← The Rich Roll Podcast
The Rich Roll Podcast
Happiness Is A Direction: Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks On Navigating Crisis, Building Better Relationships, Finding Meaning, & What Actually Makes Us Happy
02:20:43
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- [00:01]
Rich Roll
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- [02:19]
Arthur Brooks
About six years ago, I wanted to understand why I wasn't a very happy person. It was intensely personal and extremely selfish. I was 55 years old and I said, who knows how many years I've got left? And sure enough, because I was asking God, I had illumination. What I'm going to do for the rest of my life is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas.
- [02:45]
Rich Roll
An expert on the art and science of happiness, Arthur Brooks is one of my favorite thinkers, but also, perhaps more importantly, one of my favorite people. A French horn player turned think tank president turned Social scientist, Arthur is a professor at Harvard Business School. He's a columnist for the Atlantic and The author of 13 books, including From Strength to Strength and Build the Life youe Want, which he co authored with Oprah Winfrey.
- [03:09]
Arthur Brooks
The deep metaphysical why behind Just feeling love and accepted is to understand the nature of love. To understand cosmically what it means to be accepted in the universe. The vehicle for getting that is more love in your life. And you need knowledge. You need to understand how you're living. You need to understand what the barriers to that are. You need to understand your brain to do that.
- [03:32]
Rich Roll
Arthur's somebody who shows us how to build lives of meaning that can rise from even the deepest ashes. And because this conversation, Arthur's third, transpired in the immediate aftermath of the recent LA fires, we talk about that. We discuss the relationship between adversity and meaning and how to cultivate well being in times of crisis. We also discuss our pilgrimage to visit the Dalai Lama last year. Arthur shares wisdom he has gleaned over the years from that friendship. And we talk relationships, spirituality, the duality of science and faith and transcendence.
- [04:07]
Arthur Brooks
So here's the thing. It doesn't matter how many answers you have if you're answering the wrong question.
- [04:17]
Rich Roll
First of all, great to see you. Thank you for coming to do this today. We're on, like, day nine or ten of being evacuated from our house from the fires. I don't know when this will go up, but, you know, we're in the aftermath of this, you know, kind of devastating experience here in Los Angeles, which has been, you know, deranging and also clarifying. We're among the, you know, grateful and lucky in that our home was spared, but we were displaced. We've been living up in Ojai. And I've been reflecting on the experience. And I mentioned to you before we started that there was a silver lining in our personal experience, which is that we reconnected with all these friends that I didn't even realize or had forgotten, actually relocated to Ojai and had the experience of kind of being part of a community. And the nourishment that comes with that that I think is lacking in many places throughout Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a very alienating kind of place. And community is something that I've been craving. And it's one of the reasons why I enjoy going to places like New York, where social collisions are just inevitable. And that has actually been kind of really nice. And it speaks to, you know, the. The heart of what you talk about all the Time with respect to what's important in terms of living a happy and fulfilling life.
- [05:37]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, love is really what is the nuclear fuel rods of. Of happiness. And yet we neglect our ability to. To experience love because it's the proximate relationships that we have that are going to make that possible. With your friends, with your family, with your extended family, your immediate family, of course, with the divine, which means you need the quiet to actually make that happen. These things don't happen, incidentally, and they will be crowded out by the craziness of daily life. And sometimes you need something to intrude on your daily life, to tear away your daily life. You know, a lot of people will talk about this during the coronavirus epidemic, which net. Net was really hard on people. The clinical depression quadrupled during the coronavirus epidemic. But a lot of people had these collisions of love that they wouldn't have had otherwise because of the intrusion of that very unwelcome event. And I remember that, you know, we were living in Wabin, Massachusetts, just this suburb of, you know, Boston. And you know, we met some people and we invited them over and they kind of, you know, snuck over during the coronavirus epidemic and we were just laughing and. And we got together more and more and they would bring food and the kind of stuff that we just wouldn't have done. And we looked forward to these occasions and we deepened these friendships. And it was because of the outside influence that was making ordinary life impossible and reminding us of what really mattered.
- [06:58]
Rich Roll
I recently had the outgoing surgeon general in here.
- [07:01]
Arthur Brooks
He's great.
- [07:02]
Rich Roll
Yeah. What a wonderful, like, heart centered man that guy is. And such a beautiful example of service. Like it really comes from the heart, you know, that he cares about these things deeply. And, you know, he was speaking about the loneliness epidemic and in the context of this parting prescription for America was talking about the crisis of community and this idea of interdependence. Like we so pride ourselves on our independence and you know, this myth of being self made or whatever that we celebrate and herald in our culture and how we sort of perceive interdependence as a weakness, and yet this is a strength. And I think within the context of the fire that we just experienced, we saw that interdependence at play. Like people coming together despite what you might see on social media, like boots on the ground, like community cohering to solve a common problem, people relying upon each other and how beautiful that is for sure.
- [08:00]
Arthur Brooks
That was a really good interview, by the way, you did with Vivek Murthy. Because you guys connected over this in a big way. And he's more than just a physician. He really cares about the soul in ways that you don't often see in.
- [08:14]
Rich Roll
An unusual way that you don't expect, like in the Surgeon General in his Vice Admiral uniform.
- [08:20]
Arthur Brooks
I know, Navy officer. But that point about interdependence is really important. And you and I have been. The last time I saw you was in the Himalayas. I'm sure we'll get to that discussion soon enough. And interdependence is a key concept that we talk about with Tibetan Buddhism and a long discussion that we had with our friends, the Tibetan Buddhists in Dharamsala in India. And the way to think about this really for all of us is the illusion that comes from the independence that we have. Now. I'm an American like you, and I'm an entrepreneur like you, and I love the rugged individualism. I think it's beautiful. We're in California, which is this. The ethos of it is go west. And I love that. I mean, our ancestors came from some old country where life was too boring and too codified and they came here for a particular reason. We've got it on the genome. But let's keep in mind that there is no true independence. And I'll give you an example, a California example for that matter. The redwoods. Enormous, incredible, thousand year old trees, hundreds of feet tall. They have a root system that goes down two meters so you can have a 300 foot tree with six foot deep roots. And that's because they grow out. And the way that stays stable is by intertwining with the other trees. They don't stay upright if it's not for the other giants around them. We're redwoods. All the entrepreneurs who want to grow up and be ritual. More power to you is what I say. But don't forget that your roots are going outward. And if they're not intertwining with other roots of other people that have other ambitions and who can support you, you're going to fail, you're going to fall down. That's the bottom line.
- [10:08]
Rich Roll
Yeah. And then layer on top of that like the, the network of mycelium that's connecting everything underneath the soil, like, you know, then, then we can get meta and talk about like the oneness of consciousness, which I'm definitely going to get into in a minute. But maybe on the subject of, of, of the LA fires before we talk about Dharamshala, like what is your message to people who are Experiencing tremendous suffering right now and grieving the loss of their homes and their neighborhoods.
- [10:38]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Grief is a physiological process that stems from a part of the limbic system that has been evolved so that we'll be averse to losing things or people that we love. And it makes perfect sense because we would not have evolved and survived if we were not averse to losing members of our kin or to parts of our lives that are very important to us. You have to be averse to loss. And so the part of the limbic system, it's called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and it becomes extremely active in times of loss. And that's what makes you feel sadness and grief. And it's normal. It's completely normal. When you've lost something that's dear to you, and especially someone who's dear to you, that you're going to be in intense pain. The pain is alleviated through time in the vast majority of the cases. But there is one special hack to the matrix. There's one special thing that people can do to alleviate the grief in this part of the brain. And this is where it gets from the biology into the metaphysics, which is to alleviate the grief of somebody else. This is how it works. When you work, you know, as I have, and you've talked to many people who've lost a child, there's almost nothing more unnatural than losing a child, losing a parent. Got it? I mean, this is the natural order of things. When you get married, one of you is going to die first, and it's going to be really, really hard. But nobody says it's unnatural that one of the spouses died first. You know, this going in child dying is just. It's not natural. You can't accommodate it emotionally. So when you work in communities of people who've lost a child, time heals to a certain extent. But the way that you can accelerate the process and make it more generative than it would have been otherwise is to help other people who've had that loss. So when we talk about something like this, the fires where people have lost things that are dear to them, their community, their home, their neighborhood, their neighbors, are not going to come back, whatever it happens. To be helping people who are in crisis is tremendously pain alleviating. Because when you do that, you'll find that it will heal your own dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. When you're starting to deal with the overactivity of that of others. And that's how the soul works, it's.
- [12:47]
Rich Roll
Tough to hear that if you're in the midst of the crisis, though, and you're the one who should be on the receiving end of that service and saying, like, well, you can alleviate this. This pain that you're feeling by giving yourself to somebody else.
- [13:01]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, no, of course. And they're in the immediate throes of it when the fires are still burning. It's one thing to just try to keep your food and clothing and take care of your kids. I got that. When you actually need relief completely. But there's never any point in our lives where, once again, where our roots are not interconnected. And remembering that is critically important. There's always somebody who's suffering more. There's always somebody who needs our love. And we always have enough love to give to somebody else. We have enough love that we can accept the love and service of other people and that we can give to other people who need us as well. And that interconnectedness, it really relieves a lot of pain.
- [13:37]
Rich Roll
Attachment is the root of all human suffering. And every obstacle is an opportunity for growth and evolution. But there's also timing and delivering a message like that. Of course.
- [13:50]
Arthur Brooks
No, there's timing, for sure. I mean, you and I both believe that things to which you need to become detached will be ripped away from you. That's just. This is the way that it works. But as an unhelpful message in the throes of the worst loss, that's something you can get in perspective, you can get over the long term, that you can see that truth retrospectively in your life. So everybody who's watching us right now has experienced loss. A really nasty breakup, the bankruptcy of a company, the divorce of your parents when you were a kid, whatever it happened to be. It doesn't have to be that your whole neighborhood burned down. You've had losses, right? Retrospectively, looking back on it, you can find a way that that was generative for you. Now there is a way with the little losses that we deal with, that we can get the knowledge that we can get the benefit more in real time. I ask my students in my class, in my happiness class to keep a failure and disappointment list. Ever talked to you about this before?
- [14:49]
Rich Roll
I can't remember. Maybe. Yeah.
- [14:51]
Arthur Brooks
So they keep a little notebook. And each time something bad happens that feels like a loss, or it feels like a disappointment or feels like a failure, which is a lot. I mean, this happens to us pretty frequently. You write it down and leave two lines blank. And on the first line, you write down. It's like that thing really Bothered me. It really bothered me. And then a month later, you come back to the first line that you left blank under it and write down, what did you learn? What did you learn about that? What did you learn from that experience? And then three months later, you come back to the second line and write down a good thing that happened because of that loss. And you're filling in the notebook. And by the time you're going to a new thing that's really bugging you, really bothering you, you start to look forward to it, because you're going to be looking back at the knowledge and growth from past negative experiences and the benefit that actually has come from those negative experiences. While never, never, never waste sacrifice, never waste your suffering.
- [15:48]
Rich Roll
That's a great practice. I like that. Basically, you're widening the aperture on perspective. Right. And it's easy to say, well, these things happen. Reason, or it will come of this. But to actually kind of track that.
- [16:00]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. And then say, the last five bad things that happened to me. Here's what I learned, and here are the benefits that actually came from it when I go back and voluntarily accept it. No, of course not. That's not the way your brain works. That's not the way life works. But to say that these sacrifices and negative experiences are all pain, no gain is just wrong. And the only way we don't benefit from them is by trying to eliminate the pain as opposed to trying to learn from the pain. That's a really important thing. What you find is that real masters in this who practice true gratitude, they'll wake up in the morning and they'll say, I'm really grateful for all the wonderful, beautiful, generative things that are going to happen today. And I'm also really grateful for the things I don't like today. I'm grateful for those things because I know retrospectively that that is going to be the source of my growth. I'm not just grateful for the dessert, I'm also grateful for the vegetables. I realize I'm talking to a vegan here.
- [16:53]
Rich Roll
Yeah, that's the engine of.
- [16:54]
Arthur Brooks
Yes, totally, totally.
- [16:56]
Rich Roll
And reframing your relationship with them.
