← The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
528. The Longevity of Happiness | Dr. Arthur Brooks
01:36:20
Jordan Peterson sits down with professor, author, and columnist Dr. Arthur Brooks. They discuss the physicality of happiness, how aim sets perception, the paradox of progress, the need for proper discernment, and how sustained maturity sets you up for the adventure of your life. This episode was filmed on January 7th, 2025. Dr. Arthur Brooks began his professional life as a classic French hornist. He left college at age 19, touring and recording with the Annapolis Brass Quintet and, later, the City Orchestra of Barcelona. While still performing in his late 20s he returned to school and achieved a Ph.D. by 34. Arthur is now the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of the Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. He is also a columnist at the Atlantic and the author of 14 books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller, “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting H...
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- [00:00]
Arthur Brooks
Do you want to have progress in your life? Do you want to be a happier person? Do you want to have a life full of meaning?
- [00:06]
Jordan Peterson
What you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit. And that's exactly what you see in Jacob's Ladder.
- [00:14]
Arthur Brooks
There's another weird angle on this, though.
- [00:16]
Jordan Peterson
I've been trying to think about prayer. Technically, that's a complicated topic.
- [00:20]
Arthur Brooks
Gratitude is a divine thing. It's managing your effective evolved state, so it doesn't manage you.
- [00:27]
Jordan Peterson
Why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could be walking in the eternal garden? Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to sit down and speak with Arthur Brooks. Now, I met Mr. Brooks several years ago when he was CEO of the American Enterprise Institute. And after that he ended up serving as a professor of practice at the Kennedy School and at the business school at Harvard. And that's where he is currently. He has a very active public life as well. And it focuses on psychology, philosophy, neuroscience of happiness. And so we talked about that. That was the focus of our conversation. And part of that was a matter of definitional clarification, which is crucially important because to understand happiness and to pursue it properly means that it has to be defined correctly. You have to know what it is and what it isn't. And it isn't, for example, in Arthur Brooks, conceptualization reducible to instantaneous hedonistic gratification in the moment, Right? And so one of the things we talked about was the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. And, well, understanding that in this introduction gives you a flavor of the conversation. So pleasure could be reduced to something like immediate hedonistic gratification in the moment. Now, the problem with that, A problem with that, for example, is that psychopaths can be pleasure seeking. And if pleasure is regarded as a good in and of itself, then psychopathic pleasure seeking also becomes a good. And that's not tenable, not least because psychopaths don't operate in their own best interest because they fail across time. And they're terrible socially, familially, from a community perspective, they're devastating. And so pleasure itself has to be elevated or sanctified. That's another way of thinking about it. And the terminology that Arthur uses for that is enjoyment. And enjoyment is the elevation of pleasure, let's say, to something that's iterable, reciprocal, social, future oriented, permanent and stable. So you could think about it as the gift that keeps on giving. And that is something that's akin to, what would you say, a combination of wisdom and pleasure. So we talked about many elements of happiness other than that. But that gives you a flavor of the discussion and hopefully a reason to continue listening. So welcome aboard. All right, Mr. Brooks, I think what we should start with likely is just a brief or lengthy, for that matter, walkthrough of. Let's start with your publishing record. Let's give everybody a sense of what it is that you're doing and how that came about.
- [03:42]
Arthur Brooks
Thanks. And thanks for having me on the program.
- [03:44]
Jordan Peterson
It's a pleasure.
- [03:45]
Arthur Brooks
I'm delighted. And I write about human happiness. I'm a behavioral scientist by background. My PhD is largely my work was dedicated to behavioral economics, but it moved much more toward the behavioral sciences and the psychological angle and then later more toward neuroscience because everybody in the behavioral sciences now has to know a lot more neuroscience than they did when you and I were doing our PhDs just because we recognize that psychology is biology much more than we did in, I guess, the old days. In the 80s and 90s. I came late to what I'm doing right now. However, I've only been writing about human happiness in the way that I am for the past five and a half years since I've been a professor at Harvard. I've written two big books since I came to Harvard, one called From Strength to Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life for strivers who are trying to understand the move from their fluid to crystallized intelligence and why they feel like they're burning out in the middle of their careers, how they can actually get stronger and better and happier as they get older. And the second book I actually co authored with Oprah Winfrey called Build the Life youe the Art and Science of Getting Happier, which is just the basic straight up science of human happiness that I wanted to introduce to large groups of people. That was and Oprah Winfrey, she hosted the book much as she would have hosted somebody on her show when she had a talk show back in the old days before I was doing this teaching at Harvard. And I teach a large seminar at the business school, the Harvard Business School called Leadership and happiness that has 180 students, something like 450 on the waiting list and illegal zoom length they think I'm not aware of. And that's before I was doing that, which is fun. As an academic, I was actually the president of a think tank in Washington, D.C. i was the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a free market oriented think tank which I was the chief executive of for 11 years. Before that I was a behavioral scientist at Syracuse and Before that, I was a professional French horn player from when I was 19 until I was 31. I went to college by correspondence in my late 20s and early 30s, and then left music and went and got my PhD and became a behavioral scientist.
- [06:00]
Jordan Peterson
Your PhD is what was the focus of your PhD?
- [06:04]
Arthur Brooks
Public policy analysis. Public policy analysis. And my fields were applied microeconomics and mathematical modeling and all I was doing.
- [06:12]
Jordan Peterson
So that's where you moved from into behavioral psychology.
- [06:16]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly right.
- [06:17]
Jordan Peterson
So I was like lots of economists.
- [06:19]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, right.
- [06:20]
Jordan Peterson
That's happening more frequently. Right?
- [06:21]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. I was mostly interested in human behavior as an economist. I got a great technical toolkit as an economist, but I'm not that interested in cheese markets in Bulgaria. What I'm really interested in is why people do the weird things that they do.
- [06:33]
Jordan Peterson
So motivation.
- [06:34]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly. Right. Studying things that don't have typical economic rationale, like why do people give to charity, why do people admire beauty, why do people love each other? And using the empirical methods and experimental methods that you learn in an economics milieu made it possible for me to study these things. And the tap root of all those things turned out to be human happiness. So when I left my think tank and I was trying to figure out what do I want to do for the rest of my life, I actually had a long process of discernment that culminated when I walked the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain. Hundreds of kilometers. Walking across northern Spain, praying the rosary, and every day saying, lord, guide my path, which is in a process of discernment, is important. You've talked about this an awful lot in your work, and you talk about how people try to actually find what their purpose and meaning actually is through discernment. I thought it was to go back to my behavioral science roots and to look at what people actually most want in life, using science and ideas to give them greater access to the truths about love and happiness.
- [07:39]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so let's start with that issue of discernment. So I've been trying to think about prayer, technically, let's say. And so that's a complicated topic, but you could imagine this. Imagine that your decision is to aim up, which is the opposite of iniquity, by the way. I found out the word iniquity means fundamentally to aim down, to do bad things while you're aiming at them. So instead you decide you're going to aim up. Now you can leave that kind of amorphous because you could do that in a spirit of ignorance. You could say, well, I would like things to be as good as they could Be. Although I'm not sure what that means, and I'm not sure how to do it. But you open the door that way to the beginnings of something approximating fantasy. I mean, part of what your imagination does is seek a pathway forward, Right? And so you can set something like an unspecified uphill goal, and that would be like a meditative or prayer practice. And then you could say, well, my desire, my aim is to flesh out that conceptualization and to specify a way forward. Right. Now then you've set your perceptions and your imagination to work on a particular project. The goal is to walk uphill, whatever that means, to clarify the nature of what uphill is and to discern a strategy. Okay, and then you said you walk this route, Right. And that gives you time for contemplation. Okay, so walk me through that a little bit. You said you were praying the rosary and you were concentrating on something like upward aim, and then you took time to do that. Right. So it's like you give your dreams an opportunity to make themselves manifest in a situation like that. And that's part of that clarification process.
- [09:23]
Arthur Brooks
That's right.
- [09:24]
Jordan Peterson
So what happened to you when you did that, and why did you do it?
- [09:27]
Arthur Brooks
Well, as a neurocognitive matter, we actually understand what a discernment process does literally through pilgrimage. So you know Ian McGilchrist's work, who's phenomenal, the psychiatrist. Neuroscientist. It's a Scottish. He wrote the Master and his Emissary about the right and left hemispheres of the brain, the hemispherically lateralized brain, where the right side of the brain asks the big questions, but doesn't actually come up with the answers. Because the biggest questions in life don't have answers. They only have understanding. Now, the left side actually solves complicated problems. The right side deals with complex problems. Complex and complicated are fundamentally different. Insofar as complicated problems, they're hard to find the solutions to. But once you have the solutions, you can replicate them with almost effortless ease.
- [10:12]
Jordan Peterson
You can make them into an algorithm.
- [10:14]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly right.
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Jordan Peterson
Yeah. And the left hemisphere is actually specialized for algorithm production.
- [10:18]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly right. And that's the reason that you use the left side of the brain disproportionately. When you're looking at social media or using technology engineering solutions are left brain solutions. The right brain problems are those that have very easy answers. We won the football game. They lost the football game. She fell in love with me. She didn't fall in love with me. I have something I want to do. I Don't have something that I want to do. But you can't answer the questions. You can only have an understanding of the questions. And to come to the understanding of those questions, you have to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain. And to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain, you have to be undistracted and let your mind waddle to stimulate the default mode network in your brain, which is intensely uncomfortable because we hate boredom. When you were at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, your colleague Dan Gilbert, who's a wonderful social psychologist, he did all those experiments about people being bored. So he would put people in a room for 15 minutes with nothing to do except they had a button in front of them. You remember these experiments?
- [11:19]
Jordan Peterson
No.
- [11:19]
Arthur Brooks
If they touch the button, they get a painful electricity.
- [11:21]
Jordan Peterson
Oh, yes, yes.
- [11:22]
Arthur Brooks
And it turned out that 80% of the participants shocked themselves rather than letting their default mode network run free.
- [11:29]
Jordan Peterson
Even animals will do that.
- [11:31]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [11:31]
Jordan Peterson
Bored animals will shock themselves.
- [11:32]
Arthur Brooks
Absolutely. And one, they had to throw out this particular guy because he was such an outlier, shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. We hate boredom, we hate the default mode network. But unless you engage the right hemisphere of the brain and the default mode network by purposively just walking and repetitively praying, unless you manually stimulate that part of your brain, you are not going to come to understanding about the why of your life. You're going to be stuck on the how and what and you're going to be path dependent. And I knew that, I knew that.
- [12:04]
Jordan Peterson
Well, probably perhaps part of that discomfort. So Carl Friston, we did some work in this regard too. Carl Friston has associated negative emotion, anxiety, more specifically with high entropy states. So, and you could think about a high entropy state as a state of navigation where a very large number of pathways are potentially open to you. Right? And so if you open Pandora's box, if you move away from a determinate goal and you open Pandora's box, which is what direction should I go? Then that is anxiety provoking, because there's a multitude of possibilities that beckon now. There's opportunity in that, but it can easily overwhelm you, especially if you're tilted more strongly towards negative emotion, let's say. So the problem with opening up a space of contemplation is that open spaces are unprotected and high entropy. And so there's negative emotion for sure. Well, that's why we know too that the default emotion associated with right hemisphere activation is negative emotion.
