn't quite buy happiness except in the caveats you just gave. It doesn't make you more miserable inherently. It actually does buy you out of a lot of things that poor people have to deal with that suck, right?
- [32:08]
Arthur Brooks
Fame.
- [32:08]
Coleman Hughes
Fame. On the other hand, I actually, it wouldn't surprise me if many rich and famous people would pay a certain sum to selectively not be famous at certain times. Because fame actually first of all is irreversible. Like if you're wealthy, you can lose it, right? Like let's say wealth actually made you unhappier, you could give away your wealth, right? Once you're famous, you can never become unfamous. So it's a one way street, first of all. And then second of all, you actually lose the ability to have certain experiences like permanently. Just like Johnny Depp can't walk down the street and go to a coffee shop and have that experience with a friend. He just can't do it ever, right? So I wonder, I mean, I guess it probably isn't a literature on famous people because how do you get famous people to do studies, right? But has psychology studied the idea of fame as a route to happiness? Yes, and I think it's super important, especially right now, because every kid in America and around the world is growing up on this model, this influencer model where they all have five or ten influencer role models right? Before they even have like normal career based role models.
- [33:20]
Arthur Brooks
That's right. That's right. So there is work on this, as you can imagine, because there's work on everything. Everybody's trying to get tenure someplace, so there's research on everything. There are four really worldly rewards. This is actually according to Aquinas. So aquinas talked about St. Thomas. Aquinas writes in 1265 in the Summa Theologia, he's an unbelievably adroit social scientist that there's worldly rewards which are not evil, they're just incomplete, right? So if you go for them, you'll become unhappy. If you use them as a kind of a launch point toward the divine things you really want, then you can be happy. You can be happy and rich, but not if you're. If your only goal is to be rich, then you'll be unhappy. That's his point. The four goals, the worldly goals are money, power, pleasure and honor. Where honor is what you'd call fame or prestige or the admiration of other people. Right? Those are the four worldly goals. Of those, as we study them, honor is the only one you can ever be happy in spite of. And there's a reason for that honor. It taps into an ancient, ancient goal that we have as human beings. So we are a kin based hierarchical species. And we're oriented in our evolution to live in bands of 30 to 50 individuals. So what we want, what we naturally want, is to rise in a tiny hierarchy, to be famous in a small group of people, which we can actually accommodate. Your brain can't accommodate the concept of a band of individuals. That's billions and billions of people, or millions or thousands of people for that. And so chasing that kind of prestige, moving up that kind of hierarchy is way out of the ancestral environment. It's completely unnatural, but it's also extremely addictive at the same time. So this is something that you're addicted to and can't stop. And it actually doesn't even bring any pleasure, but it will bring tremendous pain if you lose it. That's why one of the things that they say is the only thing worse than being famous is being formerly famous, where people don't really remember you anymore. That's a really corrosive, terrible thing. So getting famous is something that people really want and will work hard for and give up almost anything for and betray their loved ones for and even hurt other people for. And they hate it. It's one of the most diabolical things in life. As a matter of fact. Fame is a crazy thing and a lot of people have it. I actually have a game I play with my students to find out. One of these worldly rewards is their idol. This is how Aquinas put it. Aquinas said that everybody wants God, but you know, not everybody is willing to put up with what it means to pursue God because there's a lot of one sided conversations and cumbersome rules, more or less. And they don't quite believe it because, you know, really. So they'll look for things that have this divine character. And the things that have the divine character are the worldly idols. He Says that everybody's beguiled more than anything by at least one, usually one. And if you know you're idol, you will be able to recognize what will always lead you astray. So things that prospectively you're going to be regretful of will always have to do with the fact that you were chasing that idol. And you'll look back on it and go, oh, I did it again. I cut some corners, I behaved unethically, I hurt somebody, I took a job I didn't want. I married somebody I don't love. Why the idol? So he said, if you know your idol, you have power. So I based on that theory, which is actually has a lot of basis in modern social science as well, I have a game called what's my idol? To identify. You want to play?
- [37:05]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, sure.
- [37:06]
Arthur Brooks
You want to play this game. So here's how you play it. Remember, the four idols are money, power, pleasure and honor. Where honor means a lot of different things to different people. It might mean Internet famous to some people. For academics, it's being known by the right people. You know, that kind of thing. Now to figure out what's your idol, you don't just find it because we will lie to ourselves. Here's the way to figure it out. You eliminate the ones that aren't your idol. And when eliminating them, what you're saying is, I'm willing to give that one away. Not that I'll be poor in that, but I'll go to the population average. So if you say I'm going to get rid of money, it means you're at the population average. You have plenty in America, but you're not extraordinary in it. Right. And you got to watch your money is the way that that works. Okay, so let's play. Think about this. Coleman's possibilities are money, power, influence over others, feeling good, pleasure and honor, the applause, the admiration of other people. You got to give away one and you have three left. Which one do you give away?