- [16:58]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly right. Yeah, exactly right.
- [17:00]
Rich Roll
How much? I'm wondering, like, how much do you think, or maybe even if there's social science on this, how much of our unhealthy relationship with attachment, disappointment, loss, other factors that are driving levels of unhappiness has to do with our unhealthy relationship with death that is sort of part and parcel of the modern Western world? Like, we've all had experiences where an older person has been sick for a very long time and then they pass away. And everyone's like, I can't believe this happened, or like, how could this happen? It's so tragic, it's so awful when like, you know, death is the one certainty, right? Like, and also, you know, I have all these longevity experts on the show and all these people trying to extend lifespan and health span and often wondering, like, how much of their motivation is being driven by like, this tremendous fear of death and what that has to say about the modern developed world's relationship with this inevitability and how that tracks to how we're living our lives in the present moment.
- [18:10]
Arthur Brooks
Most ancient cultures had a much healthier relationship with death than we do today. And it really comes down to a cognitive issue. And so modern neuroscience has helped us understand why we're afraid of death. So philosophers have talked about this and Ernest Becker, the founder of terror management, theory around the fact that we can't cope with our death. But we understand neuroscientifically why that's the case. Everybody watching us can accept the fact that she or he is going to die, that they're physically going to die, there's going to be bodily death. They know that. They understand that. And part of the reason is because we have consciousness with a big prefrontal cortex. Your dog doesn't know he's going to die, but you know, Rich knows that Rich is going to die. The problem is that we don't have the, the hardware. We don't have the cognitive capacity to understand non existence. So we can understand non living, but not non existence, which are two fundamentally different things. It's not a philosophical distinction, it's a cognitive distinction between the two states. And since you can't imagine not existing, you get a cognitive dissonance about your death that creates fear. Because cognitive dissonance always provokes fear. I'm going to die, but then I can't understand, I don't understand not existing. So I have this prefrontal cortex, this consciousness that helps me understand my existence, but doesn't allow me to understand my non existence. That fundamentally is a huge problem such that the only solution, a lot of people have to comfort themselves is to eliminate the whole concept of death. Now you might say to yourself, you and I, we're quite spiritual individuals. And so one of the ways that we deal with it is by spiritually eliminating non existence existence, I'm going to keep existing. That's how religion works. And all my behavioral science buddies are like, yeah, you just explained how you have created religion to soothe yourself. Right. I just happen to think it's true actually. Which is the reason you can't conceive of non existence is because non existence doesn't exist. That's my explanation for it as a traditionally spiritual and religious person to be sure. But be that as it may, it's a big problem when you can't conceive of nonexistence and it's freaking you out. One of the easiest ways today is just I'm not going to think about.
- [20:26]
Rich Roll
It, remove it from your conscious experience.
- [20:28]
Arthur Brooks
I'm going to act as if it's not going to happen. That's not healthy by the way. That's the addictive behavior.
- [20:36]
Rich Roll
So then what is the message to the spiritually allergic to how to rectify that cognitive dissonance?
- [20:43]
Arthur Brooks
Number one is to recognize that that is the problem that you're actually having. And so a lot of people, so the existentialist, the 20th century existentialist, Jean Paul Sartre, for example, his contention was, I mean you're in my contention, how you and I see the world is you had an essence before you existed and then you exist. And your whole journey through life is to understand that essence and to live that essence in the service and love of other people. That's a really, really big, I mean and that's an ancient idea. All major religions are based on that concept, that essence proce existence. The existentialist said no, no, no, no, no no. Existence precedes essence. You have to invent the reason for living. You have to invent your essence. And the whole goal of your life, the whole ethical purpose of your life is to define what your essence is and live up to it. And in so doing you'll eliminate the anxiety that you have about non existence. That's the whole idea behind Star Trek to me it's just not satisfying. Now if you're a Nietzschean, Nietzsche would say there is existence and there is no essence. So don't waste your time, don't worry about it, have fun.
- [22:00]
Rich Roll
Another way of articulating this idea of essence precedes existence is to say that this is something I've been thinking a lot about and I'm becoming increasingly convinced of, which is that that consciousness is not a byproduct of matter. In other words, consciousness developing its complexity as a relationship to the complexity of a biological system, but rather that consciousness is the substrate of the universe and matter is a byproduct of consciousness. Like in a non duality context. Like in the way that Sam Harris teaches meditation.
- [22:39]
Arthur Brooks
And there is a cosmic consciousness that might be exogenous to the individual. There is something out there that governs the greater consciousness of Rich and Arthur and everybody watching this. There is. And you know that. I don't know. It was called God. Why not? But not necessarily depending on who you are now, if you're somebody like Robert Sapolsky, have you had him on your show?
- [22:58]
Rich Roll
No, not yet, but he's on my list.
- [23:00]
Arthur Brooks
He's phenomenal. He's phenomenal. But he's an ultra materialist. And he believes that consciousness is an illusion and free will is an illusion, that all of this is biological, all of this is radically material. And this idea that there's a cosmic rich, rich roleness out there, that that's just an illusion. It's a byproduct of the activity of your prefrontal cortex.
- [23:27]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I don't buy that.
- [23:28]
Arthur Brooks
It doesn't feel right to me either. And there's a reason, by the way, that there has never been a single documented. According to anthropologists, not a single documented civilization that's not religious. There's not a single one. You can't find a society in which people haven't actually searched for and had a concept of the divine. That doesn't mean they're all Catholic. It doesn't mean they're all Hindu. What it means is that we have an innate sense that there is the divine, that there is a cosmic consciousness, that there is a Brahman, a Godhead. There is something out there. And you might say, well, I mean, that's once again a byproduct.
- [24:05]
Rich Roll
Yeah, it's an evolutionary imperative.
- [24:07]
Arthur Brooks
I mean, it's like. Or an evolutionary imperative or just a basic byproduct of this 30% of our brain by weight. That is what made us conscious that we're alive and gonna die. And that's what's freaking us out. It's just that we're too. We're very advanced. Too advanced for our own good.
- [24:23]
Rich Roll
I actually don't think we're that advanced. I don't think we're advanced enough to really grok the fullness of the conscious experience. And I think it's our lack of humility around, our lack of cognitive capacity to fully understand what's actually going on and to kind of egoistically decide that this is what it is that is getting in our way.
- [24:46]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, no, I agree.
- [24:46]
Rich Roll
And robs us of the mystery and the awe and the wonder that I think is available.
- [24:50]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, no, that's Right. So they are. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I agree with you.
- [24:54]
Rich Roll
So I have this sort of grand unifying theory of Arthur C. Brooks that I'm working on.
- [25:00]
Arthur Brooks
Am I the first one to hear it?
- [25:01]
Rich Roll
Here's what I think. You know, here's what I think. I think that you are a social scientist and a Harvard Business School professor. Yeah. And you can kind of, you know, shroud yourself, drape yourself in these monikers. Right. But what's really going on here? You do this, I believe, for the sole purpose of being taken seriously on topics that actually transcend science and are, in fact, deeply spiritual. And your deeper purpose? You talk about happiness and all these things, but really your real purpose is to get buy in, get people to sign up for this journey towards transcendence.
- [25:45]
Arthur Brooks
Wow. So what makes you think this?
- [25:48]
Rich Roll
Because I know that you're a deeply spiritual person. I mean, you're very principled around your religious practices, and I've spent time with you in India with the Dalai Lama. So I know that your spiritual curiosity isn't limited to Catholicism, and I know that you're a very effective communicator. And I believe that you have figured out, whether conscious or unconscious, that the best way to be of service to people is to provide this sort of easy welcome mat, like a door that swings wide open. Because everybody's interested in happiness, and everybody is seeking greater fulfillment and purpose and meaning in their lives. And you know, through your own conviction and personal experience, that these are things that are discovered through a spiritual commitment. But that doesn't necessarily translate. It's not exactly a great recruiting tool. And I'm not saying you're trying to recruit people into. Into your religion. I'm just saying that I think that you are an example of somebody who understands, you know, the. That there is greater meaning available. And the best way to get people to start going on that exploration for themselves is to, you know, bring them in through science and terminology and talking about, you know, the. The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala and, like, you know, this study and that study, people curious about this world and then trusting that once they're kind of rooted or invested in this exploration, that they will go on their version of the journey that you've been on.
- [27:23]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, it's. You're accurate or look, rich, you're adept. I mean, that's what you do. One of the reasons that you're incredibly successful, I dare say, is because of your intense curiosity and. And insight. So you actually prepare when you have a guest I'm an old fan of the show. So I see you interviewing all different kinds of people, and you analyze the person on the basis of deep background research, intense curiosity, but also penetrating insight into the person, into the person as a person. That's your superpower as somebody in this business. It's one of the reasons that millions of people look at your interviews. Right. There's a lot of competition out there.
- [28:10]
Rich Roll
You're buttering me up right now.
- [28:11]
Arthur Brooks
Not really, because, you know, it's by way of saying, if you think this, then let's take it seriously. I'm a behavioral scientist going way back. I mean, I got my PhD about 30 years ago, as a matter of fact, and I'm really interested in human behavior, all different kinds of human behavior. I was trained as an economist, but I also did military operations research, and most of my research was on philanthropy and the appreciation of beauty. Early on, when I was a conventional academic, writing my academic journal articles that no human could read because they were too mathematically complex to be understood by normal people. But at the tap root of it, what I really, really wanted was I wanted to understand why I wasn't a very happy person. It was intensely personal and extremely selfish is what it came down to. About six years ago when I, you know, I've had a lot of different career twists and turns. I mean, I wasn't like you, lawyer to ultra endurance athlete to podcaster, but, you know, pretty crazy, like four or five careers. A French horn player, and then I a scientist. And then I was a think tank president in Washington D.C. and when I retired from that in my mid-50s, I said, I'm going to go back to behavioral science, but I'm going to write a new mission statement about it. Because I was 55 years old and I said, I've got, I don't know, somewhere. I mean, we die young in my family. My dad died at 66. We have a tradition of trying to die young. It's kind of what we do. But you never know. Who knows how many years I've got left. And to write that mission statement, I walked the Camino to Santiago. Do you know what that is?
- [29:39]
Rich Roll
Yeah, we've talked about this before, but, yeah, I keep. Ever since you shared that with me, I keep running into people who have done it and had transformative experiences.
- [29:47]
Arthur Brooks
You and Julie would love it. I mean, it would be. It would be. We should do it together. We should actually do it together because, you know, now we've been to the mountains and let's, let's do the plains, the valley, right? It's, you know, it's up to 800km across northern Spain, and you're just walking all day. Your whole gig is walking and praying and in contemplation. And people do it when they're searching for something. Walking is a metaphor for walking towards something. And when I walked that, it was because I was asking God to give me special information about what I was supposed to do for the rest of my life. I've always known. I didn't know and I didn't know, and it was hard. And on the last day, entering Santiago de Compostela, which is a city in northern Spain, it's the cathedral there where the pilgrims who for a thousand years have been walking this. All different faiths, by the way. This is not just a Catholic thing. That's when you're supposed to have illumination. And sure enough, I had illumination that came to me that what I'm going to do for the rest of my life is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. That's what I'm going to do. Why? Because I want people to have what they deserve in the pilgrimage of their own lives is to have the love and happiness that comes from these transcendental bonds of love of the divine, love of each other, love of their families and their friends, love expressed to the entire world through the way that they earn their living. And the way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to throw out that welcome mat that says, I got the science you can learn. The reason you haven't found it is because you don't understand it. And the reason you don't understand it is because it's not obvious. It isn't completely obvious. And now we have this opportunity, so there are a lot of people out there who say, you know, the welcome Matt says, want bigger biceps. What they want is not bigger biceps. What they want is love and happiness. That's what they love and want. That's what they want because that's what everybody wants. So the science of happiness is bigger biceps.
- [32:01]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [32:02]
Arthur Brooks
In other words, Rich, you're right.
- [32:03]
Rich Roll
I mean, behind. It's sort of a lament that I have when people. I have this goal, I want to run a marathon. I want bigger bike, whatever it is. It's like, all right, well, why do you want that? And then, okay, and then, why do you want that? And peeling back those layers? And it does. It always goes back to, like, I want to feel loved. I Want to feel accepted. You know, I want to feel connected.
