← Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big with Arthur Brooks: Finding the Meaning of Your Life in an Age of Emptiness
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- [00:00]
Arthur Brooks
Here's where it gets interesting. Complicated problems are actually dealt with in the left hemisphere of your brain. Complex problems, the things you care about the most. The mystery, the meaning, the love, the happiness, the why of life is in the right hemisphere of your brain. If you spend all day long using technology, you're shoving yourself into the left hemisphere of your brain where you not only do you not know the meaning of life, you can't even ask the questions.
- [00:27]
Kevin Gentry
Welcome to the Going Big Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Gentry, and this is the place where we celebrate bold moves and big ideas. Each week I sit down with inspiring leaders, entrepreneurs and change makers who are making a significant impact in their careers and in their communities. Whether you're looking to level up your leadership, pursue your passion, or just get inspired to take your next big leap, this is where those stories come to life. Now, if you're listening on iTunes, YouTube, or anywhere else you tune into podcasts, be sure to hit that subscribe button so you'll never miss an episode. Now let's dive in to what it means to truly go big. Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Going Big Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Gentry. And today's episode, we've got a great conversation with someone who's speaking spent most of his adult life studying all the attributes of people that have been guided by ambition, leadership, success, but now ultimately happiness and meaning and purpose. And you probably know I'm talking about Arthur Brooks. Arthur is well known to so many. He is first and foremost, I knew him when before he was even a college professor, he had been an artist, a musician. Then he ultimately led one of the most influential public policy institutions. It's located in Washington, D.C. but arguably one of the most influential in the world. And then what really is very intriguing, he stepped away from that influential role at the American Enterprise Institute to really focus on what gives us happiness in life, what leads to a meaningful and purposeful life. And that's what we're going to dig into because it's perfect for the Going Big Podcast. And Arthur, it's really great to have you. Thanks for joining us. We got a lot to dig into and I'm so excited by what you do today because you are so now leveraging your many gifts and impacting so many people's lives. So thank you for all you're doing. Thanks for joining us today.
- [02:39]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you, Kevin. I mean, you and I, we've known each other for 20 years. How about that, huh? And we've both changed a lot. We're all both doing different things than we used to. I mean, we have the same values, we have the same mission in life, which is to lift people up, bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, and set them free. Right. But we do it in different ways than we used to, don't we?
- [02:58]
Kevin Gentry
Well, indeed. And what a great way for you to launch it. And aren't you kind even to say it in that way? Yeah, I just happened to look on my bookshelf and I dusted off a book that you wrote 20 years ago, who really cares when you are a professor at Syracuse University. And I think the story. I heard you speak at a conference in Chicago, and I was with the businessman Charles Koch. He was also going to be speaking. And we were talking about the fact that this Syracuse professor who used to play the French horn in the Barcelona Symphony, had this tremendous research about who in America really gives and very importantly, how they feel as a result of it and what motivates them. And maybe that has led to a lot of your subsequent work. But here's my first question going back to even before that, an early version of you, Arthur, what was kind of motivating you to think about how the world works and how people think and what motivates us? Was that an early part of your thinking?
- [04:04]
Arthur Brooks
My earliest thoughts about what I wanted to do with my life, they were really all about the arts and about music, as a matter of fact. I grew up in a family of artists and intellectuals. My father was a PhD biostatistician and my mother was a painter of some minor renown in the Pacific Northwest. And both my parents were amateur musicians. And my brother was a really good musician as well. He was also a writer. And so the result was that what did we do? We did the life of the mind. Kind of a lower middle class family, not very concerned with money, but we had a lot of love. We're very religious family and also a very artistic family. So the result was that what I wanted to do was kind of follow in the footsteps of the people around me, my parents, my grandparents. And I found I was really good at the French horn. And so that's all I ever thought about it. I didn't think about human behavior or statistics or economics or public policy or any of that stuff, let alone what I do now, which is behavioral science and neuroscience. Now I was thinking about wanting to be the world's greatest French horn player and play it in such a way that if Beethoven were still alive today, he'd say, that's great French horn playing. And that's what I did. I didn't give it a second thought to almost anything else until I was in my late 20s.
- [05:17]
Kevin Gentry
All right, okay. And by the way you're upbringing, I also know your brother Jeff, who is phenomenal in terms of in the nonprofit fundraising space and helping us communicate effectively to prospective supporters. That's a whole other chapter we could go into. But going back, even with you as an artist, what was success to you? I mean, you began to describe that, but what was success to you then in terms of, in your mind, how it might be defined and then how has that changed over time? Or has it changed?