- [38:13]
Coleman Hughes
So I think I'm like very. It's very easy for me to give away power, I think.
- [38:19]
Arthur Brooks
Tell me why. Why you? Why? Why? Power does not. What you're telling me is that power just does not beguile you.
- [38:24]
Coleman Hughes
Yes.
- [38:25]
Arthur Brooks
Why?
- [38:27]
Coleman Hughes
I don't know. I mean, why isn't. Why is a tough question. Because I. It's never attracted me. So, for instance, because people like my podcast, etcetera, People say, oh, my God, Coleman, wouldn't you love to go into politics? I'd love to vote for a guy like you. And I think to myself, why the hell would anyone trade the other aspects of life for what it means to be a politician? Okay. You've got power, but first of all, now you've got the burdens of super fame. You've got an extra like you've got. You've made instantly tons of enemies. Tons of people hate you. Dubious whether you can actually get all that much done. Right. You've now got to spend all day begging for donors. Whatever. I see all the downsides. It's totally unattractive to me and I'm surprised people even think I would consider it.
- [39:15]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [39:16]
Coleman Hughes
Which tells me that power is not my vice.
- [39:19]
Arthur Brooks
So you actually. It's not just not your vice. You don't like it.
- [39:23]
Coleman Hughes
That's. I think.
- [39:23]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. And furthermore, I know a little bit about your career. You hate people having power over you. Yeah.
- [39:29]
Coleman Hughes
I think that's true.
- [39:30]
Arthur Brooks
You have an aversion to power.
- [39:31]
Coleman Hughes
I agree.
- [39:31]
Arthur Brooks
Yours and others. So that's the easiest sacrifice you've ever made.
- [39:35]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah.
- [39:35]
Arthur Brooks
That's like basically I hate liver and I'm going to give up liver for lint.
- [39:38]
Coleman Hughes
Right.
- [39:39]
Arthur Brooks
Right. Okay. All right. Now, now it gets a little harder because most likely the one, usually the one that people give away or people or something they don't like actually you have money, pleasure and honor. You got to get. You got to go to the population mean on one of those, which. What's next? What's the easiest one to give up of those three and go to the population mean?
- [40:03]
Coleman Hughes
Maybe I'm trying to decide between money and honor. Maybe money, money. I'll go to the population mean on money. So I'm at the population mean. It's means. I'm not going below the mean.
- [40:16]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [40:17]
Coleman Hughes
I'm not going to be. There's not hardship, not going to be poor.
- [40:19]
Arthur Brooks
There's not hardship unless you make bad choices. Yeah. So why is that? Okay. What have you figured out in your life at this point that leads you to that?
- [40:26]
Coleman Hughes
What I figured out is that the difference between having to stay in the worst possible motel and staying at the Holiday Inn is like a hundred times larger than the Holiday Inn versus the very best hotel that exists in the world in terms of how it makes me feel. So avoiding poverty super important in my brushes with what it means to live in a poor lifestyle. Super important.
- [40:54]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [40:54]
Coleman Hughes
Big for my happiness, I think.
- [40:56]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [40:56]
Coleman Hughes
Whereas the difference between middle class and the very best hotels in the world where I've had had a couple glimpses of is not as big in terms of my own happiness.
- [41:06]
Arthur Brooks
There's not that big a difference in the lifestyle.
- [41:08]
Coleman Hughes
You'd get used to it.
- [41:09]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Day to day between you and Jeff Bezos is really what it comes down to, right?
- [41:13]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah.
- [41:13]
Arthur Brooks
I mean his boat is bigger and he has a private plane, but fundamentally he's worrying about the same things that you are about his life and his love and his future and all the same stuff. Good. And that's a big realization, by the way, because people who don't have that realization typically are poor who are suffering from poverty. And so they imagine that the relief that they'll get from going to poverty to middle class will be supersized if they go from middle class to wealth. And it's exactly the opposite, which is what you just said.
- [41:42]
Coleman Hughes
The first leap is the big one.
- [41:43]
Arthur Brooks
The first leap is what eliminates sources of unhappiness, which is the entire way that money brings well being.
- [41:49]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah.
- [41:49]
Arthur Brooks
According to Kahneman Deaton. Yeah.