- [13:07]
Arthur Brooks
It tends to be high negative affect. And so you're familiar with the Panis test, the positive affect, negative affect sequence, which is. I administer it to all my students at Harvard. I make them take this because I put them into four categories. The high positive, high negative category. That's high affect, people. That's you and me, which are the mad scientist profile. The high positive, low negative, which everybody wants to be, which is actually not great for a lot of things.
- [13:31]
Jordan Peterson
Which is the cheerleader makes the impulsive.
- [13:33]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, that's the cheerleader. And they make bad bosses too, by the way, because they can't take criticism or hear bad news. You have people who are high negative and low positive, which is the poets. And then the people who are low affect, low, low. Those are the judges, you know, very, very low affect, sober, stolid. They make good surgeons. Right. You don't want somebody to cut you open and say, oh, my God. Right? That's not. That's not what you want. And so I actually categorize people and then talk about the strengths and weaknesses that each one of these has. Now, the people who are most likely to be able to affect discernment, most, at least conventionally, by undertaking these techniques are the mad scientists, because they have access to very high levels of affect, but they have to understand themselves to do that. This was the thing. I had this background as a behavioral scientist and I wanted to know the why of my life and from that, to figure out the direction. Forward or uphill, as you say.
- [14:26]
Jordan Peterson
So that was two questions, the why and the direction.
- [14:29]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
- [14:30]
Jordan Peterson
Why is that two questions rather than 1? 1.
- [14:32]
Arthur Brooks
Well, the why of life is really the meaning at all. And then once you understand the meaning, then you can figure out what direction you're going in. Because the direction, per se, is not meaning. The direction is direction.
- [14:45]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, it's fine. Fine.
- [14:45]
Arthur Brooks
So in other words, here's the.
- [14:47]
Jordan Peterson
That's the difference between strategy and aim.
- [14:49]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly. And so in sailing, there's a concept called the rum line. Are you familiar with that?
- [14:54]
Jordan Peterson
No.
- [14:54]
Arthur Brooks
R H U m line. And it's a. It's a very important metaphor in Spanish. It's called el rumbo in Spanish. And that's something you use a lot. The rumbling. What it is, is a direct answer with the destination, and you have to have it. If you're doing navigation and sailing.
- [15:09]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
- [15:10]
Arthur Brooks
That doesn't mean you're going to go exactly to that point or you're not going to get blown off course. You can't actually make any progress unless you have a rumb line. And so that's the whole idea, the meaning is the rumb line. And then you can start making progress toward the goal, notwithstanding the fact that it's not perfect.
- [15:27]
Jordan Peterson
So there's an idea in the Old Testament that the firstborn is to be sanctified to God. And I think the reason for that is that the aim sets the frame. Right? Right. So if you start a new endeavor, which you do sequentially during the day, right? Because your day is composed of a whole variety of journeys, essentially events towards a destination.
- [15:49]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [15:50]
Jordan Peterson
You set the aim and that sets the frame of perception, and it sets. It actually calibrates your emotions. Right. Because positive emotion, this is another thing that Friston established, I think better than anyone else. This is very cool. So negative motion indicates a high entropy state. Too many convening rum lines, let's say. Positive emotion makes itself manifest when the entropy in relationship to a goal is decreased. So once you establish the goal, right, there's a certain calculated cost to getting there.
- [16:21]
Arthur Brooks
Right?
- [16:21]
Jordan Peterson
Right. And that's. That cost is going to be indicated in part by anxiety because it indicates, well, what it's going to. The risk for the endeavor. Okay. When you take a step forward to the location, you reduce the entropy because the probability that you'll succeed is now increased. And that decrease in entropy is marked by dopaminergic activation, positive emotion. So it's so cool because it means this is so cool. It's one of the things I've been lecturing to people about as I travel. It's like, you know, I've been thinking.
- [16:51]
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- [18:13]
Jordan Peterson
Your aim sets your emotional frame like there's almost nothing more important to understand than that. It's like because your brain can't compute what's positive until it knows what the direction is and it sees you making progress. So no aim. First rule, there is no aim, no positive emotion. And the second rule is progress towards a name, once specified is positive emotion. And then there's a corollary which is something like, well, it's like, it's like steepness of approach. Let's say you make some approach to a goal, but the goal doesn't really matter. It's like you're not going to get a lot of kick. But let's say if you have a really high order goal, that would be one that would be divinely inspired, let's say. Well, then any progress towards that is going to give you a kick.
- [18:58]
Arthur Brooks
Progress is actually what instantiates the liking, the wanting liking learning process. That's from dopamine. That's what it comes from. Humans are made for progress, not for arrival. And so the whole process is, okay, discern the rhumb line, figure out the instantiation of what that means, practically speaking, and then start making progress toward it.
- [19:21]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, that's what a leader communicates to people.
- [19:24]
Arthur Brooks
That's exactly right. That's why people will run through a wall for a great leader. But that's what you must do for yourself.
- [19:29]
Jordan Peterson
So I got something cool to, to tell you about that psychobiologically. I learned this from a friend of mine. I did a podcast with him and he's a deep biological thinker and he was very interested in honeybee communication. So what honeybees do is they go find a flower patch. That's a treasure store, let's say. Right? So it's, it's a name for the honeybees, right. And they go back and they communicate about the direction and the distance. So they communicate about the energy that has to be expended to go to this flower bed. But one question the other bees have, so to speak, as well, is the journey worth the effort? And the way the honeybees communicate that is that the more rich the storehouse, the faster they dance. And it's exactly the same thing that enthusiastic leaders do when they're talking about the goal. It's like. So the way people calibrate that is, like, if I can see you enthusiastic and energetic about something, I assume that you truly believe that the goal is worth the effort, because otherwise you wouldn't risk expending that much energy.
- [20:31]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly.
- [20:32]
Jordan Peterson
Well, I think it's so damn comical that it's stable across, like, honeybees and people.
- [20:36]
Arthur Brooks
Oh, yeah. No, no. I mean, anybody who doesn't believe that psychology is biology, they just don't know the biology. They just don't understand the biology. Right. But there's another weird angle on this, though. See, this is one of the great paradoxes of this. So do you want to have progress in your life? Do you want to be a happier person? Do you. To have a life full of meaning? Number one, discern. Number two, create a strategy about actually how to arrive at the object of your discernment. And number three, start making progress toward it.
- [21:06]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, exactly.
- [21:07]
Arthur Brooks
This is like 1, 2, 3. This is what I advise.
- [21:09]
Jordan Peterson
Behavior therapy 101.
- [21:11]
Arthur Brooks
This is what I'm talking to young men. Because, yes, email that I get. All the email that you get is from young people in their 20s. You know, how do I fall in love and stay in love? How do I find a job that's actually going to give me fulfillment? How do I have the. The life that I want to have? Because I have this hollowness in my life. Like, 1, 2, 3. This is what we talk about. Here's the paradox. Here's the hell of it. If you arrive, it's a problem.
- [21:33]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right.
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Arthur Brooks
Because that's the arrival fallacy that we come up with. So a lot of people will say, why do all diets fail? Because they basically do. 95% of diets fail insofar as at one year after the inception of a diet, people weigh more than they did at the beginning of the diet. Right. This is before the GLP1, drugs, et cetera, et cetera. Why? And the reason is because you will forego all of the food that you like if you see the scale go down. Because progress is Everything. Because humans are made for progress. All of our utility, all of our. We get so much dopamine in the wanting, liking, learning process actually from progress. The reward for actually hitting your goal is you never get to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. That's why 30% of stringent diets lead to eating disorders. Because people are like, I want more progress. And so they keep making progress. And that's when healthy eating or healthy dietary patterns turn into unhealthy dietary patterns is because people want progress so very much. So the paradox of all this is you better have a rum line and that rum line better be pinned someplace else.
- [22:42]
Jordan Peterson
So. So one of the. I've been studying these ancient stories in the Old Testament a lot.
- [22:49]
Arthur Brooks
Congratulations on the new book.
- [22:50]
Jordan Peterson
Oh, thank you.
- [22:50]
Arthur Brooks
It's phenomenal.
- [22:51]
Jordan Peterson
Oh, thank you. So one of the things that I really tried to delve into was Jacob's vision. Yeah, it's very cool because Jacob, when he has the vision of Jacob's Ladder, Jacob's a bad guy. He's in collusion with his Oedipal mother. He's deceived his father. He's betrayed his brother. He's a mama's boy. He's intellectually arrogant. He's a coward. He's a bad guy.
- [23:15]
Arthur Brooks
He's an unlikable character.
- [23:16]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, exactly. But then he leaves and he decides that he's gonna be good. He's gonna try to be good. That's when he has that dream. Now, the thing that's cool about the dream, that's relevant to our discussion is that. So you have this Jacob's Ladder, which, what would you say, spirals up into the ineffable, right? You can't see the pinnacle. The pinnacle is wherever God is, but you can't see that. And the reason I think that that's relevant and important is because of the paradox that you just described. If you reach your goal, you satiate the system and the motivational framework disappears, right? So that means there's no direction and there's no hope. That's the problem. It's weird because you've attained your goal, but now you're directionless, and technically, you're hopeless. Because hope comes in consequence of positive emotion in relationship to a goal. So actually, what you want. You might think that paradise is the land of milk and honey, so to speak, that it's the land of infinite satiation. But the problem with that is satiation destroys the frame and destroys hope. So actually, what you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit. And that's exactly what you see in Jacob's Ladder. It's like, so you climb. This is slight. This is different than Sisyphus, right? Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill and then it rolls back down the same hill, right? It's like, no, what you actually want is a mountain. And then when you get to the top of that, you can see another mountain. And then when you get to the top of that, you can see another one. And that never comes to an end. So that would be an inexhaustible source of motivation and hope. And it is independent in a way. It's independent of accomplishment because you. There is no final goal, but you don't want there to be a final goal because then you run into the problem of the paradoxical problem of satiation. Right? And it is also strange, and you were touching on this, that one of the really weird things about human beings is that we're far more seeking oriented than satiation oriented. Right. Is that we do want the adventure. We want the craving, we want the desire, the progress. Yeah. And the progress more than we want the containment. Absolutely. You know, like, I had a client once, I had a funny conversation with him. He had this dream of retiring when he was like 50, you know, and. And he had a pretty cut and dried, ordinary algorithmic job, you know. And so it was okay, but it wasn't a thrill. It wasn't the meaning of his life, you know. And I said, well, what's your vision for retirement? And he said, well, I imagine being on a beach in the Caribbean with like a Mai Tai in my hand. And I thought, well, that's a travel poster, not a plan. And so I talked to him about it. I said, well, look, you're like a middle aged white guy. You're gonna sit on the damn beach for one day and you're gonna be so sunburned you're gonna have to hide for two weeks. And then what are you gonna do? You're gonna drink like five Mai Tai's a day. Or 20. For how long? You're gonna be an alcoholic in no time flat. You've got no orientation or goal. There was nothing to it at all. Right.
- [26:15]
Arthur Brooks
Good luck on your divorce.
- [26:16]
Jordan Peterson
Well, right. And your cirrhosis.
- [26:18]
Arthur Brooks
These guys at Goldman have told me this for years and years. So you can make a bunch of money. Of course, if you're smart and you're motivated and you have your MBA and you come out like raring to go by 49, you have $400 million. And I've seen this again and again and again. The people that I've worked with, a privilege to work with, they retire at 49. Why? Because they don't like their work. Their work is backbreaking, and they can't see their families, and they don't have love in their lives, but they've lost their chops on actually how to do these things because the plot has been lost in their lives. And so they retire at 49, and then they become very good at golf or tennis, and they get a nice dark tan, and pretty soon they're having an affair with their tennis coach. And then their life really falls apart. And here's the thing. Here's the thing, Jordan. Woe be unto the man whose dreams come true, because he will find that he had the wrong dreams.