- [05:50]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, well, it absolutely has changed. And part of it is because, like so many young people, my concept of success was fundamentally misbegotten. As a young man, what I thought success would be would be worldwide acclaim as a classical musician, which is, I realize this kind of esoteric. But I wanted to have the greatest discs on Deutsche gramophone, which is the finest classical music recording company in the world. I wanted to play the world's greatest concert halls. And that's what I thought success would actually be. And that's misbegotten because I was characterizing a successful life with respect to the approbation and praise of other people. And that's the wrong way to see it now, today. That's what I teach my students. Don't go looking for the applause of strangers that will always leave you empty. Please. Plus, they don't care. But I didn't know that at the time. And I had an experience that made me think a little bit differently. Quite early on, I had what I consider to be the pinnacle of my concert career when I was 22 years old. I had gone pro at 19. So one year of college and then I went pro. And part of that was because I had dropped all my required classes and was invited to pursue my excellence outside the college, by the college. So anyway, that was the impetus, a little shove from the nest. And over the first three years of my career, it went well. And when I was 22, I had this experience of, you know, this was the notch in the concert career bedpost, as it were. I made my Carnegie hall debut, which is what every classical musician wants to do for sure. And it was with a quintet, it was with chamber music. It was a big deal at Carnegie Hall. And I came, I remember coming up to the hall and I was wearing my black tie, my tails, I was dressed. Dressed in my finery, and my name was on the marquee at Carnegie Hall. It was incredible. And that night I had an experience that changed how I thought or it changed the direction of how I started to think. And here's what happened. It was one of the best concerts I ever played in the first half and in the second half, after intermission, I mean, we had a critic from the New York Times there. It was going to be great. And in the second half, in the middle of the second half, I had to do one thing I was not, I was nervous about, which was I had to give a little speech to the audience about it. We used to talk to the audience a little bit in this chamber music group about what we were going to play. But I wasn't a good public speaker. I was an amateur at public speaking. So I was nervous and I got up to talk to the audience and I walked toward the audience as dramatically as I could and I wasn't watching my feet and I fell off the front of the stage. Into the audience? No, I fell off the stage six feet, broke my elbow, fell onto my instrument at my Carnegie hall debut. And, and of course, what did I do as a 20, 22 year old guy, I jumped up and said, I'm okay, folks. Which I absolutely was not okay. I mean, my instrument was all messed up. And you know, and, and, and it's sometimes God gives you a wake up call that you're going in the wrong direction with respect to your ambition. And I remember going home after that concert saying, I think God's trying to tell me something here. And I stewed on that a little bit. It took me a few years, but by the time I was 27 or 28 years old, I realized that I'd been going in the wrong direction and I was never going to be happy. I needed to do something fundamentally that wasn't about my glory, but rather it was about serving the world. And it wasn't going to be being a French horn player. You can serve the world as a French horn player, don't get me wrong. But that wasn't my holy vocation. I needed to do something new. And that's why I went back to college, to find out what I was supposed to do to serve the world.
- [09:32]
Kevin Gentry
Okay, so where you are now, I would say as a public intellectual, a very effective and influential one. You're really at the nexus of helping us all try to understand something that is perhaps more acute than ever before. And what is a purposeful life? Why do we feel so much emptiness? Why is it that achievement doesn't bring the Satisfaction. We think it will. If we just get to that next thing. Oh, if we just get to that house, if we get to that job promotion, if we just do that, everything will be great. What's going on with that? If I could sort of jump ahead and ask.
- [10:10]
Arthur Brooks
Absolutely. And you've jumped ahead a lot because what. I went to college and got my PhD and became a behavioral scientist and wrote hundreds of papers and did all that kind of stuff. And so as like in Seinfeld, they say, and yada, yada, yada, now I write different kinds of books. And what I write about now is love and happiness and purpose and meaning. As you mentioned in the introduction to this, what I'm writing about right now is the most acute crisis of our time. For the last five years, I've been asking the following question, looking at my students at Harvard, talking to people all over the country and world, what's wrong? Why has depression tripled? Why has anxiety doubled? Why is loneliness actually going through the roof? And I get all kinds of popular explanations for it. Like it's just all the, you know, the tech that's around us, which by the way, is a big part of the explanation, or these generational explanations where young people are too fragile or old people took all the resources. Those aren't adequate explanations because it turns out that something has disappeared from life. And so that's what I've been searching for. And here's the answer. Life weirdly and quite suddenly started to become meaningless to millions and millions of people, especially people under 35, most especially college educated adults, and most especially on top of that, women. So college educated women under 35 are the unhappiest people. And you have to ask what's wrong? And the answer is, they say life feels meaningless. So all of my new work is about what's the meaning of life? What does it mean? Number two, why is it missing? And number three, what do you have to do to go get it? And my new book is the Six Ways to Do It.
- [11:50]
Kevin Gentry
Okay, so I jumped ahead to whet everyone's appetite and we're going to put a pin in that. And now we're going to back up a little bit because I want to understand how your own journey got you to this point. Okay, so you become a professor at Syracuse University, you're publishing books, you're publishing these works. And then I can't remember exactly how you got tapped to lead the American Enterprise Institute. I knew you suddenly in that role, but were you dissatisfied in teaching and in higher education, or did this new opportunity just come and like, oh, wow, this is cool. What a new chapter in my life.
- [12:29]
Arthur Brooks
When I went from being a French horn player to becoming a behavioral scientist. When I went, that was a complete retooling of my, of my life. And what it really taught me is that I actually can change. And so the result is that I've tended to build my professional life in kind of 10 year cycles there. Every decade or so I kind of take it down to the studs and start again. So, you know, French horn and then being a behavioral economist and then running a think tank and then running a happiness organization. These are four very distinct phases. But what I found out is that you can actually do that. And by the way, this is one of the reasons that I so love the free enterprise system. Because you can do that if you've got the will and the hard work and personal responsibility. And you also have the privilege of living in a great country where you can do that. Because we're a country of innovators is what it comes down to. One other thing that's worth pointing out, however, Kevin, I teach now, my students, they learn at the business school that they have a linear career path, which is to say that they're going to go up a staircase toward greater amounts of power and fame and especially money. But that's actually not how most of them will design their careers because psychologically that's not satisfying to them. Most of my students are actually spirals, which means that in seven to 12 year cycles they're going to create a new version of themselves. And sometimes it's going to be more money and sometimes it's going to be less. And there's a certain spiral orientation, a psychological profile, as a matter of fact. And if you're a spiraler, which means you need to change man, and you needed to create it of your own imagination. An entrepreneur in the business of you, and you don't do it, you're going to be depressed, you're going to be anxious, you're not going to like your life. And so that kind of sets a lot of my students free. But that's me. I mean, I spiraled more time than times in a Tom Brady pass. I mean, it's like seven to 12 years. It's like time to do it again is what it comes down to. And that's really how I find the most satisfying life. So that's what explains the changes.
