The Two Types of People Who Never Find Happiness

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Old School with Shilo Brooks

Episode: The Two Types of People Who Never Find Happiness
Date: March 26, 2026
Host: Shilo Brooks
Guest: Arthur Brooks

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Main Theme and Purpose

This episode features a compelling conversation between host Shilo Brooks and happiness expert Arthur Brooks, centering on the enduring insights of Seneca’s essay On the Shortness of Life. Together, they explore the fundamental obstacles to happiness—ambition and idle distraction—as diagnosed by Seneca, blending ancient wisdom with modern behavioral science. The discussion ranges from life’s purpose, the science and philosophy of happiness, the role of mortality, and the significance of love and leisure, to practical strategies for living a more fulfilling life.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Arthur Brooks’ Unusual Path to Happiness Studies

• Biography: Arthur shares his journey from aspiring to be the world’s greatest French horn player to becoming a leading academic on happiness.
  • “I spent all my 20s in what my parents called my gap decade ... performing first in chamber music and then the Barcelona City Orchestra.” (02:00)
• Motivation: Contrary to being a naturally upbeat person, Arthur’s own melancholia drove his fascination with happiness science.
  • “Happiness is hard for me ... I wanted to know the secrets to it, and I sort of felt guilty about it.” (03:45)

2. Genetics, Habits, and the Pursuit of Happiness

• Genetic Predisposition: 50% of happiness is heritable, but habits matter.
  • “If you’ve got gloomy parents and grandparents ... I need better habits.” (04:57)
• Epiphany on the Camino de Santiago: Grounded his life’s mission in “lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas.” (05:51)

3. The Essence of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life

• Seneca’s Significance: Advisor to Nero and core Stoic, positing that life is only short if wasted.
  • “He was no Nero fan, but he wanted to make Rome as good as it could be.” (08:44)
• Central Message:
  • “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” (14:09, quoting Seneca)

4. The Two Types Who Miss Happiness: Strivers and Slackers (11:38)

• Seneca’s Diagnosis:
  • Strivers: Overachievers missing life in constant ambition.
    • “My students at Harvard ... are all strivers, but they don’t have very high enjoyment of their lives, which Seneca would say, that’s a big problem.” (12:09)
  • Slackers: The perennially distracted, wasting life on idle pleasures or distractions.
    • “What they’re doing is ... scrolling Instagram and YouTube shorts. ... Like you’re sitting in an airport lounge waiting for a flight that never takes off.” (12:30)
• Ideal: The middle space where one is “fully alive right now.” (12:52)

5. The Trap of Striving and the Myth of Earned Love

• Addiction to Achievement:
  • “Love awfully feels earned to me. ... They become addicted to winning, addicted to the hunt, addicted to the grind.” (15:46)
  • Memorable Analogy:
    • “Anybody who's addicted to meth hates meth. ... Anybody who's a striver ... they just don’t know how to stop.” (16:06)

6. The Culture of Vice and Pleasure versus Enjoyment

• Seneca on Vices: Modern culture encourages vice at every turn, but “pleasure doesn’t lead to happiness, only enjoyment does.” (18:20)
• Neuroscientific View:
  • “Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon ... an animal impulse ... The way to turn that vice or source of pleasure into actual happiness is by adding two things: people and memory.” (18:50-19:28)

7. Science and Its Limits in Explaining Happiness

• Humanities vs. Reductionism: Shilo pushes back against reducing love to “dopamine hits.”
  • Arthur: “It is inadequate to reduce everything to this complicated terminology. But it’s helpful to have a little model, because ... you can stand in awe of the real thing.” (23:28)
• The ‘God module’: “The big, deep why questions that are ineffable ... are largely processed in the right hemisphere of the brain.” (22:17)

8. Mortality and the Sweetness of Scarcity

• What Facing Death Teaches: Mortality intensifies life’s sweetness.
  • “Scarcity leads to the sense of sweetness of something ... Once you can’t escape [death], you’ll be free of trying to escape it. And then you’ll be fully alive today.” (27:29)
• Cognitive Dissonance: We can’t truly imagine non-existence; confronting this helps clarify values.
  • “We can’t conceive of non-existence. So non-existence is beyond our cognitive capacity. And this creates a huge cognitive dissonance.” (29:07)

9. The Meaning of Leisure and the Life of Philosophy

• Leisure Defined: Traditionally, “an excellent pursuit for which you’re not compensated with the world’s rewards.” (31:42)
• Modern Application: Deepening relationships, faith or sense of life, and learning for intrinsic good.
  • “Your life actually has balance, and then it’s worth going to work. But ... there’s a reason to come home.” (32:15)

10. What Seneca Misses: The Importance of Love

• Arthur’s Critique:
  • “What’s most missing: Other people. ... If you’re not loving others ... you’re not gonna be happy.” (36:58)
  • “There’s one thing you need to know about happiness ... you need to give your heart away. You need to love and be loved.” (38:16)

11. Suffering as Part of the Search for Meaning and Love

• Risk of Loving: Bemoaning the “culture of fear” that holds people back from connection.
  • “Giving your heart away is the ultimate entrepreneurial experience. ... it’s part of the product. It’s a feature, not a bug.” (39:57)

12. Moral Courage in Divided Times

• Notable Quote (41:28):
  • “The mark of moral courage, the mark of character, is not to stand up against people with whom you disagree. It’s to stand up against people with whom you agree on behalf of those with whom you disagree.” (41:28, attributed to Arthur’s father)
• Enlightenment Values: Listening and standing up for opposing voices strengthens society.
  • “The mark of moral courage ... is standing up for the people with whom you disagree ... in front of the people, trying to shut them down on your own side.” (43:11)

13. Arthur Brooks’ New Book: The Meaning of Your Life

• Origins: Sparked by seeing worsening student mental health: “What used to be happier was ... unhappier than the rest of the country. ... And so I started looking at the data.” (45:24)
• Content: Explores the meaning of meaning, why it’s hard to find now, and practical strategies for finding it. (46:58)
• Release Date: March 31, 2026.