- [41:51]
Coleman Hughes
Right.
- [41:52]
Arthur Brooks
Okay. You got two left.
- [41:53]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah.
- [41:53]
Arthur Brooks
What's next?
- [41:54]
Coleman Hughes
Honor and pleasure.
- [41:55]
Arthur Brooks
Honor and pleasure.
- [41:56]
Coleman Hughes
So this is where it gets tough. This is where you like them both. I like them both, yeah.
- [42:00]
Arthur Brooks
So which way you got to give one up though. You're going to keep one and you got to give the other one up.
- [42:05]
Coleman Hughes
Go to the, go to the average. What, what is the what, what, what is like the average level of pleasure?
- [42:11]
Arthur Brooks
The average level of pleasure is not. It's not feeling better or worse than ordinary people do. Right. I mean, ordinary people have particular behaviors. They're not back an alien and they're not doing something to serve pleasure per se. They don't mind feeling bad. I mean good. But they don't certainly go out of their way. They don't sacrifice parts of their life for it. Ordinarily, what do you know is somebody who cares an awful lot about it will make significant sacrifices in their life to get it. And most people, they like feeling good, but they're not going to make significant sacrifices in their life to actually feel good more of the time than ordinary people do. So that's really what we're talking about.
- [42:49]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, so that sounds okay to me.
- [42:50]
Arthur Brooks
That sounds okay to you?
- [42:51]
Coleman Hughes
I give up pleasure. I think honor probably the hardest for me.
- [42:55]
Arthur Brooks
So now that does not mean that you're a vice ridden individual. It just means that we know your weakness. We now we know what that is. And that's not surprising given the fact that you're a public person. Public people are public for a reason. There's very few people who are in public lines of work and say, yeah, you know, fame was thrust upon me. I mean, you do things on purpose that people are going to pay attention to. Not because you're an egomaniac, not because you're some sort of narcissist. On the contrary, it has to do with the fact that you want to do something and be recognized for doing it well. And you want to be. You don't have an acknowledgement of it and you're doing things that, that normal people can actually find beneficial. You're doing a podcast, you're in media, you write books, all this kind of stuff that I do too, by the way. So the result of it is I would have been shocked if this wasn't the order.
- [43:45]
Coleman Hughes
Really?
- [43:45]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I know enough about you to know that you're countercultural, that you tend to feel pretty good when you're speaking truth to power. I've seen you do it. I've seen you be in controversy publicly for speaking truth to power.
- [43:58]
Coleman Hughes
So my, to the extent I'm self aware, I think I like the way I think of it is I like respect rather than fame. Fame is the thing of someone recognizes me on the street, which I hap. Which happens. And it's honor.
- [44:13]
Arthur Brooks
So that's why honor is better than fame is calling it because it encompasses both.
- [44:16]
Coleman Hughes
Right, Right. So I though my fans are super respectful. So those are almost always good interactions on the street. I don't. I would not want that to get any more frequent than it is.
- [44:28]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [44:28]
Coleman Hughes
And I would actually prefer if it like went down. However, the idea that of being a respected voice, having the respect of my peers, I think is important to me.
- [44:38]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. And that's, that's your version of honor.
- [44:40]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah.
- [44:40]
Arthur Brooks
And, and by the way, that's a lot healthier than wanting people been people. You're screaming, you're Coleman.
- [44:46]
Coleman Hughes
Coleman.
- [44:47]
Arthur Brooks
You know, that's, that's. I mean, come on. You know, the, the movie star fame is a little bit different than, than the admiration of, of a, a public that has some knowledge of your work. Right, Fine. But the truth of the matter is that's still, that's still going to be your weakness. It's still going to be your idol going forward. And the things that, that really do bring life satisfaction, real life satisfaction, your faith or life philosophy, your family life, your friendships, earning your success and serving others through your work, those things will be. You'll be distracted from those things when you're actually thinking about your idol. And so you always have to be careful about it is what we find. And that's what I Try to help my students through. And that's what I have to do too. And by the way, my order is exactly the same as yours.
- [45:35]
Coleman Hughes
Really? All four?
- [45:36]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly all four in that order. I mean, power. I was a CEO for a long time. The thing that bugged me the most was when people called me boss because it felt inherently disingenuous. Whether it was or not. Because I, I don't want a boss. I don't like, I don't like being bossed. I'm very sort of inherently. I'm an Emersonian. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a very Emersonian. I'm not a Randian, I'm an Emersonian kind of guy. Which is. You've ever read Self Reliance?