- [14:29]
Kevin Gentry
Okay, so when you're at American Enterprise Institute, you're very influential in that role. And there are A lot of conversations about, you know, Arthur Brooks. Da, da, da, da. You said you wanted to move on to something else. You stepped away from a position of significant power and influence to go into this area of happiness. And we might argue now that's more powerful and influential than even what you were doing. But was there a feeling then for you of either an emptiness or just a restlessness or I'm done. I just want to move on to something else. I'm intellectually curious. I want to just try something else and help us understand to the extent it can help each of us think about this, to challenge ourselves.
- [15:13]
Arthur Brooks
So there's a couple of different ways to think of it. One is the psychological orientation of the Spiroller, which is to say around 10 years, you generally start to get an itch that you want to do something new, that you want to do something new with your life. That's part of the psychological profile, and that's what people actually see. And what that means is that what used to be alive doesn't feel so alive as it did before. And if you push that another 10 or 15 years, it's going to be a big problem. But there's another issue as well for people who run organizations. Now, your results may vary because everybody's a little bit different, but one of the theories about effective leadership when you're leading something, when you're a CEO, for example, is that the right cadence is about 10 years. And here's the reason for it. Kevin what the data show pretty clearly, and I used to write about this in my earlier time in academia when I was at Syracuse, is that it takes about five years when you take over an organization to. To get it up to speed on your vision. You got to make the hires, you got to make the fires, you got to raise the money, you got to convince your board, you got to do all that stuff, especially with a nonprofit. And then you get about five years to really run with that vision, to create a whole lot of value with the vision that you've created if it comes to pass. I mean, if it doesn't, then you're going to be out in three or four years because it didn't work. Because. But if it works, you get about five years, but after that, you generally don't get a second vision, and after that, you're running on fumes. And I knew that, and I published on that. And roundabout.
- [16:42]
Kevin Gentry
You knew that from your research?
- [16:43]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, I knew that from my research. And by the way, I'm completely dedicated to finding the truth in My research, which is why when I do happiness research, I live according to what I find. So. So no joke, I eat my own cooking, as they say. And so after about 10 years, I was paying attention to this and somebody reminded me that I had published this. And so what you going to do? And here's what happens, Kevin, if you're a leader a lot, past 10 years, again, not everybody, but a lot, you're going to leave. Sooner or later, you're going to leave, but you're either going to leave before you feel ready or you're going to leave on somebody else's terms. And I. I know which door I want. I don't want to leave on somebody else's terms. I don't want to get a shove. So I said to myself, I got my 10 years, I got my second five. I know that a measure of great leadership is what happens after you leave, because that's the strength of the organization. And so I put in my notice 16 months before I was going to leave and went through a big, big, big search and trained the new guy. And the truth of the matter is that the organization's better than when I was there. Not because I'm so perfect, but because we did it right.
- [17:53]
Kevin Gentry
That is the mark, I think, of a very good leader is what happens after them, and which is in May. In some ways that's counterintuitive because we think, well, nobody can do it as I did, but truly continuing on that effort. Okay, so questions? Did you say that some, your friends, mentors, did they kind of nudge you a little bit or say, hey, buddy, you've been saying this. You need to practice what you preach, or were you kind of there, you were looking for affirmation for them, or how do others help you? Because again, I think we're all trying to figure out how do we live this life of meaning? We want to learn from you, Arthur.
- [18:29]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, well, I got nudged by a couple of people that I'm very close to and who truly love me, friends who I'm really close to, including Tully Friedman, who's the great private equity pioneer. He started Hellman and Friedman and Friedman, Fleischer and Lowe, two of these epically successful private equity companies. And he and I are very close. We've been very close friends for a long time. We've traveled all over the world together and no secrets. And he said, you're getting tired. You're getting tired. I mean, not tired as a person. I mean, I was 55 years old, for Pete's sake. You Know, I had lots and lots of years left in my career. He said, but you. You look like you don't enjoy it as much as you used to. And you've always talked about 10 years, what's the plan? And by the way, he was the chairman of my board, and so, you know, he had a big interest in not losing the CEO because it was going great, as you know. I mean, you were involved in our organization, too.
- [19:21]
Kevin Gentry
Yeah, but good for him.
- [19:23]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he helped me and as well as my other great friend Dan Daniello, the founder of Carlisle, who was the successor chairman. And together, the three of us, we really put together an idea on how to transition me out, transition a new person. And they were honest with me and loving with me, and that was the best thing that ever happened to my career.
- [19:44]
Kevin Gentry
Well, if you would, just a little bit at the importance of people like that. I mean, obviously it's pretty clear they're important. You just said that. But any sort of advice. I gotta say, I feel like at different times, I look back at a change I made. I'm like, okay, I'm glad I made the change. I wish I'd done it a few years before.
- [20:01]
Arthur Brooks
And I.
- [20:01]
Kevin Gentry
It was in a period of sort of rationalizing or justifying. Why didn't I just do it? I wish somebody had just kind of kicked me a little bit. But I'm responsible for myself. How important? I mean, what should we take away from this?