- [27:07]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right, Exactly.
- [27:08]
Arthur Brooks
This is a real problem.
- [27:09]
Jordan Peterson
Well, that's also part and parcel of the call to religious humility. It's like, I want to get what I want. It's like, what makes you so sure you're right about what you want? Exactly. So I think that notion of this is something I've been discussing with my wife a lot, because she really learned this in the last few years. Is that. So we talked about setting an amorphous uphill goal. Okay. So that's sort of predicated, in part, you could think about that as a religious relationship with the unknown. It's sort of predicated on part, on your a priori presumption that you don't know, finally, what's good for you now. But what you could want is to learn that and discover it. Right. But that's like an ongoing relationship. And what that does is it provides a solution to the problem of you getting what you want and finding out that it wasn't the right thing. Right. Because you still want to journey forward. You want to sally forth, so to speak. But you have to do that in ignorance and humility. And you have to do that understanding that as you make progress, you're going to shift the goal that you're seeking and that that should happen.
- [28:14]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [28:14]
Jordan Peterson
Because otherwise you run into it. Exactly. The paradox that you. Exactly.
- [28:17]
Arthur Brooks
And you have to recognize that heaven is not on earth. Heaven is in heaven. It's fine if there's an end to the rumb line, as long as it's unattainable in this particular life, because we are not geared toward it.
- [28:27]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, that's why heaven is an observation. Yeah. Well, you know, I've thought about that a lot this Notion of life, life abundant in eternity. Like, that's. We tend to read that concretized and think about that as something like life after death. But that's not what it is. It's. As far as I can tell, it's something like the state that exists when you posit an amorphous, indefinite goal as your ultimate goal. Because that imbues everything local with a kind of global significance. Right. I'm pursuing the best, and that's how it's manifesting itself in the moment. And that's life eternal because there's an element of it that's timeless. So, you know, in the Sermon on the Mount, it's a guide to what you just described. Christ says it's very specific. He says, first of all, focus your attention on the highest imaginable. Okay, whatever that is. Like, you don't know exactly. Right. But it's. Because it's indefinite and it's ineffable and it's beyond you. But that's what you want to. That's what you're orienting towards. So you establish your. Then pay attention to the moment.
- [29:35]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly. And let me put one more twist in this as part of discernment. So making progress on the rumble is, practically speaking, in worldly terms, having more. Having more of what? More money, power, pleasure, fame, more family, relationships, more prestige, whatever it happens to be. But the real twist is not just having more satisfaction that you can actually count on in life, is not more having more of the things that you want. It's wanting less. Haves divided by wants is a much better model that's both biblical and psychologically robust. And so the goal should be for all of us, increasing the numerator, having more with respect to our goals, moving on the rumb line and wanting less. Or.
- [30:21]
Jordan Peterson
Or learning to be okay. So wanting less. My wife just did a talk in Salt Lake City, and what she had focused this talk on was gratitude. And she learned this. She started to practice being grateful when she was dying. It's a very strange time to start practicing being grateful. But one of the things that you can think through when you're in dire condition, dire straits. This is what happens in the story of Job, by the way, is that, well, imagine everything falls apart for you.
- [30:47]
Arthur Brooks
Right?
- [30:48]
Jordan Peterson
Okay. Now, you could ask yourself, how could I make this worse? And the answer to that is, well, I could be resentful and deceitful and arrogant and unhappy and bitter, which, by.
- [30:58]
Arthur Brooks
The way, is our psychological baseline from the Pleistocene. We're evolved toward resentment. We're evolved toward anger and fear because literally there's more tissue in the brain devoted to negative emotions in the limbic system of the brain as opposed to positive affect, because it's protective. It keeps you alive.
- [31:17]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Yeah.
- [31:17]
Arthur Brooks
Well, Jordan Peterson exists today because Jordan Peterson's ancestors starting the Pleistocene were resentful. And the result of that is that you're evolved to say, you know, first class on the United Airlines has really gone downhill as opposed to, I'm getting there safe and fast, and I'm sitting in the front of the plane. I'm going to get off early, and they're going to give me something to eat. It's unbelievable. That's why gratitude. Gratitude is a divine thing, and it's a practice. It's standing up.
- [31:47]
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- [33:02]
Arthur Brooks
It's managing your effective evolved state. So it doesn't manage you.
- [33:07]
Jordan Peterson
Right. Yeah. So you're. You're. Well, the. Well, the presumption would be exactly that. Is that the default attitude, the default untrained attitude is likely to be overwhelmed by negative emotion and resentful.
- [33:20]
Arthur Brooks
Right, Right.
- [33:20]
Jordan Peterson
But that isn't. That isn't fate. You can train yourself out of that and part of the way you do that. And I saw her do this when she was dying, which was really quite something to see. She decided, as an act of will, to focus on what she was grateful for and to become an expert at that. Right. And that isn't the sort of expertise that modern people tend to think about when they think about expertise. Right. Because we think of something like propositional knowledge rather than attitude. But it's definitely the case that you can, what, cultivate. Well, what traditional people, traditional European Christians, for example, knew that you could cultivate virtue. And that's a very specific phrase. It's that cultivation is practice.
- [34:08]
Arthur Brooks
Yes, absolutely.
- [34:09]
Jordan Peterson
Now, this discernment idea, by the way.
- [34:11]
Arthur Brooks
One thing, by the way, when your wife was giving that talk on gratitude in the room next door at the same conference in Salt Lake City, my wife was giving a talk on forgiveness, which is also adapted, which is also standing up to the lit.
- [34:25]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right.
- [34:26]
Arthur Brooks
See, our wives who are godly Catholic women, woe be unto them being married to us. Imagine this.
- [34:33]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
- [34:34]
Arthur Brooks
No, I don't like the paths of righteousness.
- [34:36]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:37]
Arthur Brooks
It's a beautiful parallel.
- [34:38]
Jordan Peterson
So discernment, that's an archaic phraseology, discernment.
- [34:43]
Arthur Brooks
Yes.
- [34:43]
Jordan Peterson
And that wasn't something that I saw a psychologist study when I was in the thick of the research enterprise. And so why discernment? Specific, like, why discernment? Why that terminology? Why happiness? Why did those things. And how was that related? How was your pursuit of those as an intellectual enterprise associated with that pilgrimage that you took?
- [35:08]
Arthur Brooks
So discernment comes from a very strong view of the existence and essence dichotomy. So philosophically, we've been going back and forth forever. What precedes what essence or existence? Of course, in the 19th and 20th century, Sartre and all of the existentialists would say that existence precedes essence. You're born without a meaning. Meaning in life doesn't exist until you discover it. Or no, no, till you create it. That's what Sartre said. The ethical life is one in which you have to create your sense of meaning.
- [35:39]
Jordan Peterson
Right.
- [35:39]
Arthur Brooks
The Krishna.
- [35:40]
Jordan Peterson
Nietzsche's presumption as well.
- [35:42]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly right. Well, actually, Nietzsche was stronger. Nietzsche said that there is no essence, so stop looking. For all intents and purposes, it's like, stop wasting your time, for Pete's sake. Because actually, trying to create this illusion of meaning, this illusion of essence, what you're going to be, you're feeding into this global kind of delusion that people have now, the ancient Greeks, which of course led to and the Hebrew tradition leading to the Christian tradition is. No, no, no, no. Essence precedes existence. And that means your job in life is to discover your essence. To discern, to discover. And that's discernment. Okay, okay, that's what I believe. Okay, that's what I believe.
- [36:22]
Jordan Peterson
It seems to me that in the story of. In the Genesis account, God basically tells Adam and Eve that they have unlimited freedom in the garden, except for one thing. And I think it's associated with this idea of discernment because they're not supposed to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which I believe means they're not to make the presumption that they can establish the fundamental axioms of the moral order. They have to discern it. They have to find their way. But that way is implicit in being and reflective of its substructure.
- [36:56]
Arthur Brooks
Something like that. There is truth, there is rightness. Yes. There are things that actually exist. It isn't all subjective. Edmund Husserl, I mean, in phenomenology talks about the essence of reality is what you perceive. That's the beginning of the problem right there. That's the beginning of the problem. We believe. You and I believe, I think that you and I would agree that there is an underlying reality and the adventure of life is figuring it out.
- [37:22]
Jordan Peterson
Yes.
- [37:22]
Arthur Brooks
And so that I want to align my perception with reality. That's my goal.
- [37:27]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, Well, I think that's also a good definition, mental health. Okay, fine, I understand. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, how did you then come to the conclusion that there was an implicit or an implicate order and that the goal was discernment rather than. Because the typical intellectual. That the typical Luciferian intellectual is going to make the presumption that there is no moral order, but that it can be imposed, particularly by a powerful intellect.
- [37:55]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [37:56]
Jordan Peterson
And that while that is the Luciferian temptation, it tends to go very badly wrong. But I'm very curious about why it was that you took the alternative pathway. Like what. What clued you into the fact that. Well, misery can do it if you're wise. But what clued you into the fact that there was an implicate order and that the goal was discernment.
- [38:17]
Arthur Brooks
That's a. I got lucky. I think I got lucky. I was. My father was a mathematician. And here's the funny thing, you know, there's a lot of social science studies people ask me all the time, how do I raise my kids in the church. So the most important thing in my life is my Christian faith. The most important thing in my life that started when I was a kid.
- [38:37]
Jordan Peterson
How old?
- [38:38]
Arthur Brooks
Since before I can remember.
- [38:39]
Jordan Peterson
I mean, why was it the most important?
- [38:42]
Arthur Brooks
Because it was just the central thing in my life. And here's probably the reason. So what we find when people ask, how do I raise my kids in the faith? Right. The answer is, have them see the most powerful physical person in their life worshiping. It doesn't matter what you say. You know this about because you're dad, your father, like me. It does not matter what you say. All that matters is what they see because that's how they receive information. And there's lots and lots.
- [39:11]
Jordan Peterson
That indicates the status hierarchy in a very concrete manner.
- [39:14]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly right. And my father, who was a scientist, he had a PhD in biostatistics. He was a mathematician by background and what he taught as a university professor, he was a proud man. He would have been on his knees in front of no other man, but on Sundays, he was on his knees. And that had a huge impact on the little guy. That had a huge impact on me.
- [39:37]
Jordan Peterson
Right, so you respected your father.
- [39:38]
Arthur Brooks
There was something bigger than my. I mean, I thought my dad was powerful, that he could lift the house.
- [39:43]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right.
- [39:44]
Arthur Brooks
He was a math professor. He could not.
- [39:46]
Jordan Peterson
Right.
- [39:47]
Arthur Brooks
And I saw my father on his knees, and that had this impact. Now, maybe I have the God gene, you know, maybe what we'll actually find out with, you know, the exhaustive mapping of the human genome and the advance of science, that there's a God center in the brain, that we have particular proclivities for whatever it happens to be. But I don't think so. I think that what I saw was that that's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be an honorable, admirable man like my father. And my father stood in awe of the Lord. That's what I wanted to be. Look, I wake up, Jordan. I wake up many days an atheist. I wake up, I don't know. But then I decide to worship. And I decide to worship because that's what I believe I'm supposed to do. That's the ultimate rumb line of my life. And behavioral science notwithstanding, that ultimately is the truth that I have to follow, because that's the truth that I believe is most meritorious.