- [46:02]
Coleman Hughes
No.
- [46:03]
Arthur Brooks
Oh, you got to read Self Reliance. It'll rock your world because of who you are. That is so good and so fresh right now. It talks about, you know, how to be truly culturally self reliant in a culture that wants true conformity. How to be yourself completely. It's like a tall glass of cool water on a summer day. It's beautiful. But that's how I see it. I mean, second is money. Where. Yeah, I mean I'm trained as an economist. I know good things that money can bring, but I know the tendencies that we have for which we will spend money on things that don't bring satisfaction. I like, I like feeling good. I like feeling good. I do. But I'm pretty spartan guy. I'm a 4:30am workout every day kind of guy. I can feel bad too and get along just fine. But it's honor, you know, I want to be respected for my work. I want to be liked by other people. You know, I don't care if people don't recognize me on the street because why would they? I look like every other 60 year old man in America.
- [47:04]
Coleman Hughes
But you look a little better than the average 60 year old man, I think.
- [47:08]
Arthur Brooks
Thanks. I was not.
- [47:09]
Coleman Hughes
See those biceps.
- [47:14]
Arthur Brooks
But that's my weakness. And when I do things where I neglect my family a little bit, where I don't say the things that I actually should, or I refrain from saying things that I should or I say things that I shouldn't, it's always because I'm trying to please a little bit. I want people to like me a little bit too much and I want the affirmation of people a little bit too much and that gets me into trouble. So I have to watch it. But that's power. The knowledge is power when it comes to happiness.
- [47:42]
Coleman Hughes
Right. Are we in a crisis of meaninglessness? And if so, how do we get out of it?
- [47:48]
Arthur Brooks
We are. My assessment of the explosion of depression and anxiety, particularly among young adults under 30, is the lack of meaning that they're experiencing in their life. The reason I say this is because there's an incredibly strong correlation between exhibiting these mental health symptoms and saying, my life feels mean, meaningless. This is what we see again and again and again. There's a lot of survey research and even experiments that show that you're more likely to be feeling mentally ill if you don't know the meaning of your life. And the meaning of life is getting harder and harder to find. So a lot of my research right now is about this deficit and meaning and where it's coming from. And we actually know. We actually know. Why didn't your, you know, you know, Coleman's grandfather come home and say, I don't know the meaning of my life?
- [48:38]
Coleman Hughes
Because he was serving in Korea.
- [48:39]
Arthur Brooks
He was serving in Korea, but he also. He wasn't actually. He wasn't actually rewiring his brain the way that we are today. So there's a great body of research by the neuroscientist, the British neuroscientist, Ian McGilchrist, who, who wrote a book called the Master and His Emissary. Oh, yeah, that's a famous book, and it's about hemispheric lateralization of the brain, where the right side of your brain is the master that actually asks the big meaning questions, and the left side of your brain is the emissary that goes out and finds answers based on solving technical, complicated problem. The problem is that in modern life today, people under 30, I hope not you. I strongly suspect that you're not in this group, have lost the ability to use the right side of their brains effectively in examining meaning questions. Because they spend all day long looking at a computer screen and all night long looking at a phone. In no small part. Plus, they're actually encouraged to treat every problem because this is the way that the culture and education system has worked to treat every problem. Like a technical, complicated problem. Problem everything. Like a way to write a piece of code or to create an app where you can find a pizza place that's open at 10pm Everything is just another complicated problem. But all of life's mysteries, all the things that actually lead to meaning, like love and suffering and beauty and calling and romance, those are all complex problems that actually don't have technical solutions. They don't have solutions at all. They just. Just, you don't solve meaning problems. You live meaning problems. And that means sitting on the right hemisphere of your brain. And if you're no good at that, because the technical world has told you that you're going to find love on an app and you're going to simulate love with pornography and that you're going to solve your problems by writing the right kind of code or grinding away at your job or whatever it happens to be, you're not going to find the meaning of your life. Your life's going to feel empty, and you're going to wind up in the camp that we're talking about here. The meaning crisis is the mental health crisis in America today.
- [50:41]
Coleman Hughes
So I want to talk a little bit about how I think you've said this, but also many people have said this, that happiness is at some level, the distance between expectation and reality. Meaning, you know, if you expect, if your dream as a kid was to, you know, make $100,000, and that's what you kind of picture as being amazing, and you hit that, then you're happy. But if you grew up with that and what you think is amazing is 500,000 or some. Any other bar, whether it's financial or not, then the distance between reality and that expectation becomes your kind of sense of life satisfaction. Is that how you think about happiness?