- [20:14]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Okay, so a couple of things. Number one is you need people around you who tell you the truth. That doesn't mean they're right, but they need to tell you the truth as they see it. Wise people around you who have your interests at heart. That's what you need. You need a team. You need a team of people who will actually do that. It's very good if your spouse is that person. It's very good if you have a living parent who will do that. It's very good if you have friends. And so, you know, Tully Friedman is more or less the age that my parents would have been. My parents died young, and so he's played that quasi fatherly role for me. As a matter of fact, that's number one. But number two, there is a way to know when it's time to change. There's a rule that has to do with your internal knowledge and your internal data that are kind of beyond your grasp. And this is actually kind of a neuroscientific concept. All of the deepest meaning in your life, which gets back to the book. I know, we're going to talk about it later. It's all in the right hemisphere of your brain and you don't have very much language ability in the right hemisphere of your brain. You know things but can't quite articulate them. You feel things in the right part of your brain, which is what people will call gut. Here's how to understand your gut about whether it's time to change and which option that you should take. Okay, so as you assess something, you should think, okay, there's three things that you can feel about your current job or a possible future job. Number one is excitement. Excitement. Everybody knows that. It's like, it's great, I can't wait to get out of bed and go to work. Or that opportunity, it just lights me up. The second is fear. And fear is not horrible, but it's certainly not pleasant. Like I could fail. That could be a bad decision. That could be failure. And the last is deadness, where you feel dead inside about something. Those are the three feelings about your current job and a possible future job. Here's the right, here's the right mixture for to know whether you should leave because you don't have this or whether you should take something because it does present this. It should be 80% excitement, 20% fear and 0% deadness. If you can as close to that as you can actually get now, it shouldn't be zero percent fear because if you have zero percent fear, you're going to be bored in two years out of your mind. And fear means this might fail. Right now deadness is really important because there are all kinds of things, Kevin, I could find all kinds of cool jobs for you. You're a talented, hard working, well known guy and most of them that I would come to you with, which is when a headhunter calls you, you're like, it makes me feel dead inside. Complete emptiness, right? Say, hey Kevin, yo, I want to be the president of a state university. It's like makes me feel dead inside. Perhaps that doesn't mean that's a bad job. It just means that you know that that's a bad job for you. So here's how you know when it's time to leave. Because deadness is increasing, fear is decreasing and deadness is taking over Excitement. That's how you know. Then what should you do? You know, because excitement's real high. Fear is non trivial and serious and deadness is near zero. That's how you know.
- [23:24]
Kevin Gentry
Okay, so in that case, when Tully and said hey, you know, tapped you on the shoulder and said, you might want to think about something different. First of all, was, did that hurt to hear that or were you like, oh, thank you, I needed to hear that.
- [23:39]
Arthur Brooks
Of course it hurt. But it didn't really hurt like you hurt my feelings. It more hurt kind of like, you know, asking somebody to kick you and then they do.
- [23:51]
Kevin Gentry
But, you know, a challenge many of us have, you know, with a friend or a loved one, is how do we tell them that I don't want to hurt their feelings.
- [23:59]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah.
- [24:00]
Kevin Gentry
But it's obviously for the best. Okay.
- [24:02]
Arthur Brooks
No, no. But, you know, that's. I have relationships with other people where they say, love is honesty. I need honesty. I will not put up with you buttering me up. And friends who are close enough that, you know, when you're not getting the truth, you're here.
- [24:15]
Kevin Gentry
That was, it was a great insight. When I interviewed Governor Glenn Youngkin, he said that the role of the mentor is not to affirm the thing that you're doing, it's to challenge you on the thing that you're not doing or doing wrong. One last thing. Did you feel like, what was the element of fear when you were going to step away because the future is unknown? What was the element of fear for you?
- [24:41]
Arthur Brooks
Well, the element of fear is whenever you know you're going to do something new, it's, number one, that it was a bad idea, and number two, that it was a good idea, but you're not good at it. And what is something truly new? If you truly go down to the studs, that's a. That's, that's real. And so the truth is 20% is the ideal amount of fear. I was always more like 50% fear because I was really, really making big changes. And it might be foolish, but I mean, hugely spiraling. And so that would. That turned out to be the only way that I could, could get it done. But when I left aei, as president of aei, I actually did something I recommend to a lot of people for self examination, you know, to figure out what these proportions are. I did. What I ordinarily do is I walked a pilgrimage. Now, I'm a Catholic, and when Catholics have a big question that they don't have an answer to, they go for a long walk. That's as old as the hills, man. And so I walk the Camino de Santiago, which is hundreds of miles across northern Spain. And you walk and you walk and all you have to do is walk. That's your whole job. Walk and think and pray and you don't use devices. And I was with my, my soulmate, my, my beloved wife now of 35 years. And, and, and that was the whole idea. And the, the, the belief is, and it's a metaphysical belief in almost every religion that if you walk ambulate into pain and blisters and kind of a tenderness, that you won't find what you're looking for, but it will find you. And sure enough, as I was finishing this up in Santiago de Compostela, which is this ancient city in northern Spain, I came to understand that what I was supposed to do for the rest of my life, or at least for the next 10 years, is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas to return to my roots as a scientist and to augment what I knew with what was really cutting edge. And so I took a position back in academia to build this, actually an organization. I have colleagues all over the place in a lab up at Harvard, and we have a company in Northern Virginia dedicated to the media parts of what we do. And we can't keep up with it. We absolutely can't keep up with it. We get a thousand calls a year to go give talks about the science of happiness to people all over the world. It took a couple of years. It did. It took a couple of scary years, man. There was a possibility also Covid happened right after this, after this change, but it made it possible for, actually, for a lot of thinking and a lot of writing. And now it's just, it's cooking. It's cooking.
- [27:14]
Kevin Gentry
All right, well, congratulations to you, by the way. Very, very impressive in and of itself. And I want to talk a little bit about this next chapter in your life. You wrote this awesome book From Strength to Strength around this period. And I wish you'd read it, written it 10 years before so that I could have benefited from it then. But it was very beneficial to me. I bought lots of copies. I've given it to a lot of friends. I've told them to read it. Tell us a little bit about what you'd stumbled upon and what you wanted to convey. And then I've got a very important follow up question.