14. Lightning Round Highlights

• Morally Courageous Politician: George W. Bush. “Every mistake that he made as president I would have made times two.” (47:12)
• Therapy vs. Philosophy: “Philosophy. Therapy in a pinch.” (47:45)
• Favorite Fiction: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “Because I’m a behavioral scientist, and it’s behavioral science, man.” (47:56)
• Kids and Happiness: “With each additional kid, stress and negative affect rises until the fourth kid and then starts to fall again ... ask people to look into their hearts.” (49:13)
• Regretted Unread Book: “I wish I’d actually read the Summa Theologia. ... Do I get credit for owning it?” (49:53)

15. On the Future of America

• How can America survive to 500 years?
  • “Stop worrying about being great and start worrying about being good. And then let their years take care of themselves.” (51:11)

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Memorable Quotes with Timestamps

• On the root of unhappiness:
  • “There’s two kinds of people...somebody who’s a striver and somebody who’s a slacker.” — Arthur Brooks (12:09)
• On the core error of strivers:
  • “Love is not a free gift freely given. ... They become addicted to winning, addicted to the grind.” — Arthur Brooks (15:46)
• On pleasure versus enjoyment:
  • “Pleasure doesn’t lead to happiness, only enjoyment does.” — Arthur Brooks (18:20)
• On the limitation of scientific language:
  • “It is inadequate to reduce everything to this complicated terminology. But it’s helpful to have a little model, because... you can stand in awe of the real thing.” — Arthur Brooks (23:28)
• On embracing love (and its risks):
  • “Giving your heart away is the ultimate entrepreneurial experience. ...it’s part of the product. It’s a feature, not a bug.” — Arthur Brooks (39:57)
• On moral courage:
  • “The mark of moral courage ... is to stand up against people with whom you agree on behalf of those with whom you disagree.” — Arthur Brooks’s father (41:28)
• On happiness’ essence:
  • “If you’re not loving others ... you’re not gonna be happy. ... you need to love and be loved.” — Arthur Brooks (38:16)

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Timestamps for Notable Segments

• [03:45] Arthur’s personal struggle with happiness and what drove him to study it
• [07:32] Introduction of Seneca and his philosophical background
• [11:38] The two mistakes that make people miss life: strivers and slackers
• [14:09] “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it” — central Seneca quote
• [18:20] Why happiness requires resisting indulgence and understanding pleasure vs. enjoyment
• [23:28] The limits of science in explaining love, happiness, and meaning
• [27:11] How facing mortality increases appreciation of life
• [31:42] On the modern meaning of leisure and philosophy
• [36:58] What’s missing from Seneca — the deep necessity of loving relationships
• [39:57] The necessity and inevitability of suffering in the pursuit of love
• [41:28] Mark of moral courage: defending those you disagree with
• [45:06] The rationale and content of Arthur Brooks’s new book
• [47:56] Favorite work of fiction: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
• [51:11] How America could make it to year 500: “Stop worrying about being great and start worrying about being good.”

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Conclusion

Arthur Brooks and Shilo Brooks craft a rich conversation that blends classical philosophy, modern behavioral science, faith, and practical advice. They illuminate why so many miss the mark on happiness—whether by chasing too hard or not pursuing life at all—and uphold the centrality of love, intentional relationships, embracing life’s brevity, and cultivating true leisure and philosophical inquiry. The episode is punctuated by memorable wisdom, learned humor, and a genuine call to integrate intellect, emotion, and spirit for a truly meaningful life.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, Shiloh. Here with an invitation for all my old school listeners. I'm going to be taping a live episode of Old School at the National Constitution center in Philadelphia hosted by the Jack Miller center as part of their national Summit on Civic Education. I'll be sitting down with the incredible historian and Pulitzer Prize winning author Jon Meacham to talk history, leadership and the future of our republic. Tickets include a reception and a three course dinner before the show. And the best part, listeners get $50 off tickets with code TFP. T like Tim, F like Frank, P like Pam. Don't miss it. Grab your tickets now at the link in the show notes. See you in Philly. I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm talking to Arthur Brooks. Arthur is a professor, author of 13 books and one of the world's leading experts on the science of happiness. Senecas on the Shortness of Life, published around 49 A.D. changed Arthur's life. Today I'm asking him why. This is old school. Arthur Brooks. Welcome to Old school.

[B]

Shiloh Brooks. It's great to be with you.

[A]

So we have, I think, more in common than just our last name. Although we should start there. We are both, I will venture to say, of letters and reading and art. We also happen to have both. Me currently you, in the past be think tank presidents.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Professors. Your biography is fascinating to me. I want to tell people, and I've just said you studied the arts, you've been a French horn player, you've lived in Barcelona, you've gotten a PhD.

[B]

Did you know those things too?

[A]

Yeah, I've done all those things.

[B]

Did you marry a Catalan girl? Did you play in the Barcelona City Orchestra?

[A]

It's crazy. We're basically the same person.

[B]

That's so weird. Different generations.

[A]

I feel like I'm stealing from you. But at any rate, I want you to tell us about yourself. Your biography, personal and intellectual. How did you become the force of nature that is Arthur Brooks?

[B]

I don't know if it's the force of nature or not. Maybe it's just because I can't hold a job. You know, there's a. I think you put a nice spin on it. But I started off my life actually wanting to be the world's greatest French horn player. And this is such a great country where you can have a weird ambition like that, right? Only in America, as they say. I grew up in Seattle and I played in the Seattle Youth Orchestra. And I Was really serious about classical music. It's really what I wanted to do. My father's a math professor. Was a math professor. My mother was an artist of some renowned in the Pacific Northwest. And so they kind of. They compromised and decided that their kid was going to be a classical musician, sort of equidistant between math and art or something, I'm not quite sure. But it turns out that I was pretty good at it and I liked it. And so the result of it was that that's what I pinned my hopes on for the rest of my life. And I went pro at 19, and I spent all my 20s in what my parents called my gap decade, performing first in chamber music and then the Barcelona City Orchestra. And then after that, I was teaching while I was at night going to correspondence school to finally get my bachelor's degree, which I finished a month before my 30th birthday. So that was the beginning. And what I realized when I was doing my bachelor's degree by correspondence was I was a lot more interested in behavioral science and politics and statistics and math and especially behavioral economics than anything in classical music. And so I quit. I quit music and went. And after I finished my bachelor's and master's degree, went and got my PhD and got sucked into the family business, which was academia. Now I teach the science of happiness at Harvard University.

[A]

So I want to know, before we start talking about our book today, why did you start studying happiness? Were you unhappy or what drew you to that topic?

[B]

Yeah, happiness is hard for me. And what I didn't know, I mean, people who struggle with happiness. I mean, not like clinical struggles with happiness, but kind of a melancholia, as the ancients would have called it, which we still should today.

[A]

Indeed.