- [51:28]
Arthur Brooks
Sort of, but it's a little bit different than that. The problem is that expectations are a moving horizon.
- [51:34]
Coleman Hughes
Right?
- [51:35]
Arthur Brooks
That's this whole idea of the hedonic treadmill. And the whole point is that emotions with which we evaluate the satisfactoriness of a particular event in our lives or moment in our lives, that those emotions are homeostatic, meaning that you get to your expectations and then the satisfaction wears off, like a summer ratio. Also, by the way, your negative emotions, when something bad happens to you, they don't last either, even though you think they're going to. Right? That's the reason that we're fooled, continuously thinking that if we get the job or the marriage or whatever, that we'll love it forever, so that we're staying the hunt. Your point earlier, we're evolved to stay in the hunt, but we're also evolved to avoid the bad by thinking that if she leaves me, then I'll be sad forever. You're not going to be sad forever. You're not gonna be sad for that long, as a matter of fact. But you have to think that you'll be bereaved for the rest of your life so that you'll try to avoid it. That's why Mother Nature is fooling you in this particular way. The result of that homeostasis is that you're resetting all the time and your expectations are resetting. So your reality is always behind your expectations. You get to your expectations as a kid, and that becomes your reality. Your expectations are gonna just go running off into the future, and you're gonna say, oh, I mean, you've met plenty of billionaires. Me too. The first thing they say when they earn their first unit is, I guess I needed two. Why? Because expectations always run out in front. The truth is that to maintain a level of life satisfaction that's very high and enduring, you have to think of two things. The formula, a better formula for life satisfaction that's not evanescent is haves divided by wants. So it's all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want. That's a good model because the more mathematically efficient way to raise your satisfaction is by lowering the denominator. By lowering your level of wants as opposed to continuously.
- [53:32]
Coleman Hughes
So how do you actually do that?
- [53:33]
Arthur Brooks
You do that by being conscious about it. By being conscious. So, for example, a lot of people think that they will be. They'll make a bucket list on their birthday. You ever made a bucket list on your birthday? Okay, good for you. But a bucket list is. You'll have a tendency to want to do this on your. You're 29, right?
- [53:50]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah.
- [53:50]
Arthur Brooks
So 30. You know, it feels like a watershed event. Trust me, 60 feels worse. And you'll make a bucket list of. A lot of people do. Of accomplishments and experiences and relationships and things that you want to consume and experience and own. Right? And that's supposed to motivate you, to fire you up, to make you ambitious about getting these things. That's what a bucket list is all about. What that's doing is it's engorging the wants, the denominator of your satisfaction equation. But more than anything else, what that does is it tells you that by having more, you'll be a lot better off. I recommend to people not that they don't have goals. Goals are great. But that they manage their goals so their goals don't manage them. And the way that I do that is with a reverse bucket list where I write down the things to which I'm really attached, the ideas of my own greatness and the things that I want to see and do, and all the recognitions that I wish I had, and I write them down the list. I'm honest about it. I'm not ashamed because they're not untoward, not immoral. But then I cross them out because I move the experience of these attachments from my limbic system to my prefrontal cortex where I manage my desires and my desires don't manage me. I mean, I do that with lots of things about, you know, honors and glories that I wish I had or money that I wish I had. But more importantly, it's things like my opinions that are really holding me down. You know, it's like I don't want to have political opinions that are so strong that they rule out relationships. That's a terrible trade. That's the trade that the news networks want me to have. That's a. That's productizing me by the political establishment. I don't want that. I'm not going to do that. So I write down opinions that are really, really strong and I cross them out. I still have the opinion, but I'm not going to let the opinion manage me is the whole point. And so that's a way practically to do that. I do that on my birthday and on my half birthday every year.
- [55:46]
Coleman Hughes
That seems to be an epidemic right now. I know you've spoken about this. I think you spoke about this in the aftermath of the 2016. 2016 election as well.
- [55:56]
Arthur Brooks
But 2019, I wrote a book called Love youe Enemies.
- [55:58]
Coleman Hughes
Yes, that's right.
- [55:59]
Arthur Brooks
Obviously, I failed.
- [56:01]
Coleman Hughes
Well, yeah, but it was, you know, it's a tall task.
- [56:05]
Arthur Brooks
The first guy who said it struggled with it too.
- [56:08]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, yeah. Which was who? Jesus Christ. Are we in a crisis of meaninglessness? And if so, how do we get out of it?
- [56:18]
Arthur Brooks
The meaning crisis is the mental health crisis in America today.