- [40:42]
Jordan Peterson
Well, I actually think that we. I actually think that we've probably got this relatively well modeled on the neuroscientific front. It's not completely compiled yet, but proximal goals are nested in distal goals, and distal goals are nested in still further Distal goals. And some of those are explicit, but then they fade off into implicit. And they're nested in higher order implicit goals all the way up to the unspeakable, the ineffable. Like one of the ways that I've been trying to conceptualize conscience. Conscience is a very weird phenomena. I think about it as the voice. Consciousness. Conscious. Yeah, it's like the voice of negative emotion. So conscience is an orienting function that tells you when you've deviated from the path. Right, okay. What path?
- [41:32]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [41:32]
Jordan Peterson
Well, okay, so imagine now you're pursuing a proximal goal, but in that pursuit you betray a more distal goal. The voice of the more distal goal will appear to you as conscience. And, you know, the distal goal has a more distal goal. Because these things are nested all the way up because we have some relationship with what the future and other people and the infinite. And so there is a voice of the infinite distal, and that's conscious.
- [41:59]
Arthur Brooks
This is Thomistic. This is purely Thomistic in its right. I mean, this is the whole idea that it goes back and it goes back and it goes back until ultimately there is a creation of the first goal. It's the first mover, the first teleological mover, as it were.
- [42:13]
Jordan Peterson
Right. Which is also operating constantly. Yes. I mean, the operation of the God in Genesis at the beginning of time. It's not the beginning exactly. The beginning of time. It is that, but it's not just that. It's all beginnings. Right. Including the beginnings that start now. It's the same process that's operating.
- [42:34]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [42:34]
Jordan Peterson
And it is the voice of that process that makes itself manifest as conscience. I think that's. I think that's literally and neurologically true as well as theologically.
- [42:44]
Arthur Brooks
I think that's right. And I think that we could make a very compelling argument that people have in our field that this is entirely evolved and completely materialistic. I think that's a totally legitimate argument.
- [42:56]
Jordan Peterson
Well, you could imagine too. Imagine this is that as our cortex evolved, we moved from immediate local gratification to long term future orientation.
- [43:11]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [43:11]
Jordan Peterson
Okay. So the cortex allows for that, and that's what maturation does. But it's not just the future. So now everything that makes itself manifest in the present, on the hedonistic front. So the satiation of immediate motivations has to be construed in relationship to its future consequences. Okay, so that puts. And then the future is. Well, what time span?
- [43:32]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, no, this is the time travel which is only allowed by the 30% of our brain by way Called the prefrontal cortex.
- [43:38]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right, exactly. Okay, okay.
- [43:40]
Arthur Brooks
Many people believe, by the way, that Adam and Eve became our ancestors, fully became our ancestors with a knowledge of good and evil because of self consciousness, which we became in the moment that the prefrontal cortex allowed that. That's the.
- [43:54]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right. That's apprehension. Okay. Well there's a parallel, I think as well. Like I don't think there's any difference between inclusion of the future in the purview of your perceptions and inclusion of other people.
- [44:08]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [44:09]
Jordan Peterson
It's partly because one of the things that I studied psychopaths for a long time and you think of psychopaths as selfish. Right. Self centered. But it's weird because, so psychopaths betray themselves all the time because they don't learn from experience. So they get what they want now, but they fail. And so then I thought, oh well, psychopaths don't care about other people. They also don't care about their future selves. And I thought, oh, that's the same thing.
- [44:34]
Arthur Brooks
They don't learn from remorse because they don't have remorse.
- [44:36]
Jordan Peterson
They don't. Well, they certainly don't have remorse.
- [44:39]
Arthur Brooks
Dark triads, or you like to talk about dark tetrads, you bring in sadism, of course. But the characteristic of people above average in psychology, in psychopathy is the lack of remorse.
- [44:48]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
- [44:49]
Arthur Brooks
Well, that lack of remorse is an inability to learn.
- [44:51]
Jordan Peterson
Yes.
- [44:52]
Arthur Brooks
You hurt somebody, you did something wrong, it had consequences. If you don't feel remorse, that remorse is activating the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your brain which is making you feel social pain.
- [45:02]
Jordan Peterson
Right.
- [45:03]
Arthur Brooks
You don't feel that if you have psychopathic tendencies.
- [45:05]
Jordan Peterson
Yes. And then. Well, and if that pain doesn't make itself, like I think that pain is the felt sense of the eradication of a neurological system. So like imagine that you, that a system emerges in this Darwinian sense to dominate. So now you're under its sway. Okay. Now it has a goal in mind and when it makes itself manifest, it fails. Okay. The consequence of that failure should be the destruction of that system. I think that felt pain is the psychological consequence of the death of a system that failed to meet its goals. Now it's gonna struggle and fight to maintain itself even in the face of failure. Right. Which is why it's hard to get rid of a bad habit, for example. It's a living thing, it's not going to give up without a struggle. But the corollary of that would be approximately equivalent to what you just said. There's no learning because there's no remorse, because there's no difference between remorse and learning. The first stage of learning is, oh, I was wrong, that has to go. That's a sacrificial offering too. Right. That part of me has to go. And it's going, no, no, you know, I want to live. And fair enough. And sometimes, like, if you're really poorly oriented in your life and you fail cataclysmically, an awful lot of you has to go, you know, when it gets.
- [46:28]
Arthur Brooks
Back to your wife. Talking about gratitude, by the way, because the same thing is the prefrontal cortex saying, no, no, no, no, no, you, limbic system evolved to feel resentment. That's maladaptive.
- [46:41]
Jordan Peterson
Yes.
- [46:41]
Arthur Brooks
And I have decided to reprogram the limbic system, which tends toward resentment, and I'm going to reprogram it towards it. It's the same basic pattern. This is self management. This is the essence of self leadership. Doing what feels good, if it feels good, do it. If it feels bad, avoid. It is being managed by your ancestors.
- [47:02]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, the problem with that attitude is, well, in relationship to who and over what time span.
- [47:08]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [47:08]
Jordan Peterson
And that's a huge problem. If you have a dominant lobster, a lot of investigation. I know neurology because it's well mapped out. If a dominant lobster who ages is defeated in a battle, his brain dissolves and reconstitutes as a subordinate brain. Right. Exactly the same thing happens to us.
- [47:34]
Arthur Brooks
Because the neuromodular activity in the limbic system of the lobster brain, because once again, because psychology is biology, the lobster can't do anything about that. The big dominant alpha lobster, if there is such a thing, is going to fight to try to maintain that position.
- [47:49]
Jordan Peterson
Yes. And if it can decide, well, the lobster brain is so simple that it can't be subordinate. Sometimes a dominant, sometimes dominant. So it's either victor or not. And when it loses, the victor brain is no good. So it has to go and so dissolves.
- [48:06]
Arthur Brooks
And that's the divine in us. That's the difference. And this is the essence of being fully human and fully alive. Saint Irenaeus said, the glory of God is a man fully alive. What does it mean to be a man fully alive? It is managing your limbic system. It is not deciding that your level of affect that you have today is going to actually be the determining factor in how you treat other people. It is actually, it is getting beyond who you were as a person. It's deciding to worship even though you don't feel a single milligram of faith on a particular day.
- [48:40]
Jordan Peterson
So when everything falls apart for Job, his wife says, and we presume she loves him and that she knows he's a good man, she says, there's nothing left for you but to curse God and die. And she means it. And his attitude is, no matter what's happening to me right now, no matter the depth of my suffering, I refuse to lose faith in my central goodness, and I refuse to lose faith in the essential goodness of being and becoming itself. And that is a decision, right? It's a decision.
- [49:12]
Arthur Brooks
Right?
- [49:13]
Jordan Peterson
Right. Because it's weird. Because the evidence, and this is what his wife tells him. It's like the evidence is that you're done, you've tried really hard, you were a good person, everyone knows it, even God, and yet everything's been stripped away from you and you're in the most miserable imaginable position. You should curse God and die. That's what you would do if you were acting in accordance with the facts.
- [49:33]
Arthur Brooks
If you're purely limbic, there are lots and lots of people who make an absolutely a logical decision to commit suicide.
- [49:43]
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- [50:59]
Arthur Brooks
If they're purely limbic. However, the divine in us, the divine console that allows us to manage our ancestral. Our. Our less evolved selves.
- [51:10]
Jordan Peterson
Default, default selves.
- [51:12]
Arthur Brooks
It's the bumper of tissue behind your forehead called the prefrontal cortex, which is what a miracle. My dog Chucho can't do that. He can't time travel. He can't manage his emotions. The essence of being fully alive is doing exactly that. This is the message that we can give to all these young people today who are so. They don't have to live like Jordan Peterson and Arthur Brooks. They don't have to go, you know, suffer through a PhD. They don't have to become behavioral scientists. They have to learn to manage themselves. They have to put their prefrontal cortex in charge of their limbic systems. And that takes practice, and that takes commitment, and that takes good relationships that will actually bring that along. It's interesting because the best indicator of somebody being able to manage in a man, his limbic system is a good partner. Job's wife is the one who says, curse God and die. Right. Interesting. Interestingly, chapter 38 of Job is where he puts God in the dock and he says, you know, all right, everybody told me to curse you and die. All this bad stuff. So what gives? I'm a righteous man. What gives? And then God actually turns it around and says, what do you know?
- [52:22]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, you're so smart.
- [52:24]
Arthur Brooks
Where were you when I created Stars in the Sky?
- [52:27]
Jordan Peterson
The whole story is not evident to you?
- [52:29]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, exactly.
- [52:30]
Jordan Peterson
Job accepts that. He says, look, I can take solace in my ignorance.
- [52:33]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly. Right.
- [52:34]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Which is very useful to take solace because your ignorance is infinite. There's a lot of place for solace in that.
- [52:40]
Arthur Brooks
Self management is the essence of. Well, humility requires self management, too. We're not evolved to be humble. We are evolved as tribal societies to be humbled but not to be humble. To be voluntarily humble is a decision that can actually lead us to live our best lives.
- [52:59]
Jordan Peterson
That's wisdom.
- [53:00]
Arthur Brooks
And that's the 30th chapter of job. That's the capstone of that thing. That's the big point at the end of the day where he is victorious but still doesn't understand, puts God in the dock, and then is taught humility and accepts that humility and thrives.
- [53:14]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Okay, so let's go back at happiness, because what you could say that the folk understanding of happiness is something like the gratification of a toddler's whip. Right, Right. A toddler's having a tantrum in a store and his mother, defeated, gives him the chocolate bar. And so now the child stops squawking and bitching and being subsumed by negative emotion.
- [53:41]
Arthur Brooks
Right?
- [53:41]
Jordan Peterson
And maybe smiles. And so you think, well, that's happiness, right? Okay. But that's not the kind of happiness that you're describing. That's gratification, okay?
- [53:49]
Arthur Brooks
Just gratification. And that's a feeling.
- [53:51]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so why. Look, if you're hedonistically oriented, why not. But why not be skeptical about your proposition that it's something other than immediate hedonistic gratification that constitutes happiness?