[B]

Hey, this is old school, man. I wanted to know the secrets to it, and I sort of felt guilty about it. I mean, everything was pretty good in my life. I mean, who am I? What right do I have? Which is what a lot of people say when I'm on happiness. And I Learned that about 50% of your happiness is genetic. So my mother literally made me unhappy. It's kind of her fault. But thanks, mom. No. I learned this from these identical twin studies, and I got really interested. This is when I was doing my bachelor's degree and learning something about behavioral science and thinking that was pretty neat, I thought, huh? If that's the case, that raises the stakes on my habits. So, for example, if you learn that both your parents and all four of your grandparents are bootleggers and Drunks, you shouldn't drink. Yeah, you know, it's just like word of the wise.

[A]

I've been there. I know what you mean,

[B]

man from rural Texas.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And you know, if you've got gloomy parents and grandparents, which I most certainly did, I need better habits. And so I started studying that, putting my behavioral science background to good use. I went to AEI and took this 11 year sabbatical to run a nonprofit organization. And by the time I came back, I was ready full blast to study this for the rest of my life. I really had a big epiphany, as a matter of fact, when I was trying to figure out what to do after I ran a think tank. You'll see after about 10 years, I actually walked the Camino de Santiago, which is this ancient walk across northern Spain, which Catholics like me have been doing for more than a thousand years. Walk. When you're Catholic and you don't know what to do, you go for a long walk. That's sort of, that's the protocol and what the ancient legend is, that if you go with an intention and offer it up to the Holy Spirit, that your intention, the answer, will find you. As you enter into Santiago de Compostela, this city of northern Spain, and see the Grand Cathedral, the information will be gifted to you. And sure enough, I mean, it's, it's kind of amazing. As a matter of fact, I had this epiphany that I was going to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. And I went back to academia. I took a professorship at Harvard University and I told the dean of the Harvard Business School, I'm going to teach happiness. You need a course in happiness, the science of happiness. All right, knock yourself out. And now I've taught it the last seven years in a row. I have 180 students enrolled. I have 400 on the waiting list. There's an illegal zoom link they think I'm not aware of.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And it's not the milkman, it's the milk. They want happiness. They actually want this. And created a really good behavioral science and neuroscience based technology for understanding how happiness actually works, rooted in the biggest questions. You get the right questions from theology, philosophy, history, biography, art. Then you actually will use modern science to see how it works in the brain and experiments to see how it can work in behavior. And then you try to adopt the habits and teach it to others.

[A]

So you're a happiness peddler and you're not even peddling drugs. And I'm.

[B]

That's exactly right. I'm a happiness pusher.

[A]

Yeah, that's right.

[B]

I'm delighted to hear, by the way, the first hit's free. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Indeed.

[B]

Indeed.

[A]

So I want to ask you about a book that you asked me to read. I read every book that we do on old school. This was not one that I'd read before a Seneca. It's here on the Shortness of Life. It's an essay. It's an epistolary essay. And I'd like to talk to you

[B]

a little bit about it today.

[A]

But first, I wonder if we might just say to people who aren't thinking about Seneca every day the way you and I are, who is or was Seneca?

[B]

Yeah, Seneca was an advisor to Nero, actually, and he was one of the great Roman Stoic philosophers. So the Stoic school of philosophy started with the ancient Greeks, but none of that literature is extant.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The only way that we know about the Greek Stoics is really from the Romans, who were quoting it and were derivative of it. And the greatest of those were Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, who was the emperor and kept a diary of Stoic ideas because he was a Stoic student and never intended for the diaries to be read by anybody. But people found it and thought, wow, this is unbelievable. This is really good stuff. And of course, Seneca, you think it's bad working for Trump? Yeah. Morgan Verneero is way worse. And sure enough, he was induced to kill himself, which not even the members of the cabinet, the Trump administration, that's happening to them. So he was a pretty interesting and a very deep guy who was circumspect about the ruler that he was serving, and he recognized that you should give the best advice to everybody, even if they're not perfect people. That's a very ancient idea. So it's not. That's not how we think today. The whole idea is steer clear and try to have plausible deniability that you know the bad people, because that adjacency will get a stink on you. And that's not how Seneca saw it. He was no Nero fan, but he wanted to make Rome as good as it could be. So if he could have some marginal nudge on the wicked Nero, that his life would have been worthwhile. And he was an absolute true and true Stoic who wrote very, very beautiful essays. This particular one on the Shortness of Time was written for his father in law, Paulinus, in AD 49. And what it is is an Answer to what we say all the time, which is, hey, man, life is short. He's like, no, it's not. It's only short if you waste it. That's the punchline. And then he goes into details about how not to waste it.

[A]

When you first encounter a book, that book can change your life. And so I'm curious, when you read this, what did you think and feel? Where were you? Were you somewhere in your life where you thought this makes perfect sense of everything?

[B]

You know, the first time I encountered it in my 20s, I was like, well, yeah, yeah, no, it's true. I shouldn't waste my time. But by my 50s, when I came back to it, I said, oh, now I understand what everybody's talking about, about mindfulness, for example. Mindfulness is not just kind of a method of meditation, a kind of a weak form of Buddhism, which people often think, no, no, no, no. It's a way of understanding the essence of your life. It's a way of being fully alive right now. I was able to relate it to my Christian faith in a different way. Even though there's no evidence that Seneca was. Was very much influenced at all by Christianity. But he was a stoic. So stoicism actually affected Christianity an awful lot. But I was able to put together the experiences that I had. I would say in my profession that I couldn't cope with it before I had a sufficient crystallized intelligence, which is the intelligence that you get in your 40s and 50s based on pattern recognition, based on what you know. So that's. With a lot of books, it falls into that category of wasted in my 20s and productive in my 50s, you

[A]

know, I read books as medicine for the soul that oftentimes we don't know what we're doing. We pick up a book off the shelf and it soothes us, it makes sense of our suffering. I wonder if I might ask you. This is true of all books, but when I read this one, it really hit home with me that this was true of this book. From what ailment would a person be suffering such that when they pick up this book, it acts as a kind of remedy in medicine and healing for them. What is that ailment that Seneca is diagnosing in life? In human life?