- [32:20]
Arthur Brooks
Right. And you know, the deep metaphysical why is behind just feeling love and accepted is to understand the nature of love, to understand cosmically what it means to be accepted in the universe. That's what we want. We want to put ourselves into perspective. We want deep understanding is what we want. The vehicle for getting that is more love in your life is opening yourself up to more love in your life is to love and be loved. And you need knowledge, you need to understand how you're living. You need to understand what the barriers to that are. You need to understand your brain to do that. And so we do need, you know, self improvement people and we do need theologians and we do need great gurus and we need scientists.
- [33:06]
Rich Roll
Yeah. But ultimately science can only take you so far. You can study happiness, you can try to, you know, formulate a theory about love, and, and you can parse the difference between feelings, emotions, and all these different kind of variables and aspects of things that drive or move us away from happiness. But fundamentally, the deeper questions or the real answers are not in behavioral science, they're in art and they're in philosophy, and they're in spiritual traditions.
- [33:37]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. So the way I teach my class at Harvard, this took a long time to figure out the architecture of the class. Because one of the reasons that the science of happiness is insufficient to making you a happier person is because it's in the middle of the story. If you actually want to become a happier person, number one, you have to go to where the right questions are. So here's the thing. It doesn't matter how many answers you have if you're answering the wrong questions. The right questions are the secret to all enlightenment. Questions are more important than answers. Right. So where are the right questions? From philosophy, from theology, from spirituality, from history, from beauty. That's where the real questions are. Then you layer on top of that what we understand scientifically about the mechanism of what we're actually trying to get at. And that's where neuroscience comes in. Neuroscience is this. I mean, it's a brand new field. There were no neuroscience departments 50 years ago. And now you can get your PhD at it at any reputable university, but it's still completely contested. It's the Wild west intellectually. Then on top of that, you need data, you need empirical evidence about what's happening, which is where my field of behavioral science comes in. And then you need to be able to apply it. What are you going to do with your life? How are you going to change your habits? What are your contemplative practices? Are you going to commit to actually changing your behavior on the basis of this knowledge? And then how are you going to share it? How are you going to be a happiness teacher? So those are the stages of what we actually go through, starting from the beginning. You're exactly right. You're exactly right. Behavioral science doesn't ask any interesting questions. Aristotle asks interesting questions.
- [35:21]
Rich Roll
When it comes to health, sleep is a big deal and there's just so much science out there to back up the role that it plays in every facet of well being, from heart health to mental health recovery, cognition, and just being able to show up as your best self. Getting a quality eight hours per night is a personal non negotiable that I go to great lengths to ensure. It's sort of a commitment not only to myself, but to my career and to those that I love. That all begins with when I'm sleeping on Now I've tried many mattresses, but the one that's really won my heart is Birch. And there's many reasons for this, all of which boil down to the simple fact that Birch just does things right. In addition to being incredibly comfortable and cool helping you regulate temperatures at night, which are essential for quality rest, Birch mattresses are also firm in all the right places and all their materials are sustainably sourced, including organic fair trade cotton and also everything is hypoallergenic and toxin free, meaning no harmful off gassing typical of most mattresses. Birch is so confident in their product they're offering both a 100 night risk free trial as well as a 25 year warranty. Plus they provide free delivery right to your door in a conveniently sized box up. And so I want to offer all of my listeners the chance to enjoy a deep and restful night's sleep with a new mattress from Birch. So right now you can get 27% off site wide. Just go to birchliving.com richroll I love coffee, but maybe not so much the jittery anxiety that it reliably delivers. And yet coffee alternatives, for me at least, always seem to fall a little bit short on the promise of delivering that morning boost that I admit to enjoying to hone my focus upon the day's demands. So I would say that it was with a bit of mild suspicion that I greeted a test with Peak's new adaptogenic coffee alternative called Nanduka. What is Nanduka? Well, basically it's a adaptogen concoction based upon fruiting body mushrooms and ceremonial grade cacao that is, I gotta say, surprisingly tasty. Something in between maybe a chai tea and a sort of spicy hot chocolate that I have to admit left me feeling pretty elevated after drinking. Energized, yes, but also focused, calm and steady pretty much all day thanks to the lower caffeine slow release incident to the fermented pu Erh tea ingredient. And without the roller coaster ride typical of coffee, the Nanduka formulation is pretty insane. It includes triple toxin screen, fermented pu Erh teas, mushrooms, of course, chaga, reishi, cordyceps, lion's mane, all of which are concentrated up to 20 times for potency. There's spices like ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg and cacao butter for enhanced nutrient absorption, all of which dissolves easily. It's organic, vegan and non gmo. So if you're looking to adjust your morning ritual now in a good time to try Nanduka, you can get 20% off plus a free starter kit when you visit peaklife.com richroll that's P I Q U E life.com richroll.
- [39:00]
Arthur Brooks
There'S the.
- [39:01]
Rich Roll
The nuts and bolts, like the practicalities of the things that you can do to, you know, drive your life towards meaning, purpose, happiness and all these things and you know, protocol and actionable kind of strategies and tactics and you talk a lot about that. And I'm less interested in the nuts and bolts aspect of this than I am in the internal contradiction in this kind of dualistic sense. Like for all of the self will and discipline that is required to improve your life.
- [39:37]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [39:37]
Rich Roll
There's a counterbalance of surrender and acceptance. Right. Like so all of these things have a yin and a yang to them. There's self will and God's will. There's, there's the importance of like acting on your own behalf, the pejorative being, being selfish and then there's being being selfless like and how important that is like all of these, these counterweights against each other. And I think where it gets tricky for people is trying to get your head around like how you, how you kind of operate in the world when and two opposing forces are important to kind of inhabit in your behavior and in your kind of philosophy of life. Like faith without works is dead. And we talked about being independent and the importance of being interdependent and the tension between what you have to do to move your life forward versus enjoying the life that you have. Right. So how do you think about these dualities and making sense?
- [40:35]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, people spend a lot of time stressing and anxious about outcomes. They focus a lot about the things that are happening outside themselves as opposed to working on what they really can, which is the things inside themselves. So people will be very stressed out and very unhappy and say, I can't really move forward in my life until the economy's better. I can't move forward in my life until my health is better. I can't move forward in life until my marriage is better. They focus on the exogenous because that's a natural thing to do. What I care about is the outcome. What I care about is the circumstances under which I can thrive. But the truth is, you can't affect those things fundamentally. Happiness comes when you're all about what you can affect and surrendering in the things that you can't. You know, I had. You sent me a text message the other day that really, I found it very moving because you were in the throat. You didn't know what you were going to lose. I mean, is my house going to burn down? A studio going to burn down? What's going to burn down? Nobody knew. And it was close, right?
- [41:35]
Rich Roll
Yeah, it's pretty close.
- [41:36]
Arthur Brooks
It was pretty close. And you said, I'm doing everything I can and I'm surrendering. What did you just tell me?
- [41:44]
Rich Roll
I can't remember what I said exactly. But it's, you know, like every surrendering, well, it's an opportunity to deepen your practice of surrender. Right.
- [41:52]
Arthur Brooks
But to be sure you're doing it exactly the right way because you're taking care of the things that you can actually take care of, and you're not taking care of the things that you can't take care care of. You can't make the fire not burn down your house. If the fire is going to burn down your house, you can lower the odds. You can change your behavior. You can protect your family. And then if the fire burns down your house, the surrender itself is the healthiest thing that you can possibly do. Now, that's an extreme case, but there's lots of things where everybody watching us has something like this going on. Parents ask me this all the time. So in religious communities, I talk to a lot of religious parents and they'll say, okay, okay, Mr. Behavioral Scientist, tell me what I can do to guarantee that my kids are going to grow up in the faith. I'm like, I can't do that. That's the wrong thing for you to be worried about. Well, I care about my faith. Of course you do. Here's what you worry about, what they see you doing in your practice of the faith. Why? Because there's a lot of science behind this. It actually literally doesn't matter what you tell your kids on any subject for their behavior. All that matters is what they see. So if you don't want your kid to hurl curse words out of the car at somebody in traffic, never have them see you do that. If you don't want your kid to be a drunk, don't be a drun junk. Right? And the number one predictor of your kids growing up in the faith is seeing you on your knees. That's it. Bowing before the Lord. If you happen to be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or any of the Abrahamic faiths, but you fill in the blanks for whatever your faith happens to be, seeing you in a position of humility and practicing something, that's what really matters. And this isn't a broader case of this. I can't be be laying awake nights about how my kids are ultimately going to turn out as adults. What I should be worrying about is my own behavior, the example I'm giving my kids. Am I loving them in the right way? Am I nurturing them in the right way? Am I being the person that I want them to become? That's a combination of intense action and total surrender. That's the magic brew. That's the magic brew of a life that basically says, I can't control this. I can control this. And that's what I'm paying attention to.
- [44:04]
Rich Roll
Unless you're Sapolsky and he would say that it's all, you can't control anything. I've sort of been thinking about this with a heuristic that I'm working on, which is imagine three buckets, there's doing. And that's like the striving and the hustle and the work and the discipline and the showing up and the working towards goals and all of those sorts of things. Then there's the undoing, doing which speaks to surrender and the undoing of our attachments or our relationship to future outcomes or outcomes in general, which is sort of a different kind of goal setting, I guess. And then there's being right. So it's on a sort of Maslow's hierarchy of need, like ultimately transcendence being, like a state of just being right, where if you're in a state of total presence, you don't need to ever set a goal. All the answers will come to you. You're just in the moment, and the right intuitive next action will come to you. And you will take that action.
- [45:05]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, no, that's. And that's a really hard thing to do.
- [45:08]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [45:08]
Arthur Brooks
Because we're.
- [45:09]
Rich Roll
Well, that's the peak of the, you know, that's, that is, this is like what we're all striving for that we all fall short of.
- [45:14]
Arthur Brooks
Of course, I know, and, and it's easy to look at that as some sort of, you know, enlightenment ideal, but we can take it down to a, an experience that all of us can relate to. So almost everybody watching us has had or has a really important romantic relationship in their life. The secret to a really happy and stable romantic relationship is being not doing it. Is. And this is what people always get wrong, especially dudes, by the way. It's like, I'm going to do more. I'm going to do more. No, no, no.
- [45:48]
Rich Roll
The solution is always to do more.
- [45:50]
Arthur Brooks
I know. Especially if you're a, if you're a striker, you know, there's no non strivers watching the Rich Roll podcast. Right. I mean, this is kind of the gig. And so do more, have more results. Right? Do more, work harder, get more results. She wants you to be, she wants you to see her. She wants the eye contact. She wants your presence. She wants your soul, man. She wants your soul. No, I'm going to go do something. You're not giving her your soul. You're giving her your muscles, you're giving her your effort, you're giving her your money. She wants your soul. And that's just being in a super hard. But that's taking this grand enlightenment down to the granular stage. And why? Because your marriage is a simulacrum for the divine. That's the divine love as instantiated in your house, in what you're doing. You're fused by the divine spirit. That's the whole point of cosmic romantic love is for you to experience. What divine love actually is, is when you're actually making the eye contact with your beloved. That's what it's supposed to be. And you're denying yourself and her that divine love. When you're not being, when you're just doing.
- [47:07]
Rich Roll
That's it right there. Like that is like. I mean, that's really profound in the case of like my own marriage, you know, and as somebody who's an admitted die hard striver and a striver who kind of arrived, you know, kind of found my thing later in life and even though I'm like old, like I feel like I'm playing a young man's game, relate to it.
- [47:29]
Arthur Brooks
Me too.
- [47:30]
Rich Roll
Yeah. There's lots to talk about about that, but I think fundamental to many strivers, and I guess I'll just speak from myself and my own experience, like. Like, what is driving that? Like, what is. What's behind that? Well, it's a sense of feeling like you don't belong. And the way to feel that sense of belonging is to achieve great things or to get noticed for doing, you know, doing things. And then, you know, kind of a layer beneath that is. Is perhaps like a fundamental sense of being unlovable.