- [27:49]
Arthur Brooks
Sure. My first research project as I took on this next phase of life was to write a book about how people transition. Because there's a lot of research about how your intelligence changes. And many neuroscientists believe that the reason for burnout in midlife has nothing to do with work, life, balance. It has to do with the fact that your natural abilities change, but you don't know that, so you're living in the past. And I wanted to examine that a little bit more now. I interviewed a lot of people. I traveled all over the country asking very successful people about their lives. And I found that almost nobody recognize the fact that what made them great in their 20s and 30s was not what they were really good at in their 50s and 60s and 70s. So I wrote a book about that. And part of it was because it's me search, not research. Kevin I wanted to know in this phase of my own life, what I should be doing. I noticed that I was a much better writer and teacher in my 50s than I had been in my 30s. And I wanted to know why. And the reason for it is basically this. You're very high in what neuroscientists call fluid intelligence in your 20s and 30s. That's working memory and. And focus and innovation and your ability to solve stuff on your own. And that makes you a big star in the law firm, and it makes you an incredibly good stock analyst and. Or even a dynamite electrician. What you have later is less of that because that peaks around age 39 and starts to decline. And in mid-40s, people say it's like, I don't know. I mean, I'm not bad at my job, but I'm not getting better, and I don't like that. This is no fun. Humans want progress. We're made for progress. And when you don't feel like you're making progress, you don't like what you're doing. And that explains burnout for most people if you're a dentist, the same thing as if you're a poet. So what you have, according to this body of literature, is that you have something not fluid intelligence. What you have in abundance is crystallized intelligence, which is your ability to use all of your knowledge as if it were the New York Public Library. You're slower, your working memory is slower, you're less innovative, but you're a much better teacher, judge of character, mentor, and pattern recognizer because you've got all these data. And so what I found was that Whereas in my 30s I wrote these very technical mathematical treatises, in my 50s, I write for big audiences. And I thought, you know, this is so interesting. I'm going to take that theory and I'm going to write it up in a popular book about how people can use that to structure the back half of their lives in a more effective way than they even live the first half, because they deserve to be happier if they're on the right intelligence curve. And that's the book that you've got in your hand right now.
- [30:31]
Kevin Gentry
Hey there. This is Kevin Gentry, your host for the Going Big Podcast. And I've got a special message for our listeners today who lead nonprofit organizations. The Going Big Podcast is actually a product of 10X Strategies. After more than 40 years in leadership and nonprofit fundraising, I launched 10X Strategies to help really great causes transform their effectiveness by 10xing their fundraising. And I'd love to help causes as great as yours, too, and I hope you'll reach out. What do we do? Our team will perform an assessment of your current fundraising and marketing to identify the greatest opportunities for big growth. We'll put together a strategic fundraising plan that can guide that growth. And then we'll come alongside and train your team, coach your leadership, and really begin to implement the tools that can help you go big tools in artificial intelligence, a lot of innovations and prospecting. Lots of ways that can deepen your relationship with major donors, form much stronger partnerships, get to the level of mega gifts and big legacy gifts, and really help you optimize lifetime donor value. So if you're interested, check out our website. It's 10 x strategies.com t e n x strategies.com and would love to partner with you. Now back to today's episode. Well, thank you. You are the reason that I made a significant change in my own professional life. And now I spend time coaching and teaching and speaking. I don't know how, but I am in it. But it's. At least it allowed me to understand that I wasn't a loser. I wasn't just because I was losing energy or changing different ways and done that. I just needed to move on to a different chapter. And so thank you.
- [32:25]
Arthur Brooks
Of course.
- [32:26]
Kevin Gentry
Here's the point.
- [32:27]
Arthur Brooks
I'm so happy to hear that.
- [32:28]
Kevin Gentry
Oh, well, thank you. I never got a chance to thank you in person, but as you. You and I are roughly the same age. I'm 62 and 62. 65 is that age, at least in the United States. A lot of parts of the world, but certainly the United States. Retirement. It's time to retire. It's time for you to retire. I mean, you really should. You should just enjoy your grandchildren, do some hobby or something like that. Well, I'm sure you've done lots of work on this. I think I've heard you speak about it, but it creates this effect and it's like, oh, okay, we're done. And I feel like a lot of my friends and contemporaries have that feeling sometimes like, oh, I. I guess I'm done. Yeah, but speak to that, Arthur.
- [33:12]
Arthur Brooks
For sure, for sure. One of the reasons is that people who are truly linear, not spirals, they don't have any concept of what a next stage of their life might actually be. That's especially true when they're so busy in business or something, they've never had an opportunity to think seriously about it. And so they get to a particular age and they get a little nudge, or they have a health crisis and they just stop. And that's. Can be catastrophically disequilibrating emotionally. Really, really hard. Which is one of the reasons that the more influence and status that you have professionally, that before retirement, the more likely you are to experience a clinical depression after your retirement. You literally change your brain chemistry when you suddenly stop having this high status and this high level of influence. So I work with lots and lots and lots of people about not retiring, but changing what you do. Now, for some of them, it means actually going on to something professionally that they can maintain for a long time without working 12 hours a day. For other people, it's actually looking at how they need to structure their lives in such a way that they're doing something productive that simply isn't paid. But the truth of the matter is inactivity is the wrong strategy for retirement. That's the wrong strategy for absolutely everybody to say, just go to the. Go to Florida. Just go to Florida, man. Everything will be okay when you're in Florida. Are you kidding me? And have dinner at 4 and. No, no, no, no. I mean, I got nothing against Florida, but the whole point is you got to have a plan of something to do. The happiest people who retire, they retire because they can no longer afford to keep doing what they were doing when they were in their active working years. They. They can't afford it because they got too much to do. They're getting pulled away from it. They have all of these things that they actually want to do. Now, some might be classified as leisure, like what they're learning and they're deepening their spiritual lives and deepening their relationships with their friends and with their grandchildren. But some of it might be things that may not pay very well, but what they've always wanted to do, that exploit their crystallized intelligence. They want to teach, and they don't have time to teach when they're actually sitting in the corner office one way or the other before you're 65 years old, a long time before you're 65 years old, you need a plan on what your next spiral is going to be.
- [35:28]
Kevin Gentry
Wow. Thank you. By the way, you and I know people like Charles Koch and Tom Smith and these others who are in their 90s, and they're still so sharp and vibrant doing these things. They're like, is it them? But I think what I'm hearing you say is you've got to find that thing that's going to keep you active and keep you going for sure.