[B]

Yeah. Well, the answer to that is somebody who feels that they're missing their life. I'm not really here. And there's two kinds of people. It's pretty interesting. So he talks about the two big mistakes that you make that'll make you miss your life and I'll put it in modern terms. Somebody who's a striver and somebody who's a slacker. Opposite ends of the spectrum. My students at Harvard, they're MBA students. They're going to rule the world. They're all strivers, but they don't have very high enjoyment of their lives, which Seneca would say. That's a big problem. You're actually missing your life because there's ambition and struggle and it's climbing and you don't get it. You're not doing it right. And then the other end of the spectrum, which are not my students, but the world is full of them, are slackers. And so the slackers are sitting around on a beach. Or actually what they're doing is they're scrolling Instagram and YouTube shorts. Are we on a YouTube short right now? I bet we're gonna slice this up into a YouTube short. So it's like, okay, guys, enjoy, enjoy. Stop. Anyway, that's bad too, because that's the way that you can just fritter away your life. Like you're sitting in an airport lounge waiting for a flight that never takes off. And, like, I don't know. Right. And so both of those things and what you want is the middle, where you're taking life seriously and you're fully alive right now.

[A]

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[B]

Because we could be a lot happier than we are because our culture isn't perfect. It's like, news flash to Americans. We don't have everything absolutely figured out. Look, I mean, I'm super grateful to live in this country. I love a lot about American culture. But we're not perfect. We can actually do better now. By the way, this is easier for me to say. I married a Spaniard. They have a very different attitude toward life than we do. Right? That's not a work based culture. It's not a productivity based culture. Now, my wife's from Barcelona and Catalonia is a little bit different than the rest of Spain. But the point is that this has been driven home to me a lot because my problem is I'm a striver. I'm a hopeless striver. Now, actually, I look at the behavioral correlates of that, as are my students, as are so many people, as are so many people watching us right now where it's like, go, go, go, go, go. Ordinarily, people who have this driverly tendency and kind of miss their lives, as Seneca would put it, they. Generally speaking, they fall. They make an error, a fundamental. It's a philosophical error, actually. What they have in common is they generally are serious kids, really good at something. And what they notice when they pick up, when they're in a highly synaptically plastic part of their lives, when their brains are in development, is they get a lot of attention and affection when they do something. And so they incorrectly deduce that love is something that's earned. Love is not a free gift freely given. It's not a grace. As a Christian, I understand that theoretically. But love awfully feels earned to Me. And it certainly did as a kid, which is why I wanted to be the world's greatest French horn player, perhaps. And the result of that is they become addicted to winning, addicted to success, addicted to the hunt, addicted to the grind. That's what they do because that's what they know how to do. Now all addicts are in a doom loop. You know, you never meet somebody who says, shiloh, you know this. You want me to tell you the secret of my happiness? Meth. Nobody ever said that. Right? And that's because it's not. Anybody who's addicted to meth hates meth. But they're in a doom loop. Anybody who's a striver and not enjoying their lives and missing their lives, they don't like it, but they. They just don't know how to stop. And they're afraid to stop is what it comes down to. That's the pathology that we're actually talking about.

[A]

Seneca encourages us not to indulge our vices. This struck me because we live in a culture in which, if you've ever watched an NFL football game, you will see all kinds of ads for gambling and alcohol and get on a cruise and indulge yourself, treat yourself. Here's chocolate ice cream. I mean, it's the. There's encouragement to indulge vices all around you. Seneca says this about. Vices surround and assail men from every side and do not allow them to rise again and lift their eyes to discern the truth, but keep them overwhelmed and rooted in their desires. Never can they recover their true selves if by chance they achieve some tranquility. Just as a swell remains on the deep sea even after the wind has dropped, so they go on tossing about and never find rest from their desires. So I'm curious to get you to reflect on the value in a culture where we are tempted to vice, or at least to indulgence of desire at every turn. Why do you think happiness requires us to resist the indulgence of desires? In accord with Seneca's advice.

[B]

According to Seneca's advice, and according to modern behavioral and even neuroscience, the reason is because pleasure doesn't lead to happiness, only enjoyment does. Now, the two are related. The problem is that pleasure is incomplete. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. The limbic system was developed, was evolved between 2 and 40 million years ago. And it's nothing more than a console of tissue that sends you signals about what's going on around you that are perceived by the most primitive parts of your brain. It turns them into emotions and One of the things that the limbic system does is when something is really pleasing, it hits parts of your brain like the ventral striatum and the ventral tegmental area. And it says, that's good. If you do that, you're going to get mates. If you do that, you're going to get calories. If you do that, you're going to survive the winter. That's an animal impulse. And there's nothing wrong with animal impulses, but they're subhuman, quite literally animal. The great thing about modern life, about being a modern human. And when I say modern, I don't mean, like since the 80s. I mean over the past 250,000 years, in the late Pleistocene, when our brains were finally evolved to the state that we find them in now, we actually have a big prefrontal cortex, this 30% of our brain by weight, which assesses the emotional information coming from our limbic system, including these pleasure signals. And we can assess, what does that mean? What do I want to do with that? What do I want to not do with that? If we so choose. In other words, we have a repertoire of possibilities in our lives that range from animal impulses to moral aspirations. And that's what Seneca's talking about. But that's what the modern neuroscientists talk about as well. Now, the way to turn that vice or that source of pleasure into actual happiness is by adding two things. See, I'm Catholic. I'm not against vice per se. It's just you take pleasures and add people and memory, thus moving the experience of the pleasure into the prefrontal cortex, where you can manage the pleasure and the pleasure doesn't manage you. If your goal in life, like the hippies, remember that. I mean, you're too young for the hippies.

[A]

No, I know.

[B]

I remember watching a newscast when I was a little boy with my dad, and there was some hippie from Woodstock on the evening news with Walter Cronkite, and he says, if it feels good, do it. My dad's like, that's the end of America, right? You know, he was kind of right. But the point is that the pursuit of pleasure doesn't lead you to happiness. It leads you to rehab. But if you add people and memory so you can make it permanent, the experience permanent, and you can manage the experience, then it becomes a source of happiness. And that's what Senate's talking about.

[A]

You explain it in fairly sophisticated, neurobiological, scientific terms. But do you find that there's something about the phenomena which you Study, and I study happiness, virtue, love, which cannot be captured by science. In other words, to reduce it in a way to those terms as you have, takes it out of the world of our lived experience. You know, I can't go around, as people constantly do today, thinking, well, that's a dopamine hit. And now, you know, they have this kind of neurobiological reduction that isn't actually instructive for living your life and loving your wife and the real human thing. So I'm curious to get you. You're a man of faith, to get you to reflect on what it is that science misses about these phenomena.