- [54:05]
Arthur Brooks
And certainly Epicurus would have been. And so the whole Epicurean tradition of trying to maintain positive feelings as much as possible. Yes, and again, he wasn't a hedonist in the modern sense. He was actually a highly moral character. But the whole point is to have peace in your life and surround yourself with people who like you and to have none disagreeable conversations and to set your life up that has as little conflict as possible, which is catastrophically wrong. Because unless you have sanctified suffering in your life, you will not become strong, you will not learn, you will not grow, and you'll make no progress on your.
- [54:38]
Jordan Peterson
Well, you also won't be able to withstand suffering when it comes. It will, which is.
- [54:42]
Arthur Brooks
I mean, it's like my students ask me. So, professor, are you saying I need to go look for suffering and say, don't worry, no, don't find you?
- [54:47]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right. You don't need to look for it.
- [54:49]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly. Right.
- [54:50]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so but then why conceptualize it exactly?
- [54:53]
Arthur Brooks
Because happiness isn't a feeling. Feelings and happiness are like the smell of your Thanksgiving dinner and your Thanksgiving dinner. You would not mistake the turkey for the smell of the turkey. The feelings are associated with something that's actually a lot more tangible. So we know, Amiyu and I are pretty interested in nutrition, that all food is a combination of protein, carbohydrates and fat. These are the macronutrients of all food, including your Thanksgiving dinner. The macronutrients of happiness, which have residual smells, just emotions from the limbic system. The constituent parts of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. These are the three things that empirically we find in people who have overall a life that they consider to be the highest levels of well being. Now, enjoyment is not the same thing as pleasure. On the contrary, pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It's largely a stimulation of the ventral tegmental area and the ventral striatum of the brain. And you tap it in all sorts of. You can get pleasure from all sorts of things. If your girlfriend says I love you, or you have a big bump of cocaine, whatever it happens to be, you'll get the same. Because we have a thrifty brain. But that's not enjoyment. Enjoyment is something that is permanent and can be experienced in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. In other words, it has pleasure involved, but it adds people in memory, thus making it a permanent experience. And that's really important because that has all kinds of practical implications that I teach my students.
- [56:17]
Jordan Peterson
Right. So the problem with immediate gratification, at least in part, is that it lacks the dimension of sustainability.
- [56:23]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly right. And iterability and self management. Because once it's in your prefrontal cortex, you can manage your pleasures. So your pleasures don't manage you. So one of the things I'll tell my students is something that gives you a lot of pleasure and it can be addictive, which most pleasures can be, not all. I mean, walking in the woods and saying your prayers, not, not particularly addictive, but highly glycemic carbohydrates and cocaine and alcohol and gambling and pornography and all that. If you're doing any of those things and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong because you're not going to be able to take it from pleasure to enjoyment and it won't be a source of happiness.
- [56:59]
Jordan Peterson
What mediating role does social engagement? Is that something like a precondition for iteration?
- [57:06]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, well, it's such that you. Part of it is that by adding a human dimension to it, you're largely mediating the experience using your prefrontal cortex. That's just as an empirical observation. When you take.
- [57:20]
Jordan Peterson
Why?
- [57:21]
Arthur Brooks
Because it becomes memorable when you add people into it. Pleasure is not memorable. But when you add.
- [57:28]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so let's think about the difference between pornography and sex with a partner, because that's a good comparison. Okay, so now the thing about sex with a partner is that especially if you want it to be repeated, you, you need to take the other person into account.
- [57:47]
Arthur Brooks
Right?
- [57:48]
Jordan Peterson
So there's a, there's a, you could call that a civilizing factor. Right? It's much more complicated activity.
- [57:56]
Arthur Brooks
It's a higher level of consciousness. You're actually more conscious of the experience because you're not thinking about, about the physical act. You're thinking about the mediating human experience that you're having.
- [58:07]
Jordan Peterson
Right? So okay, so you've got. All right, so you're under the thrall of the sexual impulse, right, which has a drive like characteristic and which has a certain set of biological activations. And pornography would only be that it.
- [58:23]
Arthur Brooks
Strips it of everything except for those biological impulses.
- [58:28]
Jordan Peterson
Right. So it reduces it to the lowest possible normality. Right, right. Okay. The question is why that, why is that not optimal? Right, right. Because that's what we're trying to get at. Okay. So now you introduce a partner while there's novelty in the partner. So that's dopaminergic because you don't know exactly what the partner is going to do.
- [58:48]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [58:49]
Jordan Peterson
Then complexifies it in the positive way because it brings elements of love and relationship and mutual caring which are beyond.
- [59:01]
Arthur Brooks
Sharing the pure limbic system.
- [59:03]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah.
- [59:03]
Arthur Brooks
So it's not just a purely limbic activity. So the whole problem is when you, when you.
- [59:07]
Jordan Peterson
That's sanctification in a sense, or sacralization.
- [59:10]
Arthur Brooks
It really is exactly right.
- [59:12]
Jordan Peterson
Which is why it's placed in the context of marriage. I mean, that's the, that's the rule on the, on the moral religious front. There's no sex without marriage, which means something like no sex without commitment and mutuality and long term relationship. So it's contextualizing it that makes it more sophisticated.
- [59:30]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [59:31]
Jordan Peterson
Now you also associate that. No, but the thing that's interesting about the argument you're making is that you also associate that with a. What a deepening and intensification of. You call it enjoyment.
- [59:42]
Arthur Brooks
Right. Well, you know the enjoyment as.
- [59:44]
Jordan Peterson
Right.
- [59:45]
Arthur Brooks
And, and I'm using that particular term because this word enjoyment is usually thought to be something that is more, more nuanced, dimensional and sophisticated than pure pleasure. Now this is a problem with the language, of course, because, you know, this is.
- [59:59]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah.
- [59:59]
Arthur Brooks
Happiness in general, because.
- [60:00]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's where we have to get to the definition. Well, so if you're talking to a young person, you would say a wise man would substitute enjoyment for pleasure.
- [60:11]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [60:11]
Jordan Peterson
And his logical response to that would be why.
- [60:15]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [60:15]
Jordan Peterson
Okay. So why?
- [60:16]
Arthur Brooks
And the reason is because enjoyment is permanent and pleasure is temporal, automatic and animal. That's the problem.
- [60:25]
Jordan Peterson
Well, what if I. Okay, but I say so. Okay, so I get it.
- [60:28]
Arthur Brooks
My dog can feel pleasure the same way that I can. My dog can feel pleasure the same way as I can. My dog can't feel enjoyment in terms of the love relationships that I have with my wife that I can because my dog's brain is incapable of.
- [60:42]
Jordan Peterson
So is it, do you think it's fundamentally. Would you reduce it to the degree that you can reduce it to something like predictable iterability? Like is that the payoff Probably.
- [60:53]
Arthur Brooks
And I think that that's part of.
- [60:54]
Jordan Peterson
The miracle reciprocal iterability.
- [60:56]
Arthur Brooks
So I can say I like that. I want to do that again for these particular reasons.
- [61:00]
Jordan Peterson
Okay. So that would.
- [61:01]
Arthur Brooks
My relationship.
- [61:01]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so that would be the difference, because you could.
- [61:04]
Arthur Brooks
Okay, yeah, that's exactly right.
- [61:05]
Jordan Peterson
Here's an example. Tell me what you think of this. This example. I. People who are watching will be familiar with this story, but it's such a useful story. It doesn't matter. When animal behavior started to study play.
- [61:20]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [61:21]
Jordan Peterson
They watched rats wrestle.
- [61:23]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [61:23]
Jordan Peterson
Okay. Now the assumption was they noticed that if you take a juvenile rat male, they like to wrestle. If the One juvenile was 10% bigger than the other, he could reliably win in a single bout.
- [61:37]
Arthur Brooks
Pretty much every time.
- [61:38]
Jordan Peterson
Every time he'd pit. And that was the mark the studies are.
- [61:41]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [61:41]
Jordan Peterson
Okay. So then the conclusion from that was that play was a form of dominance behavior. And what the victorious rat did was dominate. And that that was pleasurable because it was a victory. But then, but then Panksep did this. He thought, yeah, but rats live in a social environment, so they don't play once, they play repeatedly. Which is like, he should have got a Nobel Prize for this. It's such a brilliant insight. It's like, well, do the rules for iterable play, are they the same as the rules for one bout play? And the answer was no. Because what Panksep showed was that if you paired rats together repeatedly, the big rats that didn't let the little rats win 30% of the time didn't get invited to play. Right. So then you could imagine that maybe this is a technical way of thinking about enjoyment instead of pleasure, is that pleasure is a one off and you could even exploit for pleasure. But if you want, instead, let's say you want to make an arrangement that's iterable and if better, maybe one that iterates and improves. Right. Because obviously that's better. If it's good once, then it should be good multiple times. And if it's good and could be made better, that would even be better. Right, Right. So that would be something like the sanctification of sexuality within a relationship.
- [62:59]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly. Right.
- [63:00]
Jordan Peterson
You know, the people who have the most sex are religious. Just married people.
- [63:03]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [63:04]
Jordan Peterson
Which is hilarious.
- [63:05]
Arthur Brooks
That's Brad Wilcox. Here's the funniest. And it's like, nobody believes that.
- [63:11]
Jordan Peterson
I know. It's like so much for the sexual revolution. It's like, you want sex, be religious.
- [63:15]
Arthur Brooks
And married and be loyal to your wife. That's right. Oh, great. So, but, but here's the thing that, that gets back to the work that you've done over the years. Who is it who can't learn this? And the answer is, Dr. Triads. Who doesn't learn this? What? Because narcissism, it's all about me. Machiavellianism, I'm willing to hurt you. Psychopathy, I feel no remorse. Sadism, I enjoy it. I'm not going to learn. And so the result is that dark triads, they tend to exhibit compulsive addictive behavior over and over again.
- [63:48]
Jordan Peterson
It's self defeating.
- [63:49]
Arthur Brooks
They don't enjoy their lives because they actually can't make it from pleasure to enjoyment. They're incapable of actually.
- [63:56]
Jordan Peterson
Well, so in the biblical story of Cain and Abel, so Cain is a dark tetrad type and he becomes a murderer and then his descendants become genocidal. But the end of that story is extremely interesting, eh? Because God sentences Cain to wander, so he has to move from place to place, which is what psychopaths do, by the way, because they can't exploit the same people over and over. They have to move, but he also wanders in the land of nod. And the land of nod is being traditionally associated with sleep and unconsciousness. So the, the moral of the story is that if you're a psychopathic manipulator, you end up wandering unconsciously. Right. And your life. Cain says, my life has become a. He says, I can't stand the punishment. I can't tolerate the consequences of my actions.
- [64:47]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, we sound just like an addiction, which sounds just like an alcoholic. It sounds just like somebody who's addicted to gambling or pornography. Somebody who's subjugated to something, a repetitive behavior that they can't control. That's what that sounds like. And it's a reason ultimately. And so how do you break out of it? You know, when we talk, I talk to people a lot because I've done a lot of work in addiction communities and people say I gotta quit drinking. No, you need to substitute something better.
- [65:14]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right, right.
- [65:15]
Arthur Brooks
That's what it comes down to. Because only when you substitute something better can you actually make this leap. Something that actually can take you to enjoyment as opposed to getting you stuck on pleasure. Yeah, that's what. And that, and that requires relationship and that requires love and that requires memory. That requires.
- [65:33]
Jordan Peterson
Why memory?