- [56:22]
Coleman Hughes
So, I mean, I like when I do amas on this podcast in the past, one of the most frequent questions I get from my mostly male audience is. But it true of. Of women as well, is like navigating political differences both within family and within dating.
- [56:41]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [56:42]
Coleman Hughes
Which, you know, I don't think anyone would have asked that question, say, 20 years ago because it would have made no sense. But now it's the most frequent question I get, which is, what do I do when I'm on a first date with someone? They have different politics than me. What do I do when I'm with my family and they have different politics than me? Because on the one hand, I want to be like, in theory, I want to be able to talk about these things because they're interesting. So we don't just have to talk about whether the Knicks and The Celtics won last night. And talk about something maybe a bit spicier at the same time. It seems to just end poorly more than it ends well.
- [57:19]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [57:20]
Coleman Hughes
So what. What's. How do you think about that?
- [57:22]
Arthur Brooks
I think about it differently in dating than I do in. In. In nuclear family relationships. So in dating, it's a very interesting fact that 71% of registered Democrats on dating websites won't date a Republican. 41% of registered Republicans won't date a Democrat. Why do you think the difference. It's going to be real obvious to you when I say it.
- [57:45]
Coleman Hughes
I don't know. Oh, is it a gender difference?
- [57:47]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. Women are.
- [57:48]
Coleman Hughes
Men are more tolerant of multiple persuasions.
- [57:51]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. So women tend to be Democrats and men tend to be Republicans, and women are choosier in dating in general.
- [57:58]
Coleman Hughes
Right.
- [57:58]
Arthur Brooks
They're way, way, way choosier. And it makes certain evolutionary, biological sense. You know, they have the stake that they've got in the game for family formation and having children, raising children, you better get it. Right. And so finding a mate, they have to. They're much choosier about their partner than men are. Men tend to hunt. They have a different proclivity when it comes to that. And they're like, yeah, I'll date a Democrat. Show me the picture. I'm not saying that that's the right way to think about it, but actually, the gender difference actually explains that thing. So one of the things that I recommend is. Because that's a crazy way to rule out your life partner. That's a really. I mean, it's to say. And people watching this will be like, what are you talking about? You know, that. That betrays all kinds of views about the world. I wouldn't want somebody to be the father of my child who. Yada, yada, yada, yada. I mean, I hear it all the time. I get it. Right. But the truth is that other things objectively are more important when you get to know somebody. That's just a truth. And we know that from all sorts of survey data. And so what I recommend to people is that they don't put their politics in their dating profile, and they have a moratorium when they go out on a first date. Actually not to talk about politics until at least the fifth date. Now, most of the time, there isn't a fifth date, but if there's not a second date, you don't want it because of politics, because you're gonna be. Your screen is gonna be wrong for people who could be really. A really, really good partner. For you. So I strongly recommend no politics talk for four straight dates on that. So you don't. You really don't even know. You can suspect what that is. And that is a very effective technique for helping people fall in love for reasons they should fall in love or eliminate a relationship for more meritorious reasons. When it comes to nuclear family, this is a really tricky thing. I was the political outlier in my family. I thought differently than politics. And my parents. I grew up in Seattle. My father was a professor, my mother was an artist in Seattle. What do you think? Their politics were always Free thinker. Right. You know, I'm like, I remember when I was. I was your age, a little younger, 26 or 27, and I was living in Barcelona at the time, and I was home for Christmas, and I'm in the kitchen with my mom. We're cooking dinner, and she's real quiet. I'm thinking, oh, something's up. It's like, mom, what's on your mind? She said, well, if you must know, your father and I are very worried about you. And I'm like, what is it it? She said, I want you to be completely honest with me, and I will love you either way. Have you been voting for Republicans? I didn't have the heart, you know, because, you know, that's how families actually. Yeah, it feels like. It feels like a values schism in a lot of cases. It isn't. It isn't. It wasn't. You know, my parents. My values have come from my parents. I mean, my Christian beliefs, my belief in unalterable dignity of every individual, every human being, with no exceptions from conception until natural death, all of it, man, I got that from my parents. The fact that the value of education, the way they're supposed to treat other people, the politics is just like, I like capitalism. I think the military is awesome. And. But okay, okay. We engorge these things as matters of human dignity. So what I recommend to people is when behavioral differences and value schisms are actually coming up is love your family at Thanksgiving and listen like an anthropologist. Listen more. Just listen to learn interesting things. Suspend judgment and suspend argument. And when you do that, what you're going to find is that the people that you love think a thing for a particular reason. And you might not agree with what they think, but you're going to give more merit than you thought to the reason. And that's how a behavioral difference doesn't turn into a value schism. Now, that's a kind of a complicated process, but it's not that complicated. It's not that complicated.