[B]

So I'll answer that question with a neurobiological answer. Have you interviewed Iain McGilchrist?

[A]

I have not.

[B]

He's fantastic. He's a neuroscientist at Oxford, but he's also philosophically very sophisticated. And he talks about something called hemispheric lateralization. And all that means the fancy way of saying the two hemispheres of the brain do different things. You know, we have to put a fancy word on it. That's how we get tenure, right? Shiloh. That's right.

[A]

Although. Yeah, go ahead.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. That's how we do it, man. It's like somebody got tenure for that. And what he's discovered is that the big, deep why questions that are ineffable, the mystery and meaning of life is largely processed in the right hemisphere of the brain. It's kind of the God module. And the left hemisphere of the brain is the what and how to. It's the tech module. The problem with modern life is that we live on the left, but we want to be on the right. Your marriage is a right hemispheric phenomenon, which means I can ask you about it. And almost anything that you say will be filtered through over to the left hemisphere, where you have your language centers, the Wernicke's area and the Broca's area. And anything you'll say about why you love her, I could probably apply to your third grade teacher, too.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so that's why it's inadequate. The truth of the matter is that we're wonderfully made. We're wonderfully made, and we have a psychology that has biological correlates and is rooted in the biggest philosophical questions that ever existed. And at the end of the day, you can't actually understand with just scientific terminology. All you can do is live it and understand it and live and understand in a spirit of love, which I believe is in God's image. It all hangs Together. In other words, it's a seamless garment. It is inadequate to reduce everything to this complicated terminology. But it's helpful to have a little model, because when you have a little model, you can stand in awe of the real thing.

[A]

Yeah, that's a fair and charitable answer. I suppose what I'm driving at is a defense of the humanities in the face of scientific reductionism that when Jane Austen sits down to write a novel or when I read that novel and it brings a tear to my eye, neither she nor I are thinking about what's happening on the sides of the hemispheres of our brains. We're engrossed in the richness of human emotion. And it just seems to me that that vocabulary is a more effective vocabulary of making sense of the immediacy of human life than the more obscure vocabulary about hemispheres and pathways of my mind, which I cannot touch and will never see. But I can certainly see the beauty of that woman or the horror of that wol. You see what I mean?

[B]

I do, and I think it's actually really. It's really a great life to be able to do both. I have a book that's coming out in the end of March called the Meaning of youf Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. And it's a book about the fact that we have in modern life where the tip of the spear is the technological overuse and misuse that we've pushed everybody into the wrong hemisphere of the brain and not allowed ourselves to range in the part of our minds that actually doesn't require this kind of technical specificity, that requires a kind of more aesthetic experience. And one of the things that I talk about are sort of the six parts of life that allow you to experience life itself. It's sort of old school. You know, it's funny because, you know, I'm just gonna. Our probably shared great, great, great, great, great grandfather.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

He never came home and said to his wife, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. Yes, because his brain was working the way it was supposed to. Integrated with his mind and his consciousness and his relationship with the divine. It really was. The problem is that today, not because of the scientific language that I use, but because of the technology that dominates our lives largely and the culture that valorizes it, that people have to live in an old fashioned way on purpose, as a matter of fact. And so one of the ways that I get my students to do this is I say, here's how your brain is working now. Let's turn off the Technical stuff. Go fall in love. Ask these big questions that don't have answers. Go look at the sunset, listen to Bach, and let your brain do what it's supposed to do.

[A]

Well, you pacified my humanistic longings with that answer. Since you're an expert on happiness, though, I want to turn to something that is not happiness inducing, which is death. Seneca says the following about death. He says this to you? What I love is the way the book is spoken to you. The second paragraph, you are living.

[B]

That's polinous. It's a polyness. Probably like, yeah, kind of hoping I

[A]

wouldn't write this to my father in law, I got to tell you. But he says this. You are living as if destined to live forever. Your frailty never occurs to you. You don't notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply. Though all the while, that very day, which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last, you act like mortals in all that you fear and like immortals in all that you desire. So my question for you is, what is the use of coming to terms with your own mortality and finitude? What is the use of that in the pursuit of happiness?

[B]

In a nutshell, when something is scarce, you appreciate it more if I say shiloh. Your parents are alive, right? Both your parents are alive.

[A]

My mother's alive.

[B]

Your mother's alive. Thank God. How many more Thanksgivings do you have with her? Yeah, you know, probably not, but that focuses the mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. It's not a hundred.

[A]

No, it's not a hundred.

[B]

Probably not. Twenty.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

The truth of the matter is that you have fewer than you think. And that scarcity, per se makes it sweeter. Scarcity leads to the sense of sweetness of something, is how this works. And this is true in every philosophical tradition. So I asked my students to do something that's in Theravada Buddhism called the Maranasakti meditation, which is in the southern tier of Buddhism in Vietnam and Myanmar and Thailand. You go into these Tibetan Buddhist temples, which I do a lot when I'm on the road. And you'll see cadavers in various states of decay and photographs on the wall. And the monks will come out. There's nine of them from just dead all the way to, you know, bones that are turning to dust. And in front of each one of these photos, the monks will look at it and say, that is me. And then they'll come. It's for Two minutes, they'll focus on it. And that is me. And that is me. Because it's exposing yourself to the inevitability of truth, such that you can finally be free of trying to escape it. Once you can't escape it, you'll be free of trying to escape it. And then you'll be fully alive today. Now there's a really interesting philosophical conundrum. And this is Stephen Cave stuff from the University of Cambridge. You know his wonderful book Immortality. It's a wonderful book. I really love that book a lot. And he says compellingly, you know, based on research, but also it sort of makes sense. Common sense. Research should make common sense, kind of. I think that if it doesn't pass the grandma test, right. You know, it's like I read an article, granny. It's about something called polyamory. Granny's like, what's that? Good luck explaining polyamory to grandma.

[A]

Right?