- [35:46]
Arthur Brooks
And you'll notice about Charles Koch, whom you know intimately and I've known quite well for. For a couple of decades now. When he was in his 60s, he started to change what he was doing. He started to change his work life away from just focusing on Koch Industries and more on what he was actually engaged in philanthropically and how he was actually trying to shape the society in which he wanted to raise his children and grandchildren, the country he wanted to leave. And ultimately, he does pass on. And what that was was the classic move into crystallized intelligence. He did it, too. I mean, he's still running the company, but he's using his energies to pass on ideas as a teacher in a different way.
- [36:28]
Kevin Gentry
That's amazing. By the way, again, going back 20 years ago is when your book came out. He and I were talking about your book and these. It's amazing how this all comes together. All right, Another chapter in your life is your work with the Dalai Lama, with Oprah Winfrey. You're awesome about just thinking about who you can work with and how you can take these ideas to do audiences and just how people can hear you in a different manner. And you were so good in recent years. And also in trying to encourage us to think about how we can talk to people who disagree with us for some reason, because things have gotten so acrimonious. Speak a little bit to that. And then I want to wrap up with the present day.
- [37:14]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. I wrote a book in 2019 called Love youe Enemies. And obviously, my agenda failed. That was when I was most actively writing about public policy. But the truth is, I started that. That project in about 2015, before the first election of Donald Trump. And that was in a period that it seemed a little bit more innocent. Love your enemies. Thank you, Kevin. That book was written because I saw very clearly in the data and everyday experience that we were going toward kind of an ideological death struggle in this country where small differences in ideology would be blown up into major social differences and differences in our. Our basic ability to talk to each other. And that that's really dangerous for our country and it's horrible for our happiness. That's what it comes down to. It's a terrible quality of life and it's, and it's. That becomes a society in decline. Quite frankly. Now I don't think it's inevitable. Which is why I wrote love your enemies and love your enemies, by the way, of course. It's funny, I was giving a talk on this at a big state university. Terrific audience. And a kid comes up afterwards like, I love that title. How'd you think of it? We need better education. Matthew 5:44. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. That is the most subversive idea that has ever entered our society. As a matter of fact, that is the reason for the Enlightenment is the idea that you don't have to hate your enemies, that you don't have to hate people with whom you disagree. Before the Enlightenment might made right that the only way that you could, you could come to terms with somebody with whom you disagreed was coercion, was force. But the Enlightenment said that's the worst way. The best way is persuasion. And the only way you're going to persuade somebody is getting on the same side of the table with them and say, I got a better way to do what you want to get done. Okay. So I wrote that book about this whole concept that we don't have to be at each other's throats. And I realized, look it, I'm not some big victim that this wasn't, you know, didn't win the day and I wasn't elected president, United States. On the contrary, I know that the guy who coined that phrase, it didn't go so well for him. So it's just not always a popular idea. But it's a perpetual idea that comes back. And I realized I was going to spend the rest of my life making this case. And in indeed I have. And I really believe that that's the case. But I needed to live those ideas myself. So I thought to myself, who are the people that you would not expect somebody like me running a think tank in Washington D.C. to talk about and share ideas with? And I made a list. I said, I want to start publishing in the New York Times because I want to have access to the audience of these particular people to talk about big ideas and send a bouquet of flowers to people and say, I have a. I think I have a better way of getting, getting at your objectives. Maybe I don't. And if I don't, I Want to know first if I'm wrong? I want to know first, not last. You know, no pride and rightness here. And I want to make progress. And I went to see the Dalai Lama, somebody I've always admired, and now somebody who's a treasured friend and whom I love and who's had a huge influence on me in my life. And I wanted to talk about, you know, how he understood a good society. And Oprah Winfrey called me, actually, because she read From Strength to Strength and she said, why don't we write a book together? We. We became fast friends.
- [40:23]
Kevin Gentry
Wow.
- [40:24]
Arthur Brooks
Not around politics and all this nonsense about the fact that we both want to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love. That's really, really what it comes down to.
- [40:34]
Kevin Gentry
That is awesome. And how appropriate, too, that we're having this conversation during Lent in the lead up to Easter. Thank you. All right. Okay. Now, the present day, you've noted that we have this. This crisis of emptiness that in our pursuit of achievement is that is what has led to the emptiness or why are we at this point right now, in your judgment, that we are all struggling in our search for meaning. Man's search for meaning. Viktor Frankl, so very important and incredible and his story now, a long, long time ago, but this space now. Tell us more.
- [41:21]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. So Viktor Frankl wrote in the 1950s about his experience in Auschwitz as a concentration camp prisoner that the people who died were the ones who didn't have a why, and the people who lived had a why for living. There was a reason for them to live. They had a purpose for living. And that's so critically important. Now, the achievement orientation is not culpable, is not the problem that we have today. On the contrary, United States is a country made up of strivers. We are a country made up of the world's greatest entrepreneurs. And how do we know? Because they're from immigrant stock. Immigration is the most entrepreneurial thing that people have ever done. They put all their capital at risk in search of some sort of big reward. It's a probably a genetic mutation that tends to be the norm in a place like this. There's nothing wrong with achievement. The problem is the form that we actually tried to make achievement take. That was a wrong turn that we've taken in American society. And not just American society, society all over the world. What happened was, and this is what the data looked like. The explosion of depression and anxiety actually coincides with the feelings of meaninglessness. Starting about 2008, it was always the same bumping around since the 1970s, keeping data like meaning. Meaning meaninglessness. You know, not a big part of the population says, my life feels meaningless. And after 2008, it explodes. And that's the best predictor of depression and anxiety. Now, we all know what happened after 2008. We know what happened. The first smartphone was delivered in 2007. It was in basically everybody's pocket. By 2009, the apps were starting to multiply. By 2010, social media was on everybody's devices. By 2011, and pretty soon, the way that we work, the way that we date, the way that we hang out, the way that we spend our time, the way that we entertain ourselves was on the small screen and based in technology. I got nothing against technology, but the truth of the matter is that what we now know neuroscientifically is that it hijacks your brain, and it hijacks your brain in a very specific way. And I'll explain it like this. What tech does is that it renders everything as complicated problems. And what complicated problems means they're hard to solve, but with enough computing capacity, you can solve them once and for all. An app that finds pizza is a complicated problem. Your toaster is a complicated problem. These are all complicated problems. Driving your car is a complicated problem. And what the technology does is it answers and fixes one complicated problem problem after another. But what we really care about in life are complex problems. Those are the problems that are super easy to understand but have no solution. So, Kevin, your marriage is a complex problem. I defy you to solve your marriage. That's why you love your marriage, because it's completely. It's living, it's human. Here's where it gets interesting. Complicated problems are actually dealt with in the left hemisphere of your brain. Complex problems, the things you care about the most. The mystery, the meaning, the love, the happiness, the why of life is in the right hemisphere of your brain. If you spend all day long using technology, you're shoving yourself into the left hemisphere of your brain where you not only do you not know the meaning of life, you can't even ask the questions.