- [62:09]
Coleman Hughes
Complicated. I mean, that, that, that makes a lot of sense to me. And that strategy works for someone like me because it's very normal and in character for me to just ask someone questions, including my family, just to get.
- [62:20]
Arthur Brooks
A pretty natural anthropologist.
- [62:22]
Coleman Hughes
And I'm a natural listener as well.
- [62:23]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah.
- [62:24]
Coleman Hughes
For other people's personalities, you know, it's hard to say.
- [62:28]
Arthur Brooks
I mean, do you differ from your family politically?
- [62:30]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I would say so.
- [62:31]
Arthur Brooks
And they're, they're like, as Coleman.
- [62:35]
Coleman Hughes
They're not. They're not. Not mean about it. But it's, you know, it's also the case where, like, if we argue, it's not necessarily going to end well.
- [62:44]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, but, you know, arguing never ends well. I mean, that's like he who agrees against his will is of the same opinion still.
- [62:51]
Coleman Hughes
Right.
- [62:51]
Arthur Brooks
That's the old, dumb old poem. That's from. And from Dale Carnegie, how to Win Friends and Influence People. I mean, it's from 1936. That's the truth. If you're arguing, you're losing.
- [63:02]
Coleman Hughes
Right.
- [63:02]
Arthur Brooks
You're already. If you're having an argument, you already lost the argument.
- [63:07]
Coleman Hughes
With family, though, with, with, with friends, I find it's not the same. Like, I can often have an argument with a friend that's super productive.
- [63:14]
Arthur Brooks
That's a debate. And so it's different than an argument, typically, because you're experimenting with different ideas when you're talking to your family and to your friends who. With. Whom you have. There's. It's parametrically different. It's a different kind of experience where you're. But you're basically like, I want to know your best, your best position. I want to know it, and I'm going to see if I can take it on. And so it's the kind of thing where with certain people, if you have a kinetic alteration, it's actually a physical fight. With others, you're just wrestling. And that's what it comes down to. And so with your family, typically, you just haven't established those parameters. Now, you might be so close to your brother. Do you have a brother?
- [63:53]
Coleman Hughes
No.
- [63:54]
Arthur Brooks
Okay. If you did, you might be, if they're real close to each other in age and you were close to each other, that you're just. You're just sparring all the time. Right. But fighting and sparring are a different experience, Right? Yeah. Ideologically, it works the same way.
- [64:06]
Coleman Hughes
Right. So there's, there's a huge literature testifying to the apparent fact that conservatives are considerably happier than Liberals, almost any way you break it down. And the differences get huge. When you talk about young conservatives and young liberals, rules.
- [64:25]
Arthur Brooks
Correct.
- [64:26]
Coleman Hughes
So can you summarize that literature for people and then explain what is going on there? Because there's three or four different ways I could see this working. You know, it could be the political ideology makes you happy. It could be happy people drift more towards the right. It could be. Or unhappy people drift towards the left. It could be a side effect of religion. It could be a side effect of gender. So what's going on here?
- [64:49]
Arthur Brooks
So there's a million different theories about what's going on here, but just the basic facts are not really in question. This, a lot of this comes from Brad Wilcox, University of Virginia. A lot of it comes from Jonathan Haidt at nyu. But you find, for example, that if you break it up by gender and ideology, you can. So it's a liberal women, liberal men, conservative women, conservative men. That the unhappiest people by far are liberal women in America today. You find that these are data that come from John Height. He's got some stuff in his blog that show that white Liberal women under 30 have a 56% chance of having been diagnosed with at least one mental illness, formally diagnosed with one mental illness, and generally that's anxiety or depression. Again, these are data that come from a couple of different sources. I'm not making this up. And it's actually pretty easy to find this if you Google it, it's very easy to find the happiest people are conservative women. And so it goes in terms of happiness. Conservative women, conservative men, liberal men, liberal women. But the drop off with liberal women tends to be really, really, really fast. It tends to be really, really fast. And then there's just a lot of speculation about why that's true. There's no settled explanation for why that's the case. If really unhappy people are drawn to ideologies of protest, whether or not there's something about the liberal mindset, particularly as it affects women, that lead them in directions that are particularly unhappy, we don't know. I mean, I'm not even saying who's right or who's wrong. That's not even the point. The point is that when you look empirically at it, those are the patterns that you actually see.