[B]

It means it's dumb anyway. So what Stephen Cave talks about is the fact that we actually have no trouble understanding the end of our physical lives. No trouble understanding that. But we can't conceive of non existence. So non existence is beyond our cognitive capacity. And this creates a huge cognitive dissonance. And cognitive dissonance is the ultimate kind of discomfort. So in other words, I'm going to die, but I can't not exist. And so I got a bunch of choices in front of me right now. Here's one choice. I want to be a Christian because I'm going to die, but I'm not going to not exist. See how I resolved that? Pretty clever, right? And of course my colleagues at the university would say, oh, so you're saying that your religion is a social construct to get you around the Gordian knot, right? I say, no, no, no, I think it's reality. Right? Another way to do this is to not pay attention to your death at all. Because that's how we usually deal with cognitive dissonance. When something is highly cognitive dissonant, you don't give it your attention, you withdraw your attention to it. And that's what Seneca is talking about with his father in law. He says, you kind of know you're going to die, but you can't deal with your non existence. And so you're acting as if you're never going to die. And that's how people go through life. And then because they weren't thinking about it because it was not a scarce resource, they get to the end and freak out and say, oh no, give me every Medical test in the world. And for what would you die? I know what I would die for. I can't hang on through medical science for one more single second. And he says, actually, that's not living. And that's a good point.

[A]

He says that the. Well, I'll just read it. He says, of all people, only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy. Only those are really alive. So we've just talked about death and the finitude that a single human life possesses. Seneca is saying, you should use it well. To use it well. You should use it for leisure. True leisure is a philosophic life. Can you talk to people about that? Would strike folks, I suspect, as a little bit odd.

[B]

It's not obvious immediately that he's feathering his own nest there. It's like good life means reading Seneca is what he's saying.

[A]

What does that mean?

[B]

Actually, it's reading Shiloh Brooks and Arthur Brooks.

[A]

That's right. That's what you should do.

[B]

Inclusion.

[A]

But like, what? You know, to translate that for people. They got to go to work every day. Seneca didn't have to go to work every day. It was a wealthy family. He was going to. Hanging out with Nero. Whatever's going on, let's say that I want to take him seriously and I want to live that life of leisure. What would that mean, that life of philosophy today?

[B]

Yeah. So the modern version of that. And by modern, I mean kind of modern. 1964, I think, was when Josef Pieper wrote leisure, the basis of culture. And Pieper says that he contrasts it with Acedia, which is sort of chilling on the beach. That's not leisure, that's laziness. He says, you gotta be really good at leisure. Leisure is an excellent pursuit for which you're not compensated with the world's rewards. And there's three kinds of things that you do that are related to what Seneca talks about, but the peeper puts it into the baskets of Number one is deepening your most important relationships. The other is deepening your faith or your sense of life. Philosophy. Right. And the third is learning things that are worthwhile. That's what it comes down to. And I think that's what Seneca's talking about, is these deep pursuits that are fundamentally incredibly satisfying. And you're doing them because they're intrinsically good. They're not extrinsically good. Nobody paying you. They're intrinsically good. And then what you find out is your life actually has balance, and then it's worth going to work. But it's also There's a reason to come home. Because, you know, in my home life, for example, I want to come home and deepen my relationship with my wife and kids and grandkids. We're all in the house, and I want to. I'm a daily community. I go to Mass every day. I want to deepen my faith in what I do, and I want to learn new things by coming and hanging out and talking to you. Even though you're not paying me. You're not paying me. Right?

[A]

Not paying you.

[B]

Okay. All right. Make that clear. So this is leisure anyway, so. Yeah, but. But that's. I think, what Seneca is actually talking about. We have to understand it kind of broadly for the modern milieu. It's funny, because once again, if you'll permit me, two more seconds of neurobiology, you assess those big questions in a part of the brain where your language centers don't exist, and which is why I ask you in a minute to tell me why you love your wife. That you'll struggle even after many years married. I've been married 34 years. I mean, we're going to the end, man. It's like for the Brooks's, it's ride or die, right? Yeah. We're gonna ride until one of us goes over the cliff. But you ask me, why do you love Esther? Why do you love Esther? And I'm like, she's good to me. Well, so is my second grade teacher.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because she makes me feel good. Well, so does a Chicago deep dish pizza.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, anything that I say is inadequate, and that's the kind of information that we're looking for, where anything that we say is actually inadequate. That's how you know. Right? That's how you know. That's how you know that you're in the antenna space of your brain and mind. Whether brain and mind are coincident geographically

[A]

or not, I'm both fascinated by and also delighted by your willingness to both enter the ugliness of the blood and mucus that is inside our brains to explain things like love. But I'm happy that you are also willing to enter the humanitarian love passion.

[B]

There's no other way. There's no other way. And by the way, and not just the humanities emphasizing the human part, if you don't introduce the divine, you miss the whole thing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. As far as I'm concerned, When beloved family patriarch Gary Farris went missing, his

[A]

family looked everywhere on their property until

[B]

they came across something horrifying.

[A]

It's a homicide. Absolutely. The blame game in this family went round and round.

[B]

This is Blood is Thicker, the Ferris Wheel.

[A]

I would don't see how anyone can look at this story and think they were happy. Follow and listen to Blood Is the Ferris Wheel on the Free Odyssey app

[B]

or wherever you get your podcasts.

[A]

The word of the day is epistolary. This is a Greek term. Epe means to and stellen is the verb in ancient Greek for send. So it means to send. And epistolary means in the form of a letter, like you would send a letter. Seneca's on the Shortness of Life is an epistolary piece of philosophy. It's written as a letter to his father in law. There is a long tradition of epistolary literature, epistolary novels. For instance, one of my favorites is Rousseau's Julie. It's an epistle, meaning the whole novel consists of letters back and forth between characters. But there's also the word epistle, like in the Bible, Paul, his epistles, most famously perhaps the Epistle to the Romans. It's his letter to the Romans. So epistolary means in the form of a letter. So we've talked a lot about Seneca and what you can do when you read this book to make your life better, to stop wasting your time, to see your finitude, to really believe and understand what true leisure can do for you. But you're a happiness expert, and I suspect there are things that you can do to be happy that Seneca doesn't touch on. And so what I'd like to do now is just give you free rein to tell us, over and above the advice that we get, how should we begin to think about happiness and meaning?