- [47:58]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [47:58]
Rich Roll
And so the way you compensate for that is like, trying to be exceptional. And then when you have a partner who's like, you know, I want your soul and I want your presence, that's very threatening. Because if you don't feel loved and you're being summoned to be vulnerable, like, well, if this person really knows who I am, they will reject me. And so I need to rush off and go make money and do these other things, and that'll be just fine. And just fine.
- [48:25]
Arthur Brooks
You love me enough. You love me yet? You love me yet? Look at me. Like, all these people write to me and they think I'm cool. Do you love me yet? She's like, yeah, I don't want your followers. I don't want your show. I want you. You know, like, okay, let me go.
- [48:38]
Rich Roll
Do more, but you don't really want me.
- [48:40]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, this is the thing. I mean, this is a striver's lament. And this is something that, you know, there's a weird empirical regularity that I find in my own work, which is that successful people are basically all insane. And, you know, I don't say this clinically, you know, insanity with some sort of, you know, DSM 5 designation of this, but basically, they're not. Not balanced in a particular way, because very successful people, in worldly terms, are systematically violating cost benefit analysis for their own happiness over and over and over again. They're chasing these worldly idols such that they can actually prove to themselves through accomplishment that they're worth something. And there's three things that are wrong here. You don't love yourself enough. You don't believe that other people would love you without your accomplishments. And deep down, you don't feel loved by the divine. You don't believe that God loves you is what it comes down to. And that's deep, deep philosophical and spiritual work that needs to get done. And again, I'm not recommending that any striver become a slacker. And even if I did, it wouldn't matter. I Could say, hey, Rich, become a slacker. Sorry, sorry. Too late. Too late. You can't. It can't be done.
- [49:50]
Rich Roll
Yeah. And in the parlance of recovery, like, the persistence of this illusion is astonishing, right? Because for every accomplishment or achievement, and you're then met with that lack of fulfillment that you thought was inherent in that promise. And what do you do? Do you assess and reevaluate your strategy? No. You double down and you convince yourself that it's right around the bend of the beast.
- [50:14]
Arthur Brooks
I mean, success addiction is just another kind of addiction. And all addiction, substance abuse, behavioral addictions, they're all filling a hole that can't be filled. You're just throwing dirt into a hole that actually goes to the other side of the globe and falls out the other side. It can't be done. So it's like.
- [50:31]
Rich Roll
So when you're at Harvard Business School and you're teaching your class to the next generation of ultimate ultra strivers, and you drop that on somebody who's 23 years old, 24 years old, it's hard for a young person to hear that.
- [50:48]
Arthur Brooks
The sooner they hear, the better off they are. Are. I mean. And the truth is that there is a solution to that, which is partial at best. I mean, strivers got to strive at the end of the day. And they're going to be exhibiting certain pathologies, to be sure. And by the way, I love strivers. I am one. My kids are strivers. Right? And we'd be living in caves without strivers, without people who had not sacrificed themselves through their own pathological and unerring tendency to try to do more, see more, more, experience more. I mean, we need thrivers.
- [51:23]
Rich Roll
So. So. But on a meta level, it is an act of service.
- [51:27]
Arthur Brooks
What can I say? I just love humanity.
- [51:30]
Rich Roll
Sacrificing myself.
- [51:31]
Arthur Brooks
That's right.
- [51:31]
Rich Roll
Like, I'm gonna go achieve.
- [51:33]
Arthur Brooks
Great. But. But back to your marriage. But back to your marriage. That's what every striver says to her his spouse is like, look what I'm doing for us. Look what I'm doing for our family. Look around you at this house. Do you think this house built itself? This came from my hard work and personal responsibility and my ability to actually build this thing. And why are you resentful of me? Because I don't want the house. I want you. I'll take the house. I want you. And so this is. And again, therein lies the solution. This is not a perfect solution, because life on Earth is tricky and we all have our issues, as my kids would like to say. As my kids would say, everybody's got issues. But the truth is that love is the answer to this. To love and allow yourself to be loved is the answer to this and that. Back to your question. That's why I do my work. That's because I want it. And left to my devices, I'll just keep throwing dirt into that hole. I'll just strive and strive and strive all day long. But I know on the basis of what I've learned, I know that. That I won't be happy, that it won't be enough, and it will alienate the people who are closest to me. And my wife will be miserable. And so I have to use the knowledge to actually love and allow myself to be loved in divine love and love in my marriage and my family and with my friends and through my work.
- [52:57]
Rich Roll
There's divine comedy and perhaps a little bit of irony. We talked about this the first time you were on the show in that this epiphany and this commitment that you have to love and to really prioritize the things that, you know are the drivers of you living your best life have put you in a position where now you have more demands on your time than ever before. Right. Yeah. So it's like, of course, this is how it was constructed. Right. To test you. Like, okay, do you really. Are you really going to walk your talk here when so and so is calling you and. And every kind of hot stage across the world wants you to grace it?
- [53:40]
Arthur Brooks
There's some irony in the first book that I wrote when I started this new venture was how to live, how to get happier as you get older by detaching yourself from all the details of a success addiction. And the thing blew up and everybody wanted me to come talk about it. And now.
- [54:01]
Rich Roll
And you're like, this is it.
- [54:02]
Arthur Brooks
This is freaking awesome. I'm finally filling that hole, Right? No, I mean, it's like, there's no small amount of irony in this.
- [54:10]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [54:10]
Arthur Brooks
You know, and so what.
- [54:11]
Rich Roll
What does trip you up? What is it? What's the challenge that you kind of face, you know, presently and daily?
- [54:17]
Arthur Brooks
The things that'll actually feed my success addiction. It's basically as if I were writing a book about how to beat alcoholism. And then I went on the, you know, the lecture circuit, and every single night, I was at the best cocktail parties with the best liquor, and people were getting drunk around me. Wanting to hear more about my book is kind of what it comes down to. And so you. It's an opportunity for me to. To live in A way that reflects my values, to be sure. And that really starts at home. And that starts with my wife. That starts with my marriage. And we made lots of progress on the basis of the knowledge. Knowledge is power when it comes to this. But then practice is fundamental to this as well. But the challenge itself has illuminated a lot of these pathologies. I write about the pathologies, I write about it for other people. I experience them in my own life. And then I have to constantly hold myself to account. And by the way, I'm married to a woman like you are, who holds me to account count. She's like, do you read your books?
- [55:07]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Oh, that's what you're going to write about. Oh, that's interesting.
- [55:13]
Arthur Brooks
That's. Oh, great.
- [55:15]
Rich Roll
Can't wait to read that.
- [55:16]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Let's get you to give people advice on how to be a good husband.
- [55:18]
Rich Roll
What's your relationship with saying no?
- [55:21]
Arthur Brooks
It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. But I have a series of structures around me to make saying no easier. I have people who work with me and a lot of times I don't know until later that there was something that I probably would have said yes to. They know my tendencies. I like adventures. So, for example, we put in place in my entire work life with all of my colleagues, the people who run my organization, an algorithm. So every good business, every startup, has multiple objectives. And it's very important to be very explicit about the objectives and then to put them in order so that you have an order of operations. The order of operations is fundamental. So you're not doing things out of order in then ultimately doing things that go against your values or that make you unhappy or wreck your business. So we have really four things that we want to do. And here's the order. I want my work to glorify God. I want my work to serve others. I want my work to be an adventure. And I want my work to make a living in that order.
- [56:23]
Rich Roll
So making a living comes last.
- [56:25]
Arthur Brooks
Comes last. And that's a very privileged position, right? Very privileged. There were times in my life when I was a professional musician where that couldn't have come last because Rent was do right. And at this point in my life where I have a little bit more independence, it makes it easier. But my organization, the people who run the organization, great people who are totally values aligned, they know that algorithm and they will turn stuff down knowing that my brain chemistry, that my dopamine is designed to focus on number three, which is have an adventure. That's my weakness. I Want to go, dude, I want to have fun. I want to. I want to go to the Himalayas with Rich Roll, and I want to hang out with the Dalai Lama. And I want to have a great time. Good. Glorify God and serve others. But fundamentally, that was super fun. Yeah, that was a blast.
- [57:11]
Rich Roll
And somebody on your team told me when we were up there, like, oh, my God. We had to turn down. If you knew how much money we had to turn down from all these speaking engagements that coincided with the dates of that trip.
- [57:25]
Arthur Brooks
It's better. I don't know. But fundamentally, somebody dangle something that's a big adventure in front of me, and I'm going to want to say yes. I'm just going to want to say yes. And so I have a protection, a layer of protection around me. The people who work with me, who save me from myself, who will ask, is this going to do one and two? Is this doing one and two or not? I mean, these are our fundamental values, and that's what you need. Everybody needs. We need to take care of each other. We need to protect each other in this way. And I realize this is a first world problem, but I could make myself real miserable real fast.
- [58:01]
Rich Roll
So I got a text from you. Must have been. How long ago was it? My relationship with time is messed up. But you texted me and said, listen, I'm putting together a small group of people. We're gonna go to Dharamshala and we're gonna convene with the Dalai Lama. Like, are you interested in coming? And I was like, this is one of those moments. Like, this question is not going to be posed to me ever again. You know, I'm like, I don't know what I had planned for that particular period of time, but I was like, I'm definitely not going to miss out on this. And so thank you for that opportunity. Julie and I joined you in your group, and that was a truly informative and we. Transformative experience.
- [58:45]
Arthur Brooks
Who do we want to spend more time with and who's really going to get this thing? So it was you and me and Julie and Rainn Wilson, who's our buddy and who's a very deep guy. I mean, Soul Boone. What a great show that is. But that's a perfect person. And we're, you know, we're friends. We want to have a good time. And he brought his wife and just a few people that could. Lisa Miller at Columbia University, who's one of the real world's leading experts on the neuroscience of metaphysical experience, experiences and she's very personally, very religious as an observant Jew, wonderful person. And just a handful of people, very different perspectives.
- [59:25]
Rich Roll
Sonia. Professor Sonia.
- [59:27]
Arthur Brooks
Sonia Lubomirsky, who's not religious at all, but who's done fundamental behavioral science on gathering data on why it is that after you serve somebody else, you feel happier than when you serve yourself. And you. And I will be like, yeah, because as God or something. And she's been like, no, no, no.
- [59:44]
Rich Roll
Right, yeah, she went. I had her on the show. And not that she went after you, but she challenged you on that panel where you share the stage with the monks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [59:55]
Arthur Brooks
She's a giant. She's an absolute giant. And this is what we need in this, in this world is people who see things fundamentally differently and who are not. Who are not just like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. They. Who are going. Somebody who's. She's more things about things in a material fashion. More. When I would think about things in a more metaphysical fashion. And iron sharpens iron when you're looking for truth. As long as people have love for each other.
- [60:19]
Rich Roll
So you've been making this pilgrimage up to Dharamshala for many years. Like 12 years at this point. Annually. Going to see.
- [60:26]
Arthur Brooks
Almost annually. I've been to Dharamshala about. By the way, you say Dharamshala because that's the Indian pronunciation and the Tibetan pronunciation is Dharamsala. So both are correct. In case people are wondering.
- [60:36]
Rich Roll
It's spelled with H, but it's. I know that it's pronounced without the H. It depends.
- [60:40]
Arthur Brooks
The Tibetans pronounce. Anyway, it's in case our. Our viewers are wondering why we're pronouncing it in a different way.
- [60:46]
Rich Roll
So it's funny, I had a. I had like a disagreement with Julie before we went. I said, it's Dharamsala. And she's like, no, it's Dharamshala. And she showed me and it was spelled with the h. And I was like, oh, I don't know why. I always thought it was the other way, but I feel better now.
- [60:58]
Arthur Brooks
No, and in Hindi, of course, there is no H because it's just that all of the S sounds are sh in Hindi and in Sanskrit based languages. And all the T sounds are th sounds in Sanskrit based languages. So, you know, a very common surname is Dattar. D A T A R is Dattar. And so that's one of the. And that's the. Anyway, so that's why there's a little bit of disagreement on this because of the Translation into the English Alphabet.
- [61:25]
Rich Roll
So what motivated you to make this first visit? And why do you continue to go and spend time with him?