- [66:30]
Coleman Hughes
Right, okay, let's switch the topic a little. For the last couple questions, you've written and talked about global poverty quite a bit. You have a really nice documentary you did mostly about India and India's escape from poverty five or six years ago. And I'm curious because it's been in the news so much lately, Doge cutting US aid, what role do you think that state based philanthropy, foreign aid plays in reducing global poverty? And how do you see what the Trump administration is doing right now as a affecting that goal?
- [67:15]
Arthur Brooks
So when we look at the reduction in global poverty, which by the way has been a miracle, Incredible, from the 1970s until today, the rate of absolute poverty in the world has declined by more than 80% while the population has exploded. It's incredible. I mean, everything that we Learned in the 1970s about the population bomb and that running out of food and running out of resources and that people are going to die massively of starvation is completely wrong, wrong, totally wrong in every single way. So the real question is why? So that we can answer your question. What destroyed global poverty? I mean, eight tenths of global poverty eradicated, which is dollar a day poverty or $2 a day poverty? It doesn't really matter how you want to look at it, obviously adjusted for inflation. Okay, so what did that. It could be international institutions, it could be foreign aid, it could be International Monetary Fund and rules. It's none of those things. It's the spread of global capitalism. That's what did it. It was the free enterprise system. And the reason it was spread is not just because of American benevolence or greed. It was because people around the world, through the explosion of the means of mass communication all around the world outside the United States, looked at you and me and said, I want that. I want it. It, I want the freedom, I want the stuff, I want the life. And they threw off the shackles of the institutions very widely of their poverty. Now, not completely. I mean, a lot of that poverty reduction was in China, which is a very imperfect place to be sure. But people aren't starving to death in the way that they were. And that's an incredible achievement that we should cheer about. What do you need? You need more freedom. What do you need? You need more enterprise. You need more opportunity. That's what you need in the world. Now you get little band aids like foreign aid. And they can help, but they can also hurt. They can also hurt societies that actually become so accustomed to foreign aid that it crowds out opportunity and crowds out the enterprising experience. I want more capitalism, I want more trade, I want more globalization. That's what I want because I want less poverty. I want more people to have the kinds of freedoms and opportunities that we have in the United States. I feel that's my Moral duty to stand up and cheer about the global free enterprise system. That's what made a different world than the. The world that I was born into in the 1960s and 70s was a world of poverty. And now it's just. There's poverty, but that's the exception. And I think that's such an incredible thing. We're complaining and whining and sucking our thumbs about all the bad things in the world. We should be cheering every single day about the singular achievement. That singular achievement comes from the free enterprise system that was not perfected, but certainly made quite excellent in the United States. And I'm very, very proud that we've been able to export it around the world.
- [70:07]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I think a lot of it had to do with two events, the death of Mao Zedong and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ripple effects of both of those throughout the world. And I very much celebrate that with you.
- [70:20]
Arthur Brooks
Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul ii, global figures that were that aided this along with the demise of those figures in soc.
- [70:30]
Coleman Hughes
No doubt. I agree global capitalism is the number one cause. But it's just in my mind today because Bill Gates did a interview in the New York Times where he says, according to him, the cutting of PEPFAR and other foreign aid programs, places like Africa, is going to cause, he says, a million excess child deaths over the next many years. Is that, do you think that's a legitimate assessment of the Trump administration's mistake here? Or is that Bill Gates playing his book talking his book?
- [71:08]
Arthur Brooks
I don't know. I'm sure that Bill Gates sincerely believes that. I'm sure that it's not globalist propaganda or something like that. I'm sure he honestly believes that. And I very much regret the end of pepfar, by the way. And by the way, that was George W. Bush who put that over. Tremendous objection from the Republican Party. I just admire, I admire him so much for that, for his, his moral fortitude and, and actually pushing that through. And I wish it weren't going away. That said, I actually recognize, I also recognize that there's huge problems in the way that we were funding and administering foreign aid that need reform. But needing reform and wiping it out are two entirely different things. And I wish we had a more surgical more or an approach that actually would follow the dictates of actually trying to help poor people as opposed to trying to push an ideological agenda, which a lot of foreign aid was actually trying to do. And we weren't able to sort those two things out. So I think there's a great role for helping other people. If we had a sense and non politicized, non propagandized sense of what foreign aid is actually supposed to do. And on the right and the left were suffering from propaganda machines all over the place. So we're not, we weren't getting it right then. I don't think we're getting it right now. I'd like to be more positive about it. Coleman.
- [72:23]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. Well, on that note, Arthur Brooks, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [72:27]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you. Thanks. Congratulations on the show.