[B]

Let me say what's most missing. Other people. That's what's missing from this. You know, it's happiness is love. It is. And there's a lot of things that you have to do besides just loving other people, such that you can have the proper ecosystem for living the happiness life. But if you're not loving others, if you're not loving others through the way that you make your daily bread, sanctifying your work, if you don't have deep friendship in the Aristotelian sense of atelic friendships, just useless friends, if you're not giving your heart away every day, allowing yourself to fall in love with your wife over and over and over again, you're not gonna be happy. And if you're not a child of God, made in God's image, but not just asking for stuff, but actually loving God, you're not gonna be happy. And that's what's missing. This is a little desiccated. Right. It's a little dry now. It's good because there's all this technique in here about what we're doing wrong. And this is kind of. Again, I'm not indicting Seneca. God forbid that I should be like, you know, have the hubris to say, oh, Seneca, he's got it all wrong. This isn't intended essay to be a general field theory about how to be happy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

This is how to not screw up that one thing. Right. But I don't want people to think that if they read this one thing, they're gonna get the whole thing. They're gonna just not mess up that one thing. There's one thing you need to know about happiness and don't get anything else, is that you need to give your heart away. You need to love and be loved. That's what it really comes down to. And when you love and are loved and focusing on that, you're not gonna wanna waste your time. Then go read Seneca on how not to waste your time.

[A]

Can you talk about the fear of suffering when you give your heart away? It's possible that heart could be broken and why people should nonetheless, even with all the suffering and all the risk, give that heart away. Can you talk about that?

[B]

I do. I mean, that's the most popular thing I teach on. My students are 28 years old and they find romance absolutely baffling. People are getting married less, they're falling in love less, they're living together less, they're having less sex. All of it. I mean, it's just like. It's a love depression out there. It's brutal out there. And we can talk about all the technological reasons that actually happening, But a lot of it is really the culture of fear. It comes down to this culture of fear because this is concomitant with these. So there's a bunch of work. Jean Twenge, who's a psychologist at San Diego State University, and she does work on the onset of adult behaviors and how they're all delayed. And so, you know, young people are not driving, they're not giving driver's licenses. They're not some stuff that we're glad they're not doing, like drinking and taking drugs and having premarital sex, et cetera, et cetera. But all these adult behaviors are actually not happening. And the reason is clear in the research is because they're afraid. I mean, when I was 16, I was afraid to drive too, but, man, I wanted mobility I mean, a zombie apocalypse could have been going on outside, and that would have not have kept me inside the house with those people, my parents. And so something's going on where the fear is so great that is demobilizing people in this important way. And so that's one of the things that I talk about, is I was approaching life more entrepreneurially. Giving your heart away is the ultimate entrepreneurial experience. What you find is that before the average person gets married, they've had their heart broken five times. Five times. And before you have a successful startup business, you've had on average, 3.8 unsuccessful endeavors. Oh, yeah, that's life, man. I mean, that's actually part of it. So it's not as if pain is an artifact. It's a side effect. It's an unintended secondary consequence of trying to get love. No, no, no. It's part of the product. It's a feature, not a bug. And until we actually understand that the meaning of our life is partly ascertained through the embrace of suffering per se, we're gonna miss the meaning of our life. And the meaning of our life is love. And that's why you have to suffer on your way to finding your soulmate. And by the way, when you're with your soulmate, you're still gonna suffer.

[A]

I have a quote from you that I wanna read back to you because I think it's beautiful. And I wanna ask you to explain it because.

[B]

Did you not say sir?

[A]

Yeah, it moves me.

[B]

But I think you'll agree if you

[A]

didn't say this, you will have wanted.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

The mark of moral courage, the mark of character, is not to stand up against people with whom you disagree. It's to stand up against people with whom you agree on behalf of those with whom you disagree. I love that quotation. I think every teacher in America, especially in an ideologized educational world, should read that quotation.

[B]

That was a quote from my father, actually.

[A]

Very well put. Can you explain why and what that means?

[B]

Well, you know, it's is an Enlightenment value that we can do better than coercing each other, that it might makes right that we can actually enlighten each other and persuade each other some of the big ideas from your old home of Charleston, Virginia. I mean, what is it? No. Uva. Where's uva?

[A]

Uva. Charlottesville.

[B]

Charlottesville, Virginia. That's the first word. No, I know you taught there. That's what you know. Good old Tom Jefferson was.

[A]

Yes, that's right.

[B]

And he was an Enlightenment figure. Yeah. And what they were talking about was this idea that we could, we have a better society. And I realized that, you know, my trad kids would be like, yeah, the Enlightenment's overrated. But you know, I'm old school. This show's.

[A]

You're on the right show.

[B]

Yeah, well, you got it. And the Enlightenment basically said you don't have to force everything all the time. Right. You don't have to. It's not okay. Stand up to the people with whom you disagree. It's a free country. But the spirit of Enlightenment is one in which we actually listen to each other and see who's got the better of the debate. That's what it comes down to. And you're not going to do it when people are trying to cancel each other, trying to shut each other down. The mark of moral courage for somebody who really believes in the ideas of the Enlightenment is standing up for the people with whom you disagree. Standing up for them in front of the people, trying to shut them down on your own side.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That's saying I believe in these values more than I want to be. Right. Right now.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

And that's a really, really important value. Of course. Hard.

[A]

And would you say it also requires not just standing up for them, but in the best case, being able to articulate their position almost as well, if not as well as they can, so that you come to internalize what it is they think. Even if you disagree with it, you can still explain it as well as they can so that you understand. Yeah.

[B]

I mean, you told me something before we started that you learned German to read Nietzsche. And I'm like, oh, dude, this is a Nietzschean guy. No, not a Nietzsche. And on the contrary, I mean, he's a beautiful writer, great writer, brilliant guy. I'm sure you think he's wrong in most every way. Nihilist, thinker. It's not that existence precedes essence or essence precedes existence. There's existence in no essence. Right. Super depressing, right? That's not the point. The point is you wanted to understand it such that you could actually take it on in a morally serious way, is what it comes down to. And it's not just Nietzsche all the way down. No, it's your mother in law. It's the guy sitting across the table from you. It's the president you see on TV with whom you disagree. If you don't understand where they're coming from, if you don't actually understand what they're saying, you, if you're not willing to actually take the time to have a deep understanding of what they're talking about. Well, then you just don't have any credibility, and you're not going to be effective. And furthermore, it's not going to be your own position will not be meaningful to you.

[A]

Tell me about your new book, the meaning of your life. Because, like Seneca, you write books that straddle the kind of line between philosophy, self reflection, self interrogation. That's an ancient art that you've revived in your own literary life. Tell me about this new book.

[B]

Yeah, this book has been. I've been working on it for the last five years, maybe a little longer. And it started when I came back to academia in 2019. So I left in 2008 and came back in 2019, and I was gone. I was doing what you're doing now, which is to say full up with fundraising and management.

[A]

Tell me about it.