- [65:34]
Arthur Brooks
Memory is such that you can actually enjoyment requires that you can that it be a permanent experience.
- [65:40]
Jordan Peterson
Right, but what's the specific role of memory? I get the role of permanence, but you've you've brought up memory a couple of times. It's like, is it that the experience enriches as it's multiplied?
- [65:51]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [65:52]
Jordan Peterson
So like listening to a song that you love in many different contexts.
- [65:55]
Arthur Brooks
When I was, when I was a kid, I grew up in a lower middle class home in Seattle and we would have Thanksgiving like every other family. And every year my mother was a good cook and there would be this big turkey. You know how we do it? Yeah, I think you have Thanksgiving in October, but, but November, it's such a crowd.
- [66:12]
Jordan Peterson
Because by November there's nothing to be thankful for.
- [66:14]
Arthur Brooks
That's right. That point, you know, north of the border, it's pretty cramped.
- [66:18]
Jordan Peterson
Exactly.
- [66:19]
Arthur Brooks
Every year my mother would make this golden brown beautiful turkey and my dad would say, oh, it's so beautiful, honey. My dad loved my mom so much and he would go and get the Instamatic camera and he would take a picture of the turkey in the oven just to commemorate that moment, that beautiful moment. Now what was he trying to do? He was trying to memorialize something that was going to be highly pleasurable to eat such that we could enjoy that moment again and again and again. Now we have 30 pictures of identical turkeys in the identical oven.
- [66:50]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so memory there is something like a marker for. A marker. Not just a marker for permanence, but an actual indicator of permanence.
- [66:59]
Arthur Brooks
That's just how it makes it permanent.
- [67:00]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so basically it's the photo album. Tell me if I'm correct about that. You seem to me making, making the case that, I mean, this is a restatement of something we already discussed. But I want to get right to the heart of the matter is that, well, why would you settle for pleasure? Why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could have, when you could be like walking in the eternal garden, so to speak. You're going to substitute permanence and maybe improving permanence for the momentary pleasure. Right. Well, okay, so I've been thinking about this in terms of maturation because I think a lot of the things that we see as hedonistic and power mad pathologies are just sustained immaturity. Because toddlers are immature and they're whim driven and they're not social, they can't truly play, not until they're about three. That's when they start to unify. A three year old begins to be able to adopt a shared mutual goal. And that's the basis of mutual understanding and friendship. And true friendship emerges when that process of establishing a mutual goal iterates across playbouts. Okay. And so you can see an extension of temporal awareness there and a broadening of social relationship. And the reason the two year old, it's weird because the two year old now has to take turns and that's a sacrifice because he doesn't get to be first all the time. And that'll produce a tantrum when that's first being learned, especially with the digressive kid. But the payoff is, well, you don't get to be first, but you get to have way more games. Yeah, it's the rats, right? Yes, exactly the same thing. The rat gets to have a friend and so he only wins 70% of the time, but he plays 100 games instead of one.
- [68:43]
Arthur Brooks
It works out.
- [68:43]
Jordan Peterson
Right? Right, exactly. Okay, so like did you know that.
- [68:48]
Arthur Brooks
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- [69:58]
Jordan Peterson
I worked with these guys in Montreal. We delved very deeply into the origins of antisocial and psychopathic behavior. Okay. So the first thing that we learned was that the most aggressive human beings are two year olds.
- [70:12]
Arthur Brooks
Right? Right.
- [70:13]
Jordan Peterson
So if you group human beings together in age matched groups, there is more kicking, hitting, biting and stealing among 2 year olds than any other group. Okay, now if you, now if you look at the 2 year olds, what you see is that most of the two year olds who do that are male. And it's a minority of males. Yeah, most of that. Yeah. 5%. Most of that minority is socialized by the age of four.
- [70:36]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [70:37]
Jordan Peterson
Okay. The ones that, that aren't socialized are the repeat psychopathic offenders. And so what it seems to be is just the absence of cortical maturation. Now, you know, classic penalogical theory. Like, I learned this kind of painfully because I was a little romantic in my attitude, I suppose. Before this, there's a crime age relationship, Right?
- [70:59]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [70:59]
Jordan Peterson
So criminality spikes like mad at 15.
- [71:02]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [71:03]
Jordan Peterson
And then it's. And 15 to 19 is the real crucial period for being a delinquent psychopath. So what happens is these aggressive kids, they maintain a high level of aggression. Normal boys match that level of aggression from 15 to 19 and then it goes down. Whereas the chronic antisocial types just stay high. If you imprison them till they're in their late 20s, they mature. Right, right, right.
- [71:28]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, that's right. So, and part of this is the synaptic development between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. That, that wiring is not complete in human females till age about age 21. In human males till like 70, I don't know, but it's later. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, two of my kids are military. Two of my kids are U.S. marines. And my son Carlos, my middle son, he's a special operator. He's a scout. He was a scout sniper in the Marine Corps, where he would. His job was to jump out of helicopters at night, down a rope, into a theater of battle with a high powered rifle, and then shoot with optics at night. That's a really dangerous thing to do. That's an incredibly dangerous thing to do. That was super fun for him at 20. I don't want to have anything to do with that. Why? Why was he willing to do this? And the answer is because he did not have adequate synaptic development between his limbic system and his prefrontal cortex.
- [72:25]
Jordan Peterson
Well, there'd also likely be like, you know, males are more expendable and the more adventurous males. Adventurousness is a high risk, high return investment. And, and men, well, so there's these great studies, you must know about these studies of the drug gangs in Chicago. The guy who did the studies promised the, the gang leader is a big drug gang, that he would write a book about it. Yeah, yeah. You know about this.
- [72:52]
Arthur Brooks
Okay.
- [72:53]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. And so, so they found out that the default drug dealer made less than minimum wage.
- [73:00]
Arthur Brooks
His mom.
- [73:01]
Jordan Peterson
And almost all of them were employed. Right. But the reason they were willing to take the risk was because the status kick made them much more reproductively successful. And deaths among the higher ups opened up avenues of progress. So even though low level drug dealing didn't even pay minimum wage, the opportunity for status was high. And the relationship between status and reproductive success was unbelievable because it's like the relationship between socioeconomic position and male reproductive Success is like 0.6. It's insanely high. Right. And so it's not surprising that young men who are looking to maximize their reproductive success when they have nothing concrete to offer, are going to take a high risk, high adventure route, because that differentiates them. And even if it's that at the.
- [73:51]
Arthur Brooks
Cost of their own skin, it's like being a CEO. By the way, if you're a CEO of a company, you're probably going to have to leave in disgrace. If you're the Prime Minister of the uk, you're going to leave in disgrace.
- [74:01]
Jordan Peterson
Or Canada. That may take a recent congratulations, by the way.
- [74:06]
Arthur Brooks
Oh yeah, but why do they do it? Because the disgrace that they're almost inevitably going to face is worth what they're going to enjoy in the meantime. In terms of the prestige. That's how much much. That's how much neurophysiologically we want that reward. By the way, Aquinas was really good on this. Thomas Aquinas, I don't think you've actually, you haven't talked very much about Thomistic thinking. Right, which is this. So Aristotle was brought to the modern world through St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. He was a Platonist, but he said the pupil is greater than the master. And introduced Aristotle to more modern audiences in the 13th and 14th centuries. And he said that we are animated by four idols, that God is what we ultimately want, but God is inconvenient. You know, God is hard to understand and a lot of one sided conversations and a ton of rules. And so we think take things that have kind of a godlike feeling to them and they're fourfold. He was an outstanding behavioral scientist. He could stand up to anybody today. He said that the four idols that we have that substitute for God are money, power, pleasure and prestige. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's power, pleasure and honor.
- [75:15]
Jordan Peterson
We've distinguished, we've talked about why happiness. We talked about discernment, we talked about the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. Okay, so let's bring this down to practicalities. Now you teach leadership courses at Harvard and I presume that you take a relatively practical approach to your students in relationship to what will constitute happiness. So well, so walk us through that. Like, we talked about the necessity of establishing a goal, and we talked about the conceptualization of happiness. And so how do you make that? How do you ground that in your classes? And what have you observed as the effect?
- [75:57]
Arthur Brooks
So there's the three macronutrients that we've talked about are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And we dug in on enjoyment. We could do exactly the same thing for satisfaction. Satisfaction, and exactly the same thing for finding meaning. What is meaning? How do you interrogate meaning in your life? How do you actually find it? And that would get us back to discernment, because discernment is the essence of actually finding that particular macronutrient. Then I talk.
- [76:19]
Jordan Peterson
That's. Okay. So you, you mean by discernment, I think probably something very similar to what I've focused on as attention. And one of the things that I used to tell my. My. My clients, for example, know, let's say they were having mood dysregulation problems. One of the things I would teach them to do is to notice. This is way different than thinking about. Notice when they were particularly miserable during the week when they weren't. Right, right. And to approach that with a completely blank mind, it's like you'll see that there's variation in your mood. If you can catch yourself when you're less miserable than usual.
- [76:55]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [76:55]
Jordan Peterson
Then you can think, okay, what exactly what did I do? Right. Or what's the context that's informing that? Well, that's discernment. It's Right, Right. That's kind of.
- [77:04]
Arthur Brooks
Well, you're certainly discerning something. But when I'm talking about discernment, I use it in an almost theological sense, which is to actually find the essence of your life.
- [77:13]
Jordan Peterson
I think it's the same thing. I think it's the same thing because there's something gleaming there that's calling to you, that's setting your life in order. And this is what happens with Moses in the burning bush, by the way. That's something that beckons to him and he discerns. That's why he goes more deeply into it. And he goes deep enough into it so that the voice of God itself makes itself manifest to him.
- [77:33]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [77:33]
Jordan Peterson
And I would say, like those moments in your life where things come together, if you're discerning enough and attentive, there's an unlimited depth to that exploration.
- [77:42]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [77:42]
Jordan Peterson
Okay. Okay.
- [77:43]
Arthur Brooks
So anyway, so that discernment is really. Is trying to find this essence of discovering what your essence is not. I just don't I don't agree with Sartre. I just believe that you can invent your essence. We're not self inventing. I believe that we exist in ad infinitum.
- [78:02]
Jordan Peterson
Otherwise we could just tell ourselves what to do. It'd be simple. I'd just say to myself, be happy, and I'd obey. Well, that doesn't happen.
- [78:11]
Arthur Brooks
Or even worse, you would invent your essence as your identity, which is exactly what we're doing. See, to invent your essence is a note. Gnostic heresy is to say, I am a self inventing creature.
- [78:23]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right.
- [78:23]
Arthur Brooks
I'm this, I'm not that, I'm one of these people. I'm not those people. There's no shared story. There's no humanity, there's no, there's no love in that. And that's the problem. But, but, but, but there's no relationship either. But to discover your essence, that's pure humanity because that's what links you to everything that has always been and everything that it always will be. Yeah, and that's exciting. That's an adventure. That's just.
- [78:47]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, I think that's by definition an adventure. Actually.
- [78:50]
Arthur Brooks
That's the adventure. That's the, that's what the hero is doing in the hero's journey.
- [78:54]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right. That's what a quest is.
- [78:56]
Arthur Brooks
The quest is actually discovering your essence. Discernment is you on the hero's journey. That's a union thing. Okay, right, okay.
- [79:05]
Jordan Peterson
So now did you familiarize yourself with Jung as well?
- [79:08]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. I mean, everybody who's a fan of yours.