- [61:33]
Arthur Brooks
It's the Dalai Lama. And, you know, he's the world's most religious, respected religious figure, and it's just worthwhile. Any time anybody could have any amount of time in his presence is incredibly valuable and illuminating and reinforces the best that you've ever done in your life. And thought and said. Those impulses will be reinforced just by being in his loving presence. He's a living Bodhisattva. He has a Buddha nature. He is somebody that the Tibetan Buddhists believe could break out of Samsara, the endless cycle of birth and rebirth, but chooses not to for the enlightenment and love of all living beings. I mean, who's gonna pass that up? I mean, this beats Disneyland.
- [62:17]
Rich Roll
He's on round 14.
- [62:19]
Arthur Brooks
He's on round 14. Exactly right. And I went to see him for the first time because I made a. I was running a think tank in those days, the American Enterprise Institute, which is a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C. very nutty, crunchy, talking about better policy, better defense policy, better economic policy. But I was making a list of people that I really personally wanted to meet, where I wanted to bring their perspective to what I thought was the policy debates. And so I went to. I got an audience with the Dalai Lama. I had to go there. I got an hour and a half of his time, and I flew to. I mean, Dharamsala is hard to get to, and so flew to India, did a bunch of meetings there. And then there were no flights to Dharamsala in those days. So we drove, you know, hours and hours and hours. We almost hit a goat. I mean, it was just harrowing. Right on Indian roads. It's. It's. You've. Yeah, it's. Yeah, yeah. It's an experience. And in his presence, talking to him for 90 minutes, there was a he. He. When I met him, you know, in his little drawing room in his home, he looked at me and he knew me. And it's as if he had known me for a long time. And he said, hello, old friend. I thought, that's just the way he talks. They said, nuh, old friend. And I wanted to know what that meant. And in the first 90 minutes, I got a little bit of insight into what he actually meant, because he knew me, so he seemed like he knew me so deeply. I invited him to come to the United States, and I hosted him for a series of conferences in the United States around economic policies, around how we're supposed to bring more love and enlightenment to the hustle and bustle and to and fro of making actual federal policy.
- [64:00]
Rich Roll
Because how did that go over with the aei? Inside the Beltway crowd?
- [64:04]
Arthur Brooks
Everybody was fascinated by it. Everybody was fascinated by it. We got this bumper crops and tons of journalists. And why is the president of the American Enterprise Institute hanging out with the Dalai Lama, which was this big Vanity Fair spread about it. The whole thing, it was just a lot of curiosity is the way that that worked. But it was opening up my mind in ways that my mind had not been open before. I felt an intense and deep kind of love that I haven't felt with people outside of my family. And so I went back and invited him to the States. I hosted him a bunch of times in the United States, and I went to have conferences with him and personal time with him. Him in Dharamsala. We made a documentary film together. At one point we co authored some articles together, which was an incredibly interesting experience. And the result was that I love him. He has deepened my understanding of what it means to be a human on Earth. He's helped me to be, I think, a better person and a more well rounded person. And I feel like it's somebody that I truly have known for, I just don't know how long and under what circumstances.
- [65:08]
Rich Roll
Yeah. So when he says, hello, old friend, like, how do you decode that? What do you make of that?
- [65:13]
Arthur Brooks
It's hard to say, except that he has a perspective as a living bodhisattva across multiple lifetimes, according to his beliefs. And one has to interpret it as such. I don't know how to assess that. You know, I don't have that special insight. I don't even have a religion that admits those ideas. But it doesn't matter, because when you're with him, what matters is the intense love of, the confidence, commonality of human experience, the guru that he is becoming to you in that moment and telling you things that ultimately you need to hear.
- [65:46]
Rich Roll
So we arrive in Dharamshala, and the evening before the first session at dinner, you make a big pronouncement about how you've done this many times. And here's what I've learned. And what I've learned is I have a structure that I'm going to kind of apply to try to guide these conversations in a certain direction. But I've learned that the Dalai Lama has his own mind up about, like, what he wants to share. Right. And that was exactly the experience, in classic Arthur Brooks fashion, you show up looking fabulous and you spin a whole yarn about, like, where we are and where we're going to go and this is what it's going to look like and the whole thing. Right. And he just sort of. My sense was that he kind of looked around the room and tried to kind of figure out where everybody is at kind of emotionally and spiritually and just sort of made a decision about what he wanted to share and what he thought, like, we could receive.
- [66:46]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, no. I crafted 45 plays for the beginning of the game, and he came out and just like, ran a trick play.
- [66:54]
Rich Roll
Not so much a trick play, because you knew the trick play was coming, I guess. I've shared about this experience on the podcast before, but essentially every answer to every question was some version of love. More love. Unconditional love. The unconditional love that a mother has for a child.
- [67:13]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [67:13]
Rich Roll
Like, that's sort of the answer to.
- [67:15]
Arthur Brooks
Every question on this trip.
- [67:16]
Rich Roll
On this trip. So I guess I was going to ask, like, on your previous trips or other experiences with him, was it that. Was that the answer also, or. It was different with different groups and different.
- [67:26]
Arthur Brooks
He also talks about love, to be sure. He always talks about warm heartedness. He always talks about how, you know, the. The dissent and hatred and conflict in the world is an opportunity for all of us to live up to our true nature, which is of love for all beings. But he does it in different ways because he looks around and he says, arthur has something he needs to hear right now, and he's going to hear it. I don't really care what he asks. You know, he could ask about, you.
- [67:48]
Rich Roll
Know, the questions were irrelevant.
- [67:50]
Arthur Brooks
Hey, you know, it's.
- [67:51]
Rich Roll
Right.
- [67:51]
Arthur Brooks
It's like, you know, they were really well thought out and, you know, you.
- [67:55]
Rich Roll
Put a lot of time into it and you delivered them very charismatically.
- [67:58]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you. I appreciate that. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no. This is what Arthur needs to hear. And by the way, Arthur is here with these people because together they need to hear this. And he was telling us not the answers, but he was, because he doesn't actually, at the level of a Bodhisattva, when you're in the presence of a person with a living Buddha nature, they don't answer questions. They provide understanding to the true questions that are written on your heart. Whether you knew it or not, that's what they're doing. And so we go in and you were wondering about love, and so was I. And we were wondering about the nature of a lot of different things. And he coalesced it around a certain kind of understanding that created this temperature. And then he developed it more. And I know what my job is. My job is not to ask the right questions. My job is to interpret what he's saying. And so I've done this so many times with him at this point that at the end, when I know he's finished, then he'll look at me like this. And now I know it's time for me to say, here are the six things that the Dalai Lama is trying to get us to understand today. And the first time that I did that, it was kind of baffling because I didn't remember doing it later. And I asked somebody about it and they said, oh, no, no, this is what happens. You were his translator on this day. This is what he does. And now I get to the point where I just look into until I can see that it's time for me to translate into the language that my companions can understand most readily the message of the Dalai Lama on this particular day.
- [69:33]
Rich Roll
And can you recite or recall your wrap up?
- [69:36]
Arthur Brooks
I can't. I can't exactly at this point because it was almost an out of body experience. But it's all the different ways that love is made manifest in our lives. Remember that when you're in a position of hostility with another person, this is your opportunity to show love. This is not your obligation to show love. This is your opportunity to show love. Because in so doing, you're going to be the person that you were supposed to be. You'll understand yourself more deeply. The fact that there's opposition in front of you is because it's time for you to learn this. Don't miss the opportunity. That's typically the lesson that he's trying to bring to us. And that will just. And I don't know why suddenly I'm able to come up with this, but because this is what he's telling me.
- [70:22]
Rich Roll
And how did that message translate into behavior change for you in the wake of that?
- [70:28]
Arthur Brooks
It's fundamental because like everybody else, I was working in Washington, D.C. and I was running a think tank in Washington, D.C. and I'm doing economic policy. And I was in the back and forth of political battles just like anybody else. And subsequent to working with the Dalai Lama, I changed my approach. I changed my approach to this. I look at political dissent now as an opportunity for us to understand each other at a much deeper level. I'm just not getting involved in ordinary political battles. I started to move away from anything like the culture war because I want more love, not less. I want the conflagrations in politics to actually lead us to understand each other at a deeper level and to accept each other and to see the weaknesses and the foibles that all of us actually have and the insecurities that we have so that we can have greater compassion for one another. And that's what he helped me to understand. I didn't know I was going to see him. It turns out that's why I left the world of Washington, D.C. ultimately, because I wanted to spend the rest of my life, as I said, lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using the science that is my background. And that all I love was in.
- [71:40]
Rich Roll
The middle of that wow. We're brought to you today by calm. Now, I'm not one to cast aspersions on big, audacious goals or bold resolutions provided two things. First, there must be clarity around the daily practice practices that advance those goals. Habits that are sustainable such that they can be consistently practiced within the constraints of a busy life. Second, and most important is that goals must be pursued mindfully. You must know why you seek them, which requires that you must know yourself. And you can't know yourself unless you prioritize quiet and solitude and these things. Things are difficult when the supercomputer in your pocket is ready made for constant distraction, but which when used right is also a powerful tool. A tool I leverage with a game changing app called Calm, the number one app for sleep and meditation, giving you the power to calm your mind and change your life with just a litany of tools to meet you wherever you are on this journey of self connection. Tools that help help me start the day centered, help me re center when I get scattered or overwhelmed, which I gotta say is often, and also help me wind down after a hectic day and slumber more soundly. It's pretty amazing how just a few minutes of intentional practice can radically, completely shift your day. And the tools are right there in your pocket, ready whenever you need them. So stress less, sleep more, and live better with Calm. For listeners of the show, Calm is offering an exclusive offer of 40% off a Calm premium subscription at calm.com rich roll go to cm.com rich roll for 40% off unlimited access to column's entire library. That's calm.com rich roll this episode is brought to you by Prolon. If you're a longtime listener of this show, then you already know that I've devoted many, many episodes of this podcast to the evidence based health and longevity benefits of fasting. But what if you could reap those benefits without actually doing a full blown fast? That kind of sounds like it's too good to be true, like a sales pitch, but it's actually the question that three time podcast guest Dr. Valter Longo, one of the world's preeminent longevity research scientists, asked himself, then spent decades researching at USC's Longevity Institute, eventually answering the question with an affirmative yes via this protocol he created called the Fasting Mimicking Diet and which Prolon now makes available to you. Prolonce Fasting Mimicking Diet is a five day nutrition program that supports healthy blood sugar, enhanced skin appearance and improves energy post fast with specially designed soups, snacks and beverages. Everything arrives in one box. It's neatly organized by day and the science speaks for itself. Three consecutive cycles can reduce your biological age age score by an average of 2 1/2 years and your waist circumference by 1 1/2 inches. Pretty amazing. To help you kickstart a healthy plan that truly works, Prolon is offering the Rich roll podcast listeners 15% off site wide plus a forty dollar bonus gift. When you subscribe to their five day nutrition program, just visit prolonlife.com richroll that's P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F E.com richroll to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift. Prolonlife.com richroll Hearing him talk about the unconditional love of a mother for a child was. I shared this with you, but it was sort of deeply confronting to me because I have a problematic relationship with my mother who now is suffering from dementia. But obviously that was exactly what I needed to hear. And this is the, the sort of, you know, project of healing that I've, that I've been on right now I have to heal me more about that.
- [76:14]
Arthur Brooks
Did you realize that your mother did have unconditional love for you that went unrecognized?
- [76:19]
Rich Roll
Yes. You know, but I get caught up in, in the story, you know, I mean, the story of a grievement or whatever. And I can point to this and that and, and I'm the one who suffers as a result of that. Right? And I'm not in a position to have any kind of direct healing experience with her because of her, because of her condition now. So the onus is on me to resolve that internally and then demonstrate it externally, which I've been in the process of doing. I was in Washington the day after the election, actually visiting with my parents, and I had an amazing experience with my mother where I was able to express unconditional love and gratitude to her in a way that I don't know that I ever had before, and in a way that would not have been possible had I not been on that trip with you, had you not invited me on that trip. And it was incredibly healing. And it was also an amazing experience for my father, who was present for that, to just witness that. You know, I think that it went a long way, and I still have work to do, but it was an incredibly healing experience that I. That I think to the extent that she could hear it, you know, behind the condition from which she suffers. And I know that she did. Like, it was. You know, I know that inside she could feel it and hear it, but, like, also for me to be able to just do that, you know, incredibly meaningful and liberating.