- [44:44]
Kevin Gentry
All right, you've spoken about your personal faith. What role does faith have in this? And why is religious affiliation and participation declining right now?
- [45:02]
Arthur Brooks
So those are two questions, of course, but they're interrelated, as you can imagine, what we need to do to find the meaning of life. Number one, we need to get clean. And you're not going to throw your phone in the ocean. So this book has a Whole chapter on protocols for using technology that are science based, verifiably true in a way to actually start using your brain in a healthy way. You can have a phone and still have plenty of time in the right hemisphere of your brain, but you have to have protocols that you're actually using, and those protocols are very clearly laid out. But then you have to start doing things that used to be normal, that no longer are. Old stuff. You know, I. My great grandfather is a man named Leroy Brooks from Olathe, Kansas. And Leroy, I don't know very much about him, but I do know one thing. I'm going to make a strong assumption that he never went home to his wife, my great grandmother Mary Ellen Brooks, and said, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. You know, I guarantee you he didn't say that because his brain was working the way that it was supposed to. The solution to our problem of meaning today is to live more like Leroy. Now, I don't want to live like him. Like, you know, get a blister on my foot and get sepsis and die. And I want to have, like, retro racist attitudes. That's not what I want. What I want is to do things that he automatically did without thinking about and. But that I have to. I have to do on purpose, like worshiping, like, good old Leroy, like practicing my religion, like looking to the divine, like making myself small and making something else large. Why? Because that's a perfect example. It's one of six techniques in the book that will shove you right back into the right hemisphere of your brain. That's what it comes down to. Now, why are people less religious? Because they have this new religion. It's called left brain technology. That's what it is. This is one of the reasons that we're secularizing, is because this has become almost godlike, but weirdly empty. Because when you're actually standing in the. In the presence of the divine, it's deeply satisfying. And when you're standing in the presence of the simulacrum, the simulated divine, it's weirdly empty. And that's how you know you're on the wrong side of your brain.
- [47:22]
Kevin Gentry
All right, well, social media is not going away. No, technology is not going away. We're just going to see more and more dynamic innovation. How do we do that? I've been trying. I've been following advice that was given me recently. I would invariably start the day, first thing, pick up my phone, look at what's going on in the world, Messages I missed, et CETERA it was a terrible way to start.
- [47:45]
Arthur Brooks
It's a terrible way to start.
- [47:46]
Kevin Gentry
Now I've established the habit. I read scripture and I pray first before touching the phone. I don't care what's going on. I'm going to do that first.
- [47:54]
Arthur Brooks
First, yeah.
- [47:55]
Kevin Gentry
Do you have any other react to that but other advice about how in this technology driven world we can be more like your grandfather.
- [48:05]
Arthur Brooks
So you're not going to get rid of the technology. You're just not. You won't be able to get your boarding pass, you won't be able to get in your bank account, forget about it. But it doesn't matter. You don't have to. I mean, you can live in the modern world, but there's basically three things to do that will fundamentally change how you interact with your devices and make it possible for your brain to start working right again. Number one is the first hour of the day. Don't look at your device for the whole first hour of the day. Now that actually starts the night before because your phone shouldn't be next to your bed. Your phone should be in a different part of the house, preferably in a different floor of the house if you live on more than one floor. If you're in a flat, it's a different kit, but plugged in. In a closet. I literally plug my phone in the closet and different floor. Now, after about three weeks, you'll be so out of the habit of looking at it at night that you can have it as your alarm clock after that. And you won't look at it because it's like there's nothing to look at in the middle of the night. You won't wake up to go to the bathroom and say, I wonder who texted me. You won't because you're out of the habit. You got to break the habit. But that's the way to do it. You're not sleeping with your phone. You don't look at it for the first hour. And that's super hard, that first hour, because you. Right. But that's a really, really good discipline. Second is it shouldn't be on the table while you eat. So don't have it on the table while you eat. Now, human beings are made to have oxytocin exchange. That's a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone. And we get it with eye contact with our kin, and most notably when we're sitting around a campfire in the late Pleistocene shoving yak meat into our mouth or something. That's when we get a Lot of oxytocin exchange. But the studies are very clear. If you simply have your phone and you have it face down on the table, it will distract you and cut. Cut off your oxytocin flow. That will hurt your relationships. That's number two, three. It'll hurt yourself. Two, three. Last hour before you go to sleep. So it goes into the closet the last hour before you go to sleep. Okay? Now that's important because you actually need that for proper sleep architecture, proper functioning of the pineal gland, proper melatonin production, all of that basic neurophysiology. But it's also really important for you to connect with your loved ones. I also recommend, Kevin, that you spend. You read to your wife or you read to each other. You pray together in that last hour, and that when you're talking, you're giving each other a ton of eye contact. So there's more oxytocin. You'll sleep better. And it's really, really good for your marriage. So I don't just have phone protocols. I have love protocols that I talk about a lot as well. And they all interact with each other. So first hour of the morning, mealtime, last hour at night. If you do this with real seriousness, after three weeks, your relationship to your phone will be fundamentally different.