- [79:12]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. Well, I was wondering if there's a pathway to that. It's not standard academic knowledge.
- [79:17]
Arthur Brooks
No, no, no. But when I actually came back five and a half years ago as a process of discernment, to teach happiness and to create a big public apostolate in this as well, to talk in public education. Because I'm working in the public sphere, not just at Harvard University. I'm talking in media. I write a column every week in the Atlantic. I write books that I want people to watch. I do television. And the result of that is that I actually can't. I have to range really far from the roots of my discipline. My discipline is theorem proof in economics and running regressions, that's just not good enough. And so when I looked at it, I have to know, where do the most interesting questions come from? They come from theology, they come from philosophy, they come from art, they come from history. That's where the interesting questions come from. They don't come from when you and I were writing our papers. When we were writing our papers inside the university, we were looking at where the data were and what question we could get from the data. That's the wrong place to start. Which means I needed to become much more sophisticated in philosophy and theology than I'd ever been before. Then I needed to understand the mechanism of causation, which is the modern neuroscience, which is the cutting edge of our field. And only then could I expose it to the empirical scrutiny that comes from the way I was trained and you and behavioral science. And then I had to talk about how do you. How do you use it?
- [80:35]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what you're curious about.
- [80:37]
Arthur Brooks
Psychoanalytic practices. That's Jung.
- [80:39]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, that's okay. So when you're doing this at the business schools, or at the Kennedy School for that matter, now you're focusing on the personal and the relational, but you're doing that in the context of business and government.
- [80:52]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [80:53]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, well, how do you square that circle?
- [80:57]
Arthur Brooks
It's. Business is just another vehicle for expressing who we are as people. You know, the whole idea of work life balance is a huge problem because it suggests that your work is not part of your life. If your work is not, it presumes alienation. Yeah, absolutely. It presumes self objectification, which is a deeply problematic and sinful thing to do that makes you homo economicus. Yeah, that's no good. Work life balance is a problem, is the bottom line. So what I say to my students on the very first day.
- [81:26]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. It also implies that work isn't life.
- [81:28]
Arthur Brooks
Life. No, no, absolutely not. Your life is.
- [81:30]
Jordan Peterson
Or that your home life isn't life. One of the two. Yeah.
- [81:34]
Arthur Brooks
What's life? Leisure.
- [81:36]
Jordan Peterson
Right. And what's leisure? I mean, there's a complicated.
- [81:38]
Arthur Brooks
I'll take Joseph Beeper's argument that leisure is the basis of culture, but only when it's based in learning and contemplation that that's good as opposed to. Right.
- [81:47]
Jordan Peterson
And leisure is not. The. People often think of leisure as the absence of work. Yeah, right. It's like. Well, that's. That's actually boredom.
- [81:55]
Arthur Brooks
No, no, I mean, I want work before the fall. Yeah, right. Tend the garden. Tend the garden. That's blessing.
- [82:02]
Jordan Peterson
And you discover that by discernment.
- [82:04]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [82:04]
Jordan Peterson
And that's what you're teaching. Exactly. What do they think of that?
- [82:07]
Arthur Brooks
Well, it's amazing. So the first day of class, I say, look, a bunch of you, you want to start your own companies and your startup entrepreneurs, and the rest of you idolize entrepreneurs. Because you're going to make your fortune working for companies that other people have started, et cetera, et cetera. That's great, but it's trivial because the ultimate entrepreneurial experience is the enterprise of you and you're the founder. Start treating your life as a startup today. This is what we're going to do. What do startup entrepreneurs do? They're willing and able to take risk in exchange for the potential explosive rewards that come from it. And to understand that's an adventure. That's an adventure. And by the way, you have to know what the denomination of your rewards are. If you're thinking in Thomistic terms of money, power, pleasure and fame, woe be unto you. But if you're thinking in terms of love and happiness, game on. Let's talk about how to get explosive returns in love and happiness for the entrepreneurial endeavor of you incorporated. That's how the class starts. Because that's the hero's journey and everybody's entitled to that.
- [83:12]
Jordan Peterson
What do you mean by entitled? You mean it's available to them because.
- [83:15]
Arthur Brooks
We'Re born to it? Because this is to be born in the divine image of God, where God is inherently generative, God is inherently creative, God is inherently loving. And this is the gift. Not that we're going to be happy or have happy feelings or to have positive affect all day long. On the contrary.
- [83:33]
Jordan Peterson
Well, I guess part of the argument you're making is that that's actually a second rate substitute for the real thing.
- [83:38]
Arthur Brooks
Absolutely right.
- [83:38]
Jordan Peterson
Hedonistic happiness is. I've thought about this in terms of. It's a false adventure.
- [83:43]
Arthur Brooks
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. On the contrary. And so that's one of the reasons that the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, which is a good life, well lived, full of suffering and full of experiences and adventure. Again, that's the thing. And that's what I want everybody to have. That's what excites me. That's what gets me up in the morning. And the master stroke is to be able to say, I am truly grateful, Lord, for this day full of blessings and happy feelings. And I'm also grateful for the things that are gonna challenge.
- [84:11]
Jordan Peterson
Well, you want me, you want your life to be enough of an adventure so that if you wake up in pain, you get out of bed.
- [84:18]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [84:18]
Jordan Peterson
Because you think, no, this is worth doing.
- [84:22]
Arthur Brooks
This is my life.
- [84:23]
Jordan Peterson
Right. Right.
- [84:23]
Arthur Brooks
This is my journey. This is part of. This is the. The dragon I'm going to slay.
- [84:27]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
- [84:28]
Arthur Brooks
And. And that's what I'm teaching. That's the, that's the gist of the class. And, and so how do the students.
- [84:34]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so it's, I would suspect that the typical, or many of the typical students, particularly in business, it's a bit of a stereotype, but I'm going to run with it anyways for the time being. Is they're, they're going to be much more materially focused. And maybe I'm wrong about that. Rather than admiring entrepreneurship. Like, look, I worked with a bunch of, a bunch of startups and a bunch of these incubators in Canada, which were all fake, by the way. It's just, oh, it was so corrupt. It was just beyond comprehension. But in any case, you know, they would dangle these visions in front of these young people who are trying to start a business of, you know, making a unicorn and selling out for $100 million and then sitting on the beach and having my ties. It's like it was just complete. Well, it was so complete. It was a complete lie. It was corrupting beyond belief. And it's counterproductive because while your enterprise should be the thing, it's like you don't, you don't want to sell your company unless you can think of a better company because you get to have your company and you get to expand it and you get to bring benefit to the world and you get to learn. And then it's like, okay, now when you get your students at the Kennedy School or at the School of Business, what is their ethical orientation towards the political or the business before they take your course?
- [85:48]
Arthur Brooks
So it's the same as everybody where they want to have a good life, well lived, but they don't necessarily know what that means.
- [85:55]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right.
- [85:55]
Arthur Brooks
So they're the same as all of us.
- [85:57]
Jordan Peterson
So are they defaulting to those four things?
- [85:59]
Arthur Brooks
Of course, because we all do.
- [86:00]
Jordan Peterson
Of course.
- [86:02]
Arthur Brooks
I play a game with my students. It's called what's my idol? This is what I found one of the very first sessions of the class, what's my idol? Where I take them through a little bit of Aquinas. They read a little bit of Aquinas. And I say, look, this is the first modern, really great behavioral scientist is St. Thomas Aquinas. And don't read it for the religious parts, let's read it for the behavioral parts of this. And I say, okay. He says that the idols that you're going to chase are ultimately there's going to be one that attracts you more than any other and that when you do, you'll always do the things that you later regret. That's the thing about it. Okay. And that's behavior.
- [86:37]
Jordan Peterson
That's what makes them idols.
- [86:38]
Arthur Brooks
I know, right?
- [86:39]
Jordan Peterson
They beckon falsely in the present.
- [86:40]
Arthur Brooks
And that's very empirically robust. A very empirically robust assertion. Of course, we know this from all the literature that you know that when people chase these idols that they're ultimately, they don't get what they wanted, they're self defeating, a lot of regret. So I say, okay, let's play a game. And the way to do this is not to say what's your idol? But to eliminate the ones that they're not your idol. Okay, you want to play?
- [87:04]
Jordan Peterson
Sure.
- [87:04]
Arthur Brooks
Okay, sure. So money, power, pleasure, honor. And honor is not what we say with my Marine children, which is assert with honor. That means to be honored.
- [87:15]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, the narcissistic.
- [87:17]
Arthur Brooks
So that means shame or, or what we have in academia, which is prestige, to walk in and people say, oh, Jordan Peterson, who wrote that paper, you know, that paper that got the award last year, or whatever happens to be. Or the admiration of strangers or the admiration of the right group of people. Right. Which we want. It's your lobsters. Right. That raises serotonin levels. Okay. Okay. So think of those four. And then let's think of the one you would first eliminate, which doesn't mean you don't have it at all, but rather that you have the population mean level of it. So if you got rid of money, for example, you wouldn't be poor, you just have exactly the population mean amount of that. So you wouldn't be in. There would be no deprivation whatsoever. Money, power, pleasure, fame. Which one do you kick away?
- [88:00]
Jordan Peterson
Power.
- [88:00]
Arthur Brooks
Why?
- [88:02]
Jordan Peterson
I'm not interested in exerting control over others, voluntary actions.
- [88:08]
Arthur Brooks
So if I were to. You're the clinical psychologist and I'm just a working class economist, but I would say that the reason for that is because. Because you hate when people have power over you.
- [88:18]
Jordan Peterson
Well, that's certainly an indication of the undesirability of power. That's my lived experience of the. I hate. Yes, I hate that. I hate being told what to do.
- [88:28]
Arthur Brooks
Not everybody hates that.
- [88:29]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, I understand.
- [88:30]
Arthur Brooks
People who really like power actually are not bothered that much when people have power over them because it feels legitimate inherently. So it's kind of an interesting thing. So you find that. That totalitarians are pretty comfortable when they're in totalitarian systems. They would just like to be the totalitarian.
- [88:48]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right.
- [88:49]
Arthur Brooks
Dictators, admire dictators.
- [88:50]
Jordan Peterson
I was just writing about exactly that this morning.
- [88:52]
Arthur Brooks
It's like.
- [88:53]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, this is part of our misunderstanding of totalitarian systems. Everyone is striving to be free. Except the bully on the top. No, it's bullies all the way down.
- [89:01]
Arthur Brooks
I know. So that's. Okay, so now we've established that about you. But you kicked away power. You got three left left. Money, pleasure and honor. What's next?
- [89:18]
Jordan Peterson
Pleasure, probably. Pleasure. No, money, probably money.
- [89:23]
Arthur Brooks
Why?
- [89:26]
Jordan Peterson
Taste is an excellent substitute for money. Like you can, you can, you can. You're talking about the population mean of money.
- [89:35]
Arthur Brooks
Population mean of money.
- [89:35]
Jordan Peterson
If you're wise and discerning that you're rich with that amount of money.
- [89:41]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. And I would also postulate, correct me if I'm wrong, that given the fact that your material success, among other things has taught you using your self awareness as a behavioral scientist, that there's not that much nice stuff that you can get with money. It's really not that interesting.
- [89:58]
Jordan Peterson
Well, the big advantage to me of having money is that there are. It opens up avenues of possibility. It makes some things easier.
- [90:06]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [90:07]
Jordan Peterson
Medical care, it does.
- [90:08]
Arthur Brooks
But it opens up sources of unhappiness.