- [77:53]
Arthur Brooks
People are imperfect. I mean, we're just so imperfect. And now, you know, we're the age where that our parents were when we were young adults, and we're like, go away. There's like, they're terrible. And now we're that age.
- [78:07]
Rich Roll
I know.
- [78:07]
Arthur Brooks
And then we have kids who are like. We were looking at us going.
- [78:11]
Rich Roll
And I look at them, and I'm like, what are they really thinking?
- [78:14]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. And the, you know, the unconditional love from your mother, from my mother, from our parents, that was problematic because they're complicated people, and we were helpless. And the resentment that came because of the. Because of the style of the love, and when we were kind of messing us up and when we were so helpless, and then it comes around, and we have this grace and an opportunity to show unconditional love when they're helpless. Because now your mother's helpless. Your mother's a child, and you're the adult, and you have the opportunity to show this unconditional love. Love as imperfectly as it is, but it requires letting go of that thing, you know, that, you know, the old South Indian monkey trap reference. Now, what is that In South India, There's. The way that they catch monkeys, is that you have a box that has a hole in it that's just big enough that a monkey can put his little hand in there, and they put a ball of rice in the box, and a monkey will come along and say, rice, I like rice, and puts his hand in to get it and to grab it. It. But when it's in his fist, he can't get his Hand out. The monkey won't let go. And they just walk up to the monkey and grab the monkey. That's us. This is us. If you don't let go of that ball of rice, which is your resentment and your anger and your memories, forgiving is letting go of the ball of rice. And this is the opportunity when you recognize the unconditional love that was so imperfect in your mother, that was so imperfect expressed because she's human, you're just going to hold onto that ball of rice until it's too late. And the Dalai Lama was helping you to let go of the bowl of rice.
- [80:01]
Rich Roll
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, incredible gift.
- [80:04]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, I know. It's just. He's a gift to humanity. And, you know, on his 14th pass.
- [80:12]
Rich Roll
It was amazing to get to know some of the monks also and to discover that so many of them have, like, PhDs from American universities and are much more worldly than you would imagine and have made this choice to live this life. And most of them, at least I think all the ones I talked to at some point, had to flee Tibet, and there's sort of a diaspora of them across India. But their joyfulness is infectious and undeniable.
- [80:43]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, monastics in every tradition are like that. This. And so if you meet cloistered nuns, which, if they're cloistered, you probably wouldn't, but if you talk to monks, for example, Catholic monks or monks in almost any tradition, there's a deep joy that comes from the contemplative tradition that really comes from this intense relationship with God, this relationship that comes from paying attention to what really matters all day long, from not being distracted from it. Did you come with me up into the way. Way up into the. Up into the forest to meet the. We met a hermit on that trip, a guy who's been living by himself in one room for 27 years. And he only rarely, every couple of years, sees visitors. And I went and talked to him. I interviewed him. I actually wrote one of my columns about what it's like to be this hermit. He's just. He's so happy. He's so happy. He lives in, you know, his room is his mat. And then he cooks his meals out on his porch. And he's got about 50 books in Tibetan about Buddhism, and he reads the sacred scriptures and he meditates pretty much all day, every day. People bring him food. You know, people from his community bring him food. And his job is to pray for the world. That's what monastics do and to help people understand through his prayer, their relationship with God. And it's this joy that they actually get, this joy that you actually see from people who are trying to do that now. You know, you could say to yourself, all right, man, I got a job, job, I gotta pay the rent. But we all need more of the monastic in us. And that means doing the work of trying to understand the divine better, of reading the sacred scriptures, of participating in a contemplative tradition. One of the interesting things about my relationship with the Dalai Lama and his monks has done for me is it's made me a much more serious Catholic than it has been in the past. And early on, people go to Dharamsala and they say, I'm an to become a Buddhist. And the Dalai Lama was like, no, no, you Westerners, the reason that you're meditating is because you want to feel better. You're missing the point. You're just getting all spaced out because you want to feel better. The point of meditation is to make the world feel better. That's the point of meditation. I don't understand. Well, get with it, man. And so the Dalai Lama told me on one of my first trips, says, I want you to be a better Catholic. I gave him a rosary that was blessed by the Holy Father, by the Pope, and he kissed it and he said, I want you to be a better Catholic. I said, well, all right then. And I learned a much, much better contemplative technique by actually studying meditation with his monks, which is what I use when I pray my Catholic rosary every day. And one of the reasons that I attend mass every morning to start my day, day when it's still dark is because I follow that injunction with great seriousness. I am a Catholic, and he wants me to be a Catholic.
- [83:41]
Rich Roll
Do you have any internal conflicts that you have to resolve around the differences in spiritual perspectives between Buddhism and Catholicism?
- [83:53]
Arthur Brooks
Less than I ever thought I would, interestingly. I mean, there are big differences. I mean, Buddhism is non theistic and Catholicism is. I mean, the Abrahamic religions and the karmic religions are. There's a lot of difference between them, to be sure. But the whole point is, what I've realized is I don't have to resolve that. It's just not my responsibility. It's not a good use of my time to try to resolve that. As they say, it's above my pay grade. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to bring more love and happiness to the world through my contemplative tradition, through my, my professional practice. Getting back to my scheme, in my career, what am I really trying to do? I'm trying to bring the world together in more bonds of happiness and love, doing what I'm doing. And part of what I do is to become a better professional and to write, speak, and teach. But part of it is to be on my knees every day in mass and to be praying my rosary at night. And the Dalai Lama led me on that path of righteousness. Most interestingly, what's the resolution between the traditions? I don't know, and I'm less interested in finding out than I used to be.
- [85:00]
Rich Roll
There also seems to be an internal conflict between science and faith. Science is the devotion to better understanding through practical methodology, whereas faith is about relinquishing the need to understand fundamentally. Like on some level. Right. And many people see these things as being at odds with each other. But for me, and I'm curious about your perspective, the more you learn and understand, the more magical and mystical and amazing and mysterious everything seems to be.
- [85:37]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [85:37]
Rich Roll
I feel like these things actually complement each other completely.
- [85:41]
Arthur Brooks
Completely. Absolutely. I mean, the more I learn about science, the more religious I am, the more religious I am, the more I care about science. And part of the reason is because. Because I think of it this way, if I were an art historian and I were an expert in Picasso, I'd have to have exhaustive knowledge about Picasso's paintings and about Picasso. But I couldn't find out anything about Picasso, the man, by just looking at his paintings. I could look at Guernica all day long and say, he's not in there. Picasso's not in there. Picasso the man is not in his paintings. The creator and the creation are complementary, but they require different disciplines to understand. Understand. Religion brings you understanding. Science brings you answers. These things complement each other. It's fundamentally unintellectual. It's disgraceful that we would say that these things are mutually exclusive. It's a misunderstanding of the universe.
- [86:32]
Rich Roll
So when somebody comes to you and says, a scientist says, I'm not a religious person because there's no proof of God if you can't prove it, I don't believe it.
- [86:42]
Arthur Brooks
Right. I say that you're looking at it from the wrong direction. You're trying to look into the Picasso painting and saying, there is no Picasso. It's like the Soviet cosmonauts in the 1960s in this great coup against the religious west, were orbiting the Earth, pointing a super telescope out into space and came back declaring, we didn't see God, so he doesn't exist. And that's laughably. That's ludicrous to anybody who's in any way religious, religious at all. That's what that's doing. Now again, there aren't many, many scientists who say that I talk to. I mean I have a lot of colleagues who are atheists for sure. They're very committed atheists. On the basis of their belief that there is no God, on their basis of the belief that it really is all material. They might be right. They actually might be right. The whole point is we don't know because it's a non testable hypothesis. We can't know. And that's not where I'm actually choosing to put my intention, where I'm choosing to put my practice because I think that there is more. Can I prove it? I can bring a lot of evidence to bear on my science. But the miracle of faith is belief without evidence. And that's an entirely different kettle of fish, but one that's complementary to what we're actually trying to do in the scientific realm.
- [88:01]
Rich Roll
Pete Holmes has a great joke about this. Do you know who Pete Holmes is? He's a comedian, deeply spiritual guy.
- [88:08]
Arthur Brooks
I should know.
- [88:08]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I'll send you down the Pete Holmes rabbit hole after this. You would love this guy. Anyway, he has a joke that's a version of your Picasso example which is like asking or demanding proof of God is sort of like asking Harry Potter for evidence of J.K. rowling.
- [88:26]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, that's exactly the story. That's just a funnier way of putting it.
- [88:30]
Rich Roll
Where is JK Rowling in this story of Harry Potter? So she doesn't, from Harry Potter's point of view. Yeah, there's no evidence.
- [88:37]
Arthur Brooks
So obviously she doesn't exist. No, no, when you put it that way, people can more or less understand it. Now that doesn't mean, given the fact that I can't find evidence of God, given the empirical methods that we have in science, it's possible God doesn't exist. But the truth of the matter is that it's entirely legitimate, even using scientific methods to say there's enough evidence that there's something more out there. There's something more out there. And grappling for different ways to find an experience of the divine, a deep understanding of the divine. All of the really important things in life, by the way, not just God, have understanding without answers. I'll give you an example. Here's a question, Rich. Why do you love Julie?
- [89:24]
Rich Roll
Well, I think there is a series of reductive answers to that. Like I could name a Bunch of qualities, et cetera. But fundamentally, the real reason is ineffable.
- [89:34]
Arthur Brooks
That's it. See? This is it. See? There's a whole realm of human experience that's ineffable. That's only based on understanding. Without answers you can articulate. That's super important. That's super important. You'll never find the meaning of your life. If you're trying to live in the realm of answers you can articulate, you need to dig around in the soil of the questions that don't have answers you can articulate, but to which you can actually get understanding. Most of the karmic traditions, by the way, are taught to the novice monks through questions, not answers. You know, if you go to a Zen monastery, a novice monk will be given a bunch of koans. Koans are riddles. And they'll say something like, okay, contemplate this question. What is the sound of one hand clap, clapping like it's nonsense. No, no, no, no. The contemplation of that question will give you an understanding of a fundamental underlying answer that you'll never be able to articulate. That to me, is evidence of God. It's also evidence of my love for my wife, which, of course, is a simulacrum for my love of God. My experience of it in daily life. The fact that I can't articulate it is divine. That's the magic.
- [90:51]
Rich Roll
We're on the precipice of yet another Valentine's Day. People are thinking about their romantic relationships. That obligatory day on the calendar where we have to kind of show up and do the thing. I have all this resentment about that.
- [91:08]
Arthur Brooks
That's another issue, Mother's Day.
- [91:10]
Rich Roll
But I think it is the occasion of how are we thinking about romantic love? Where are instincts leading us astray? And, you know, how should we kind of orient ourselves around, like, you know, our. Our partnerships with the people that we're involved with.
- [91:27]
Arthur Brooks
These are the. The deepest and most intimate links that we have in our lives. Is our romantic partnerships is. And they're unbelievably important. They're cognitively incredibly impactful. They're super powerful. They're blissful and miserable at the same time. This is the 4th of July inside your head, basically. And they can bring you from the highest highs to the lowest lows in hours, even if you've been married for decades. It's just the most incredible thing. And yet they're harder and harder to figure out. For a lot of young people today, we're finding that people are about half as likely to get married in their 20s as they were in the 1980s, they're half as likely to be cohabitating outside of marriage. They're less likely, a lot less likely to be having sex. They're less likely to even say that they're in love. And so there's a love depression that's going on. And a lot of my work is going into why and what do we do and how do we fix it.
- [92:28]
Rich Roll
What is behind that?