[B]

And I wasn't paying attention to my natural habitat, which is the campus. I mean, I was raised on a campus. My dad was a professor. His dad was a professor. Campus life is just life for me. But I also love it. And the reason is because as a young man, as a young professor, that was the happiest place students had their happiest experiences of their young lives. Making friends, learning new ideas, learning crazy stuff. And when I came back to academia in 2019, it was like a plague had ravaged my village. What used to be happier was actually unhappier than the rest of the country. Cancel culture was in full swing. Depression had increased by a factor of three. Generalized anxiety by a factor of two. Loneliness, you found on most campuses. More than half the students were seeking mental health treatment. And I said, okay, well, I mean, God put me here for a reason. I'm a behavioral scientist. Let's figure it out, see what's going on. And so I started looking at the data and I started interviewing a lot of people. What I found was that the biggest predictor of mental health disturbances on campuses, but in general, among young adults under 30 years old, was this sense of life's meaninglessness, the inability to say that I know the meaning of my life or even to be looking. And so this book is about, okay, what's the meaning of meaning? What does it mean? What are you looking for? Number two, why has it become so hard to find? And most importantly, two thirds of the book is, what are you gonna do to go find it? This is a strategic plan based on philosophy, neuroscience, and behavioral science, where people can actually come to terms with the Meaning of their own lives.

[A]

That's really extraordinary. When will the book be out?

[B]

March 31, 2026.

[A]

Let's do a lightning round. You got time for a couple quick questions?

[B]

Oh, man, I do.

[A]

All right. So is there a morally courageous person alive in our politics today?

[B]

Yes. George W. Bush. My favorite president.

[A]

Are you just saying that?

[B]

Nope. He's my favorite president. And how do I know he's my favorite president? By the way, here's how you judge whether somebody is a politician that you truly like. Here's the question. Would you have made the same mistakes as him? That's how you know you're aligned with somebody. Not if you do the same things that led to victory. Would you have made the same mistakes? And he's the only major politician in my lifetime where every mistake that he made as president I would have made times two.

[A]

So what's better for the soul therapy

[B]

or philosophy in general? Philosophy. Therapy in a pinch.

[A]

Do you have a favorite work of fiction? We've been talking a lot about philosophy and behavioral science, but fiction?

[B]

You're an old school. The Brothers K. The Brothers K. Why is it the Brothers K? Because it is. Because I'm a behavioral scientist and it's behavioral science, man. I mean, look, some people, they'll say, yeah, Atlas Shrugged. But if your favorite work of fiction is a work that's not very well written and 75 times too long, it means it's not about the fiction, it's about the philosophy.

[A]

He said it.

[B]

I didn't. No, no, no. I mean, it's like. It's great if you think it's great, but not because of the craft of the writing. It's because. It's because of the objectivist philosophy. And what it is, is I'm deeply, deeply touched by Russian existentialism. Yeah.

[A]

How many kids should you have to be happy?

[B]

As many as you can. I'm Catholic. I'm trying to stay on the right side of the Vatican on this one. So your results may vary. And what you find is in the data that, generally speaking, that with each additional kid, stress and negative affect rises until the fourth kid and then starts to fall again. And the level of happiness in the family is the same with one kid as it is with eight. Now, of course, that's garbage, because it's different kinds of family who have one, and the different kinds of family who have eight is what it comes down to. And all I'm basically saying is that I got to throw out my entire data analysis and ask people to look into their Hearts and say, how many kids does God want for me?

[A]

Is there a book that you wish you had read but you have not read? And maybe you even lie. Not that you lie, but you even lie about reading. You go to dinner parties and people say, oh, I love War and Peace. You hadn't read War and Peace. You didn't read that. Is there that book?

[B]

Yeah. Seneca's on the shortness of life. I'm kidding. It's 34 pages. So we gotta throw out this whole podcast. Yeah, that's a good question. I have a stack of books that I'm always constantly trying to read, but I find them too dry. You know, it's mostly. It's like. It's really, you know, meaty Catholic stuff. You know, I wish I'd actually read the Summa Theologia. Well, good luck. St. Thomas Aquinas. Yes. You know, it's a big one. Yeah, I think. Do I get credit for owning it?

[A]

You do, yeah.

[B]

All right. Partial credit for owning it. But, you know, all these great books that. I know them. You know the feeling. Yeah. Where you know the book.

[A]

Well, I went to St. John's College where you read the great books, so I already read them all. But I can imagine the feeling of having.

[B]

When I was supposed to be in college but wasn't, I was living in Annapolis, on Hanover street, actually, around the corner, you know, dating girls from St. John's College who are actually in school,

[A]

carrying around their cant and their Euclid.

[B]

Yeah. And I was just walking around with a French horn. I had long, beautiful hair, right? Oh, really? Oh, yeah.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

This is like a once great civilization.

[A]

We need to get a photo for the pod podcast of that hair.

[B]

But, you know, vanity, actually. You pay a price.

[A]

Yes. Yes, you do.

[B]

Trust me, you pay a price. Look at that head of hair on you. If I had that, you know what I would give for that? Well, I mean, I had a hair, I could be President of the United States.

[A]

So this year marks America's 250th. Can you say how our country could make it to the 500th?

[B]

There's an old joke. How do you get to 100 years? How do you live to 100 years? And the answer is live to 99 to be careful. So I'm tempted to say make it to 499 and be unbelievably careful.

[A]

Right.

[B]

The truth is, nobody knows actually how to do that because cultures decline, countries decline. They just do. But as we like to say in economics and macroeconomics, that no economic expansion dies of old age. It dies because something happens. Either really bad luck, but usually because of bad policy and more importantly, because of bad culture. And I think that's what we have to actually keep in mind as well. The collective virtue that we have in this country, it's in decline. I don't think that I'm going out on some big limb to say that. I think that we all feel that and we're all really uncomfortable about that. If we want. I mean, what do they say for America to be great, she must be good? That's actually, of course, it's a variation from Tocqueville. And that's what we need to do again. Stop worrying about being great and start worrying about being good. And then let their years take care of themselves.

[A]

Arthur Brooks, my long lost cousin. Eerily similar, except for the haircuts.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Thank you for being here.

[B]

I don't think you're ever gonna get to my place on the hair. That's cause you've lived a more virtuous life. Shiloh. It's a delight to be with you. Thank you.

[A]

Thank you for being on old school.

[B]

Delighted. The UPS store is making packing and shipping Easter gifts quicker than ever this year with UPS Air.

[A]

How quick?

[B]

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