- [90:10]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, yes. And it opens up avenues of adventure.
- [90:14]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [90:15]
Jordan Peterson
That would otherwise be impossible.
- [90:19]
Arthur Brooks
But they're not the things you care about the most.
- [90:21]
Jordan Peterson
Well, there's other ways of doing them.
- [90:22]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah.
- [90:23]
Jordan Peterson
There's other ways of doing them better that. Are they equally valuable Sufficiently so that. That was my second choice. Anyways.
- [90:33]
Arthur Brooks
The things that I love the most are not things you buy. I just, if, you know, people say if I could keep everything in a knapsack, I would be detached. And I say, no, I would still rent everything I want. The whole point is that buying stuff is interesting.
- [90:51]
Jordan Peterson
Well, money is useful to me because it enables opportunity. It's not particularly useful to me because I can buy stu. I mean, I buy some things, but look, in a culture like ours, you can buy virtually everything you need for nothing if you pay attention. I know, like virtually everything is free food. Maybe not, you know, but I have.
- [91:12]
Arthur Brooks
A whole lecture on how to actually how to buy happiness with money. And it's. Oh yeah, you have to go exactly against your limbic system. Why? Because your limbic system tells you to accumulate resources beyond what you need to show your evolutionary fitness such that you can get more mates and propagate.
- [91:27]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right.
- [91:27]
Arthur Brooks
You need more buffalo jerky and animal and. And flints in your cage. And the guy. Anyway, okay, so you got two left. Pleasure and honor. Now it's hot in here because these are things that you like and this is normal. But you gotta get rid of one and go to the population mean, which.
- [91:44]
Jordan Peterson
Is a pleasure, probably next.
- [91:48]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. And now we've established what your temptation is. Now we've established that that doesn't mean that you can't tame it, but you must know it. You must say to yourself, honor. Honor. When I do the wrong thing, it's because I. It's because I pursue honor. By the way, I'm exactly like you. Why?
- [92:08]
Jordan Peterson
It's too bad for you.
- [92:09]
Arthur Brooks
Well, too bad for my wife and yours.
- [92:11]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, and your wife. Yeah, yeah.
- [92:13]
Arthur Brooks
I mean, it's because, you know, I hate people having power over me. I don't want to have power over others. I was a chief executive for 11 years and the thing I hated was when people call me boss. It made me intensely uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. It made me feel embarrassed, even humiliated when people said boss because I felt like they were setting up a hierarchy. It felt passive aggressive even when it was aversion. Money. Okay, great.
- [92:35]
Jordan Peterson
Well, you know, if you're someone's boss, it's not who's. It's not obvious who the slave is.
- [92:39]
Arthur Brooks
Right?
- [92:40]
Jordan Peterson
Right. Because if I have to tell you what to do, then I have to tell you what to do. It's hard enough to get myself to do things, much less bother with you. Maybe there's some temporary thrill in ordering people around. Although it's not a thrill I've ever appreciated, but I'd rather that you did your own thing.
- [92:58]
Arthur Brooks
I'd hate, you know, I hate dictatorships and wouldn't want to be the dictator. Bottom line, money. Okay.
- [93:02]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
- [93:03]
Arthur Brooks
What I mean, pleasure. I'm, I mean I'm, I'm. I'm a very self disciplined person. You know, I wake up at 4:30 in the morning. I work out for an hour and it hurts every day before dawn.
- [93:14]
Jordan Peterson
How old are you?
- [93:14]
Arthur Brooks
60. And I'm in better health than when I was 30. And part of it is because I'm not a sensualist, because I can actually do that. I mean, I like feeling good, but it's not high on my list of priorities. You know what tempts me? This. That's what tempts me. And I know it's true. And I know I have that particular tendency. And that knowledge is power. Why? Because that knowledge is being stored in the episodic memory of my hippocampus. And it, it's accessible by my prefrontal cortex and I can use it to manage my limbic system. And that's being fully alive. As far as I'm concerned, that's Being fully alive. And when my students understand that they can not just avoid errors, they can feel like they have control. They can feel like they have a sword and shield on their hero's journey. That's what this. That.
- [94:00]
Jordan Peterson
How do you get them to start envisioning their future pathway in a more multidimensional manner?
- [94:06]
Arthur Brooks
So, among other things, we talk about the process of discernment.
- [94:10]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Discovery.
- [94:12]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Discovery of their. Of their own.
- [94:13]
Jordan Peterson
What do they have to do practically to engage in that?
- [94:16]
Arthur Brooks
I ask them to contemplate questions that don't have clear answers, but do have understanding, because this is the essence of how philosophically. So I'll ask. And I've done this to my adult children as well. When my kids were 18 years old, I would make them write a business plan. As a B school professor, I can kind of get away with that.
- [94:36]
Jordan Peterson
Right.
- [94:36]
Arthur Brooks
And the whole point was, what are you going to do with the next five years of your life? You're the entrepreneur of your enterprise and I'm the venture capitalist, kind of. So I deserve a business plan. I want you to tell me what you're going to do. To find the answers to two distinct questions or to find an understanding of the answers to two distinct questions. Why are you alive and for what would you gladly give your life on this day? I want to know the answers to those questions.
- [95:01]
Jordan Peterson
Why did you come in? Okay. Explain the rationale.
- [95:04]
Arthur Brooks
These are deeply existential questions that are. That are rooted in almost every.
- [95:08]
Jordan Peterson
So what's more important to you than the mere continuation of your life? Yes, that's a hard one.
- [95:12]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [95:13]
Jordan Peterson
So that's kind of like, what would you die for? And also, what would you live for? Yeah, those are the same thing. And the other one was.
- [95:18]
Arthur Brooks
Was why are you alive? Which means who created you and for what purpose in your belief?
- [95:26]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Okay. So one of the ways that I had my clients answer that question is we did this in this exercise that I made commercial. This future authoring exercise is something. And you can do this when you're arguing with your wife, for example. Well, so one of the things I always ask my wife, and she asked me too, when we're arguing is like, what are your conditions for satisfaction? Yeah. Like you disagree with what's going on here.
- [95:49]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [95:50]
Jordan Peterson
Even hypothetically, if I did, what would satisfy you? What would that look like? Right. Well, you can ask yourself the same thing in your own life, which is like, okay, life is difficult and it's rife with existential doubt. Could you imagine a situation where you were thrilled with Your circumstances. So what are your conditions for satisfaction? That is an exercise of discernment. You have to treat yourself like you're someone you don't know. Right. It's like learning to please someone else. Like in a relationship it's like, well, it takes a long time to know what makes your wife happy, partly because it takes her a long time to know too. It's hard because people have a nature. And what satisfies that? Nature has to be discerned. You have to notice it. You know, it's so interesting to understand that. It's like you have to discern what it is that actually motivates you, for example, rather than what you think should motivate you. Absolutely. Those aren't the same thing.
- [96:47]
Arthur Brooks
Oh, absolutely not. There's what you desire and what, what you desire to desire. There's a series of iterations about that. And the well constructed life, the one at which you're really in charge, has good knowledge such that based on accurate knowledge of who you are and why you are, you can make the alterations that are applied. Right?
- [97:04]
Jordan Peterson
Right, exactly.
- [97:05]
Arthur Brooks
That's what it really comes down to. And that's what. That's the best that has been that we can use in behavioral science. This is.
- [97:12]
Jordan Peterson
So that's all that part of discernment as well. Because one of the questions would be an analogous question is something like, well, if you were in pain, what would get you up in the morning? This is why it's so useful for people to have children, right. It's like because a mother, my wife said something very interesting when she had her first child, when she had Michaela, we went up north to where my parents were in this old, this cottage. It was all old people up northern Saskatchewan. There's like 20 of them in the room and they're watching this little like 12 month old toddle round like she was on fire. Right. It's like they're just completely entranced. And my wife said it was a great relief for her not to be the center of attention that someone else had. It was a great relief to her that someone else had become far more important in her life than she was self evidently. And you know, the statistical studies show that there's no distinction between being aware of yourself and being miserable. Right. Self consciousness loads on neuroticism. Right. And so one of the corollary, psychodrama.
- [98:11]
Arthur Brooks
The problem with the psychodrama is that it's me, me, me and me is the wrong answer. He has the wrong answer. So that's what we talk about when we talk about faith in what I teach, it's not about a particular religious faith, notwithstanding the fact that I practice one. It's self transcendence. Self transcendence is the essence of awe, of getting small. I've done a lot of work in the last 11 years with the Dalai Lama. And he told me one time that one of the most profound experiences he had was in 1969 when he saw that photo that the astronaut, the American astronauts took of the Earth from orbiting the moon, that famous photo. And he said, I'm so little. And it was a sense of peace that came over him. Now there's 7% of the population that doesn't feel that peace. According to Scott Barry Kaufman, it's dark triads.
- [99:00]
Jordan Peterson
Oh, yes. They can't get outside themselves.
- [99:02]
Arthur Brooks
No, no. Because of the narcissism.
- [99:03]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right.
- [99:03]
Arthur Brooks
The narcissism component of the dark triad or dark tetrad.
- [99:07]
Jordan Peterson
So the problem with the dark tetrad type lives is they can't actually be in awe of themselves. How annoying.
- [99:13]
Arthur Brooks
They cannot experience the happiness that comes from self transaction.
- [99:17]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right.
- [99:17]
Arthur Brooks
And that's why they're stuck in this. The land of nod. That's why they're stuck pacing and, and, and roaming the land of nod.
- [99:25]
Jordan Peterson
Right.
- [99:26]
Arthur Brooks
They're the most miserable creatures for that reason.
- [99:28]
Jordan Peterson
That's why they've most selfish. That's a good place to stop. And we're pretty much exactly at the time we should stop. I think what we should do, what we will do on the daily wire side, for those of you who might join us there is. I think we should talk more specifically about Harvard and about the relationship. I'd like to know more about your life, about how you're conducting your business and what you're doing and what your plans are and how that fits in with your academic strivings and your role as a teacher at Harvard. What you think of the. Well, of the institution. I was there in the 90s. I loved it. It was firing in all cylinders as far as I was concerned when I was there. It isn't obvious to me that that's the case anymore, and I'd like to talk about that. And so if you all would like to join us on the daily wire side for an additional half an hour, please. You're more than welcome to do that. We would appreciate the support as well. So thank you very much for coming here today and talking to me. It was a pleasure.
- [100:22]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you, Jordan.
- [100:22]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, much appreciated.
- [100:24]
Arthur Brooks
Likewise.
- [100:24]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. Great, great. And thank you to all of you for your time and attention, the film crew here too in Scottsdale and to the the Daily Wire for making all of this accessible, possible, professional and well produced because those are the attributes that they bring to bear on this enterprise.
- [100:40]
Arthur Brooks
One note is that I've been a subscriber to the Daily Wire for years and highly recommend it.
- [100:46]
Jordan Peterson
What do you recommend about it?
- [100:47]
Arthur Brooks
I recommend that it's a well produced and high integrity organization with quality that one can count on, run by people who truly believe in what they're doing and are mission focused and there's not enough of that in the world.
- [101:02]
Jordan Peterson
Ah, well, there you go. Well, that's been my experience working with the Daily Wire as well. So genuinely, and I'm not saying that lightly because I'm very picky. So. All right, thank you everyone and thank you very much, sir.
- [101:13]
Arthur Brooks
Good to have you today. You too.