- [92:30]
Arthur Brooks
So you find that throughout history that romantic love waxes and wanes, and to no small extent, it's a cultural phenomenon. And what we've been finding, finding, particularly over the past 10 years, is there's been a lot of antipathy, a lot of activism that's turned the, you know, the sexes against each other. You know, men and women don't trust each other. There's a lot of, you know, politics out there about talking about how they're bad, they're predatory, they're exploitative. And when I say they, I'm not specifying the gender, because. Because you can find it on both sides. And so there's a lot of people in the culture war that are doing a lot of harm for young people and making it harder for them to form relationships. And that's a bad thing to do. That's just straight up a bad thing to do, because more romantic love means more happiness, it means more families, it means more babies, and all that stuff's awesome for human flourishing. But then, of course, there is the explanation that a lot of people are watching us, are thinking of right now, which is the technological mediation which has been tearing people apart. It's just getting harder and harder and harder. When you don't meet people in real life, you're less likely to form a deep human bond. That's just. It doesn't matter how efficient your dating app is. It's just not going to be a substitute for the relationship that you have another person. Look, there's a reason that you don't do your podcast over zoom. And the reason is because we have a better conversation when we have eye contact. And I could explain that. The neurobiology behind it, the oxytocin that we produce when we actually have eye contact, that's part of evolution, so that we can link to each other as friends and kin. But the neurobiology doesn't matter. We know that you have a deep human connection. And when it's a romantic connection between two people who could conceivably fall in love, and you're trying to intermediate it with a dating app or social media or anything on the Internet, you're going to short circuit that thing and you're going to get big problems.
- [94:34]
Rich Roll
Well, we're in the midst of it already. It's not like it's coming. It's here.
- [94:39]
Arthur Brooks
62% of relationships now start over the apps.
- [94:42]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I've got two boys, they're 29 and 28, and you know, they, they come home and share tales of the dating apps. And, you know, this is basically the primary way in which young people interface with dating. And you know, my boys, they're, they're not antisocial. Like, they're out in the world, they've got lots of friends. They, they're at bars and parties and dinner parties. It's not as if they don't have other ways to meet people or meet potential partners. And yet they still intermediate that dynamic.
- [95:17]
Arthur Brooks
Through the apps because that's how it gets done. It's crowded out everything. It's the easiest way to meet other people. And so it's crowded out everything else. It's basically think of dating apps and dating as the Voice v. The VHS tapes. Right. That it was a substandard technology that crowded out everything else because of market conditions and because of ease and convenience. That that's what's happened. A worse technology, crowded out better technologies because of market conditions under, under, under the certain circumstances that we see today. That's. That's basically what's going on here. It's crowded out. It's a bad thing. It's a lousy way to meet people that tends to be extremely ruthlessly efficient. And so it's just basically eradicated matchmaking and meeting through friends and talking to people in bars and having your friends set you up on blind dates, by the way, your friends sitting up on blind dates, that's the single best way for you to meet somebody who could be your soulmate. That's the single best way.
- [96:13]
Rich Roll
Is there some kind of study that establishes that?
- [96:16]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, absolutely.
- [96:17]
Rich Roll
And there's a reason usually those dates go horribly wrong.
- [96:21]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, but that means you need more deals flow, you need to do more of them is the way that that works. But here's the reason. Your friends, they know you, they know who's somebody who is a good enough match, but a big enough compliment, who's different enough from you. And so we have a sense about how people are going to match up together. We can't quite articulate it. This is ineffable because love, as we've talked about before, is not an answered question. It's an understood question. And your friends really get this or your family members really get this. I want somebody who's got the who's. I think he's. I think she's right for Rich. How come? Because she's close enough to his values and his beliefs, but she's far enough apart that they're going to fall in love and find each other interesting. You can't do that when you're making your own dating profile or just.
- [97:10]
Rich Roll
I don't know why, but I just know. Yeah, there's an intuition about this.
- [97:14]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting because there's been some biological investigation about why you need somebody who's different enough. You've heard about the famous T shirt sniffing study?
- [97:24]
Rich Roll
I don't think so.
- [97:25]
Arthur Brooks
In the mid-1990s. So, yeah, this is a great study where the scientists were trying to figure out whether or not you could distinguish whether somebody's a good possible mate for you simply by their smell. And so they. On a college campus where they recruited a bunch of undergraduates because they'll do anything for 20 bucks. And they had these guys wear these T shirts around for 48 hours for everything. And they take off the T shirts and they put them in shoeboxes and drill holes in the shoeboxes and they give them to random women to sniff the holes of the shoeboxes. And then they rate the attractiveness of the person just based on the smell of the guys. And it turns out that there's a super strong inverse correlation between how close they are immunologically to the smeller and the smellee and how attractive they find them. In other words, the more different than he is immunologically from you, which you sense with the olfactory bulb in the brain below your level of consciousness, the hotter you find him. Now, there's a reason for that.
- [98:27]
Rich Roll
There's an evolutionary advantage to that.
- [98:29]
Arthur Brooks
Exactly. You want people who are really different. This is called a major histocompatibility complex. And that when you find somebody who's really, really different, your potential offspring have a better immunological repertoire against diseases. And so that's why you want to mate more with him just based on the smell which you can sense in your olfactory bulb. Okay, now translate this into the modern milieu. You want people, people who are different than you, are hot to you. They're different than you, but you're going to be adjudicating your mate matches on dating apps as people who are exactly like you. These are the people who vote like you and they think Austin is a personality and they eat sriracha and whatever your thing is, right. And pretty much you're dating your sibling, which is not hot.
- [99:19]
Rich Roll
Doesn't the pendulum always kind of swing back and find its balance? Or do you feel like this is kind of a snowball rolling downhill that is just going to wreak disaster?
- [99:30]
Arthur Brooks
No, it's going to get better. Because when. When people won't voluntarily submit to misery forever, you know, they won't submit to, you know, the, the baby boomer culture warriors that are trying to get people to not love each other, to conscript them into some goofy culture war that they've got. Young people are going to fight back and stand up to the man, say, no, I'm going to fall in love. No, I want to be happy. And when they do that, you're going to find that heterosexual young people are going to be more sexually dichotomous. You're going to find that they're going to try to be more attractive than they have been of late, where it's kind of uncool to be as attractive as possible. You're going to find that there's going to be more of that, naturally, because people are trying to appeal to each other in sexual and romantic ways, and that'll be a healthy thing. So that'll be sort of the subtle way that people start to rebel against that, against the politics of loneliness and the politics of misery which people our age have foisted upon.
- [100:32]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [100:32]
Arthur Brooks
A lot of young people today.
- [100:33]
Rich Roll
Well, I see that. I see that, you know, in, in the, in the younger millennials and in the older, you know, Gen Z. Gen Z folks, like, they are some of the more analog people that I know, you know, it's. It is an act of rebellion. Like, I'm going to get off the aisle. I'm going to get, like a record player and I'm going to buy vinyl, and I don't have the apps on my phone. Maybe I still have my account, but I only look at it once a day because, you know, you kind of do have to have that for some level of social cohesion and connection with your. With your friend, your peer group. But to not be in that incessant scrolling that, you know, I find myself doing, you know, like, I'm a bad example of it often. And I think there's something really beautiful and cool about that. And I, I think to your point, around getting your head around young people and how do they find meaning and purpose and fulfillment? What is unique to the younger generation that you can speak to. This is a generation that thinks more deeply and more profoundly about these bigger questions of life than our generation did. We were just, let's get into the school and get the job and the career track. And I wasn't contemplating, like, life's larger questions until I was, you know, in crisis, basically.
- [101:51]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, well, part of the reason is because you didn't have to. And this is, this is important for us to understand. So what did your grandfather do for a living?
- [102:02]
Rich Roll
He worked at the electrical company in the Midwest in Michigan.
- [102:07]
Arthur Brooks
And so I bet you he never said, I don't know the meaning of life. I don't know the meaning of my life. I bet he never had a big existential crisis. And we actually understand why that is. With our grandfathers, they were bored all the time. I mean, they didn't hate their jobs, but their life. They didn't have any earbuds, they didn't have any podcasts. They were bored a lot. They were pushing a plow or working at a factory or working at the electric company. And a lot of their day was incredibly monotonous. They didn't even have computers. They were just doing this thing. And so the result was that their brains were actually accessing certain structures that we now call the default mode network. The default mode network is what turns on when you're kind of turned off. And those structures are important for you to assess questions of meaning that have understanding without answers. You need to be bored and for your mind to wander. And so the more you're of a generation where you had a lot of boredom and when you and I were. When you and I were boys, there was a lot of. I mean, you were growing up in the suburbs of D.C. right?
- [103:08]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [103:08]
Arthur Brooks
And I was growing up in Seattle. And we're just bored all the time. And my mom would be like, don't watch Gilligan's island. Go outside. And I'm like, I'm bored. That's the point. And so you're just doing stuff. And the result is you have a very active default mode network and you're using the structures in your brain to access meaning without even trying. Well, guess what? Our kids don't have that. Young people today don't have that because we have anti boredom devices. You and I are part of the anti boredom economy because we're creating content that people can. And I'm glad they have this content. I mean, I'm glad they have this show. But the truth is that they need to turn off the podcast and stop scrolling. And when you're at a light, don't look at your phone and let your default mode network actually turn on because if you don't then you're going to have a big meeting. Crisis. Crisis. So the fact that a lot of people are saying, young people are saying, it's like I want to find meaning in my life, that's great news. But it's also, that's evidence of the crisis. That's evidence of the fact that we're, that we're denying people the ability to actually find these questions of meaning. This is a big part of my research today is about the technological crisis of meaning in our society. How it's changed our brains and what we can actually do about it. How people can intervene in this and stop it before it's too late in their life lives.
- [104:24]
Rich Roll
It's this incredible act of rebellion that requires an unbelievable amount of discipline because basically what you're, you're putting the onus on the individual and the ask is you have to put away this incredibly addictive thing that is calling your name at all hours of the day. Right. Well, being is a function of the systems of your environment. Like if you think of the blue zones, the people who are that, you know, among the happiest among, among the people who live the longest, they live in communities that are conducive to making the healthy, best choice that is leading their life in a productive direction. But everything about our modern culture is an antagonist to that, including our devices that maybe are at the peak of it.
- [105:10]
Arthur Brooks
Right. Right now we're at peak addiction at this point.
- [105:12]
Rich Roll
But it's what, you know, it's sort of like, yes, we have to make these individual choices for ourselves or a generation has to make it for themselves. But fundamentally, what is the responsibility of the organizations, the corporations, the regulatory bodies, the governments to protect us or is it just on us? How do we see our way forward?
- [105:33]
Arthur Brooks
So that's a super good question because it becomes a public policy question. It becomes about a self governance question to be sure. But we see this pattern repeating all the time. So when societies that never had alcohol in them suddenly have alcohol introduced, everybody becomes really alcoholic, right? It just rips through the societies and then they mature and they start saying no. And new generations will be like, I'm not going to do that. That ruined three generations of my family. And you get a lot less or.
- [106:01]
Rich Roll
You overcorrect and you have fundamentalism. Yeah, basically. And then it has to swing back or whatever and find its these Mass.
- [106:09]
Arthur Brooks
Addictions, they don't last. They actually don't last. And so the same. Same thing with tobacco, for example. I mean, when our dads were boys, all men smoked. They just all smoked. And now, and you know, when I was a young guy, I was a musician, I smoked. But then I quit in my 20s, and there's no chance, actually one of my sons, because he was a Marine, he was smoking. But, you know, that's unusual for young people. And so it's less and less and less likely because the society changes and starts to recognize how deleterious these behaviors actually are. That's what's going to happen. Happen, I predict, with these device addictions that are capturing our brains in all these sorts of ways. Okay, but in the meantime, this is your question before we get there organically, what's the responsibility? Now? There's a lot of responsibility by the individual to take care of yourself in the same way that, by the way, if you have a tendency in your family toward alcoholism, you have a responsibility to pay attention to this and not get addicted. I mean, that's an ethical responsibility that you have, right? If you're a parent, you have a responsibility to take care of your kids. Because the research is now unambiguous that these things, overuse of devices is extremely dangerous for your children. Just is. But there's also public policy we need to be thinking about. My friend Jonathan Haidt. You've had him on the show, right? Phenomenal. He's doing the best work. His new workbook is huge. The Anxious Generation Every Place. Right. And the reason is because, see, John Haidt's a visionary. He's the most visionary social scientist of our time. He always sees the thing that everybody's going to be thinking three years ahead. It's uncanny. The guy's like Jeremiah, the total profit. And it's so incredible how good he is at doing this. And so what he's recognizing is how bad this is and that we need public policy answers to this. We need age limits that are a lot more rigorous and they're a lot older than they currently are. That could actually do a whole lot of good. And we need to be thinking more creatively about these public policies.