- [50:41]
Kevin Gentry
Well, I love that you're giving us all this very practical and actionable advice. So you've got this great new book coming out, the next one, the meaning of your life. Tell us a little bit more. I mean, Arthur, we're celebrating America's 250th birthday this year. We should be optimistic about the future. We should be hopeful, we should be full of gratitude. But we're facing this emptiness. Help us out.
- [51:09]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, well, for sure. And it's a funny thing because one of the reasons that people aren't more optimistic than they are is because life feels weirdly fake. A lot of young people will say, I feel like I'm living in a simulation. It's kind of like the Matrix. You remember the movie the Matrix, right? I'm going to depress you right now. That came out 27 years ago, but that was a great movie. That was one of the most popular movies of 1999. And that was a movie that was a far out science fiction theme where it's the year 2199, but everybody thinks it's 1999 because they're living in pods being pacified in a simulation. And the simulation is being run by an outside artificial intelligence, a mechanical artificial intelligence that's feeding on their energy, AKA their attention. We're in the Matrix now, that was super crazy in 1999, it actually happened by about 2020. That's really when the Matrix took over most people's lives. The way that that works. And when you're in the Matrix, everything feels fake. That's the reason. And the reason it feels fake is because you're getting a left brain simile simulation of what you want in your right brain. You get fake relationships and fake friendship and fake progress in your gaming and fake work through the zoom screen and fake communication. Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. And you can't fake meaning is what it comes down to. So when all these wonderful things about our lives, our anniversaries, our birthdays, Christmas Day, the 250th anniversary of our country, why does it all feel kind of thin? Why does it feel like unsatisfactory? And the reason is because we're seeing it all through the lens of the Matrix, the lens of the simulation. So the more that we do these things, the more life's going to feel more meaningful. There's a lot of things that we can do. This book is the six things that Science Based. Six Things that you can do to Live. Like Leroy Brooks today. Very practical, just like what we talked about here. And in six months, the meaning will be back. And you need to start now so that by July 4, 2026, you can have a great time at your 250th picnic in real life.
- [53:28]
Kevin Gentry
All right, so, ladies and gentlemen, before we sign off, you may want to pre order. The Meaning of your Life comes out March 31, right?
- [53:35]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Yep, yep.
- [53:36]
Kevin Gentry
And then you've got a special webinar OR program on March 27th. Tell us a little bit about that. I'll put it in the show notes. But it's the Meaning of youf Life. Virtual experience. Experience. Just tell us a little bit about it.
- [53:47]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, so this is the first time I've done something like this, but this is such a big release on such a big topic. And I think it's so important today that we have a major worldwide virtual book class. Effectively, it's a. It's a master class on how to find the meaning of your Life. It'll be four hours long. It'll be on March 27th. And you can go to the website themeingofyourlife.com or just go to arthurbrooks.com, my name, and you can sign up for it. It's completely free. If you buy the book, you can be in the Zoom Studio. That'll give you special access to all of our guests and talk to some of our fun guests. And if you're on YouTube, that's great too. But you'll learn all about what we can do from me. I'll talk about the book. But we've also got great people in person. I'm going to have Rainn Wilson, the actor, my close friend who's there with me, Hoda Kotb, Oprah Winfrey, Dan Buettner, who did the Blue Zones. We've got Chip Conley, who started the Modern Elder Academy. We've got all kinds of wonderful people, Maria Shriver. All of you know these people who care about this topic so very much. And so it'll be fun. And my wife Esther is going to be doing it with me too, because we have a whole session on how to fall back in love in real life and find meaning in your marriage is one of the things that we'll be talking about as well. So join us. It's going to be so fun. Themeing of your life dot com.
- [55:04]
Kevin Gentry
Awesome. We'll put this in the show notes too. So good. Okay, Arthur, this has been so awesome. Thank you for anyone listening around the world who's at this point, okay, I'm just not happy. I'm not. I'm anxious. I'm just. How should they challenge themselves at this point to begin to think about doing something different in addition to getting your book, Enjoying this?
- [55:32]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, for sure. What's the break glass plan? What's the one thing to do? So it's the one thing that'll actually get you started on this. Here's what it is. Here's what it is. When you are most miserable. The reason is because you're effectively looking in a mirror and that's perpetuating the cycle of the meaninglessness that you feel. The way that you can break that cycle immediately right now is by going and doing something with love for somebody else to love is to will the good of another person. That is to get outside of yourself. I know sometimes you don't want to do it. I got it. You don't want to do it. Take the opposite signal from what you're actually feeling. Get up off the couch, call somebody and say, I was thinking about you and I want you to know how much you mean to me. I want you to know how grateful I am for our friendship. Or go help somebody in some way. Go bring dinner to mom, whatever it happens to be, do something unbidden as an act of love. And I promise you in that moment, you'll get a word window onto the meaning of your life. Is it a permanent solution? No, you got to make it a way of life. But that's the break glass plan that everybody can do right now.
- [56:39]
Kevin Gentry
Awesome. Arthur Brooks, you're the best. Thanks for being here.
- [56:42]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you, Kevin. So great to see you.
- [56:44]
Kevin Gentry
All the best.
- [56:45]
Arthur Brooks
You too.
- [56:47]
Kevin Gentry
Thanks for tuning in to the Going Big Podcast. I hope today's conversation left you feeling energized and ready to tackle your biggest goals. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps spread the word and it gets these inspiring stories out to more people. You can also find more content, resources and updates at our website, goingbigpodcast.com Remember, the only limits are the ones you don't challenge, the limits that you impose on yourself. Keep pushing, keep growing, and above all, keep going big. See you next time on the Going Big Podcast.