- [108:14]
Rich Roll
The ripple effect of his work in that book is already. I mean, there are already schools that are kind of banning cell phones during school hours.
- [108:23]
Arthur Brooks
These are table stakes. The whole idea that you should ban phones from schools, Duh, right? And it's so easy, you know, by. By, you know, governors could have, by executive order, could say public schools in this state you're not going to be able to use cell phones during the school day in the public schools. And then of course he's the bad guy or she's the bad guy that, you know. Then the, the superintendents can throw the governor under the bus and the principals can throw the superintendents under the bus and the parents are going to freak out because the day data on these experiments have shown the parents really freak out when the kids are freaking out. But the kids like it better after 14 days. It takes two weeks.
- [109:01]
Rich Roll
As long as it applies to everybody.
- [109:02]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, it's like, it's mutual disarmament, it's detente when it comes down as opposed to the mutually assured destruction that we've got in cell phone use today. But the idea that you can have public schools and people sitting in a cafeteria, young kids looking at their phones as opposed to talking to each other other, that is complete insanity. And it's, it's a self imposed kind of misery. It's totally irresponsible.
- [109:28]
Rich Roll
Well, the downstream dysfunction of all that is, you know, we can only begin to kind of imagine. But I know, as you know, our youngest is 16 and so I'm kind of tapped into that age group. Yeah. You see a generation of people who've been reared on these devices and as a result they have very little experience or not enough development in terms of like engaging with people one on one and they become kind of anxious or conflict averse. Not conflict averse, just sort of averse to like picking up the phone and calling somebody if they can text because it's just, it's less confrontational, you know, like it, it's less anxiety producing or whatever. And so they don't develop the skill to like interact, interact with another human being. And so back to the subject of dating and intimate relationships. Like you know, then they're, then they're, you know, 21 and they're at a bar, but they're all looking at their phones and they're not interacting with each other because they don't have the skill sets or the comfort with how to kind of navigate, you know, vulnerable, open, intimate conversation.
- [110:33]
Arthur Brooks
Right. So one of the ways that we can solve this inside families is to have family phone free zones. Like no phones at the table, no phones after 7:00pm Right. This is important such that we can actually mediate human contact. We can have relationships with each other where we're talking to each other. But the worst thing is when your adolescent is looking at his phone at the table and the reason inevitably is because so are you. You're peeking at your phone underneath the table and did I get that text? And what are they saying on social media? Which is idiotic, because the answer is nothing. Nothing of importance. Nothing that's even remotely as important as the conversation you might have with your teenage kid that would actually happen. But once again, if you don't want them to do that, you shouldn't do that. That's what it comes down to. So a lot of Gen Xers and baby boomers are the ones that are providing the bad example on this.
- [111:25]
Rich Roll
In terms of dating, particularly with Millennials, Gen Z, the apps themselves create, like, an imbalance and inequity in terms of matchmaking. Right. Like, there's a whole world of discussion to be had around that, and I don't want to spend too much time on it. But it does produce a sort of despairing dilemma for a lot of people, especially when this is like, the only way that people are, like, interacting in order to date.
- [111:55]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Yeah. So each one of us has a bundle of. Of benefits and costs in our personality and things that we bring to the table in a potential match having to do with our basic personality and the resources that we can actually bring to a match and our sense of humor and our relationship with God or whatever it happens to be all these wonderful things and not so great things. And when we meet in person, people can assess the full range of what we're bringing of who we are as a person. Person. When you mediate it through an app, you're compressing that to a very small set of characteristics. And so people who have the characteristics that are positive in that very small band are going to be getting all of the action. So this is a big. And what is that small band of characteristics, things that are easiest to display on the Internet, which is largely looks and resources, how rich you are and where you live and how cool you are and how good looking you are. And when you do that, then you're going to probably take. Whereas 70% of men, for example, are dateable, you're going to take it down to 10% of men who are basically dateable, because the other ones are just not going to be attractive as mediated by these mechanisms. And so they're going to get all the hits from the women. And so what you find is that it's pretty interesting stuff that shows that men find 80% of attractive women and women find 20% of men attractive or something like that. It's just like inverse proportion and it's upside down. And so the result is you're going to get these asymmetries, these incredible asymmetries, which is not just bad for women, it's bad for men. Because what it does is it torques the incentives of men to be next, next, next, next, next. And men are not supposed to behave that way. If you want to be. If a man who wants to be happy shouldn't have that much variety, because all that's going to do is it's going to create an addiction. All it's going to do is going to torque the dopamine in his brain because there's this dopamine, what is the D3 dopamine allele. And for sexual variety, all that's going to. You're going to get really, really, really good at wanting as much sexual variety as you can possibly get, and you'll just become an addict. It's like living in a liquor store.
- [114:17]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Meanwhile, from the female, female perspective, for, you know, a, A desirable female, that person is going to have just an unlimited, you know, capacity for as many, you know, there's going to just be an unlimited amount of men who are going to want to date that person. Right. So it's working both ways in unproductive and unhealthy ways.
- [114:40]
Arthur Brooks
It hurts everybody.
- [114:40]
Rich Roll
But these platforms fundamentally are failing to serve, like, you know, know the vast majority of the people that are on them. So at some point it does feel like, look, it's not working for almost everybody who's on these platform platforms. Right. So, so something better has to come or there has to be, you know, kind of a paradigm shift.
- [114:59]
Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [115:00]
Rich Roll
Because those people, you know, why would they stay there? Like, there has to be an alternative to this. Of course, the alternative is real life experiences.
- [115:07]
Arthur Brooks
Experiences. And that's what the rebellion is going to be. It's going to be a rebellion to real life. Things that can't go on forever won't, as a general rule. And you find that the majority of people on the app say that the apps are insufficient for meeting their needs. That's what most people say. And they regret the fact that that's where they have to go to meet people, to have a potential romantic relationship. And when you're in a regret about it, then sooner or later you're actually going to get rebellion against it, is what we're actually going to find. The early data. By the way, there's a pretty interesting study that just came out that shows that couples who meet and ultimately marry, based on the app, some are really, really successful. But on Average. They tend to be less stable marriages, those that start on the apps.
- [115:48]
Rich Roll
Oh, really?
- [115:48]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah.
- [115:50]
Rich Roll
And we have enough data now because the apps have been around long enough to track these things.
- [115:53]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, exactly right, exactly right. They're more likely to result in divorce if you've been on the apps. So that doesn't mean, again, your results may vary. The people who are listening to us are like, I met my wife on the apps. Does this mean I'm getting divorced? No, it just means that tends to be the case in a statistically significant fashion, that it's an empirical regularity that we see for sure. Which just means that they tend to be matches that are not quite as good.
- [116:21]
Rich Roll
Do you feel in any way that you've seen this sort of trend around the trad wife? There's sort of a traditional values kind of ascendancy right now. Is that in some way. Way. Does it track that that is like a reaction or some kind of response to this dating app culture?
- [116:39]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, sure, for sure. Absolutely. It's what you'd always get. You get a kind of a sort of a techno utopianism is always answered by a kind of fundamentalism. That's what you always get. I mean, you get sort of this Amish behavior as a result of this modern society that's sucking all the life out of. And all the love and all the interest and, and all the adventure out of our relationship. So let's go back to 1950 is the whole point.
- [117:02]
Rich Roll
We're like, you know, 1860.
- [117:04]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, I know, I know. It's a. But, you know, American society is animated by fads and panics. Fundamentally, American society is about fads and panics. Not all societies are. Every society has its pathologies, but that's ours, you know, so this is the thing that we're all doing and nobody questions it. This is the thing that we all believe. Here's the thing we're all mad about right now.
- [117:24]
Rich Roll
Right now it's accelerated. Like the sort of life. Life cycle of these things like just happen. It's just so rapid.
- [117:31]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. And we're going to look back on a lot of the stuff that most people think is just basic civilized views right now, and we'll think of them as barbaric in 10 years, probably.
- [117:39]
Rich Roll
So it's one thing for you and I to talk about meaning, purpose and happiness as people who are in the. In our kind of era of crystallized intelligence. And we're, you know, we're.
- [117:49]
Arthur Brooks
We're looking, we're looking.
- [117:51]
Rich Roll
We're looking backwards at our life and trying to make sense of things. But as somebody who's now kind of directing your focus on younger people, like, what's different about how you talk about these issues with respect to that generation versus ours?
- [118:06]
Arthur Brooks
So when I'm talking. So the first book that I wrote about this was From Strength to Strength. That's how you and I met. That was the first book that. The first time I came on the show, we talked about that. That made a big assumption, which is you're not perfect in terms of meaning of life, but you have a good concept of it. That's not an assumption I can make with people in their mid-20s. What you find is that the inflection point in generalized anxiety and clinical depression for people in their teens and twenties exactly follows the answer to the question. I feel like my life is meaningless. And it tracks with data showing when people stop looking for the meaning of their life. Also, of course, it's contemporaneous with the onset, with the sort of the critical mass of people living online. So that's all these things are going together. So when I'm talking about people in crisis in the second half of their life or burning out or having a midlife crisis, super strivers not knowing what they're going to do, that's a different problem because that's predicated on the idea that you have an underlying sense of life's meaning that you can tap into and live in a different way. I can't make that assumption with people in their 20s today, so I have to go back to first principles. That's why what I'm writing about right now is the meaning of your life and how to find it. You know, one of the big things that you actually need to do to understand about your brain, the practices you need to actually start adopting so that you open yourself up to questions of meaning and come to some sort of an understanding about it.
- [119:34]
Rich Roll
I think that there's a paralysis that ensues with young people when you throw words around like purpose and meaning, business. Sort of like I'm supposed to know my purpose and what does that mean? So I either feel bad about myself or guilty or less than, or I'm just sort of confused. I don't know what that even means at that stage of life.
- [119:54]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, for sure. And so that's why it is so big that for the longest time I would just talk about it in those terms. And it is quite paralyzing. So I'm writing a book about it right now that talks about actually what are the Steps to go and find it. Which starts off with confronting the fact that there is a problem, understanding neurophysiologically what the problem is, talking about the things you need to stop doing in your life and then the practices that you need to actually admit the sources of purpose and meaning in your life. And it's not straightforward because back in the Pleistocene they didn't have these problems and even our grandfathers didn't have this problem because just daily life made it organic panic. Some of it is still pretty straightforward. When I only have 10 minutes with young people, I'll talk about taking a little test, a little two question exam of whether or not you have a crisis in your life. And if you do what to go in search of two questions. For example, I'll ask my students, or my adult kids for that matter, why do you believe you're alive and for what would you give your life? Because you find that people who have the greatest tangible sense, understanding of meaning of life, they have a sense of understanding about the why of their life and for what they'd give their life. It's like being alive and not being alive. This is one of the reasons that people who've been in combat roles in the military have such a strong sense of life's meaning, because they've had to confront that without ever even asking those questions. For what would you give your life? Well, the Marines, but it's self selecting.
- [121:35]
Rich Roll
In some regard, right? Because those are the kind of people that would go into the military. They already have a conviction around that maybe.
- [121:41]
Arthur Brooks
Although being the father of two Marines, I can tell you that a lot of them, they go into the Marines because they want adventure and they come out having found meaning because they've addressed these particular questions. So when I talk to my students, they're on average 28 years old, they're MBA students at Harvard. I say one of your projects is going to be to be thinking very, very deeply about your theory about why you're alive, which means how were you created and for what purpose? That means writing a mission statement. And what would you die happily for right now?
- [122:13]
Rich Roll
Happily, that's a rough question for anybody, but for a young person, hard, you know, that's, that's a very confronting question.
- [122:19]
Arthur Brooks
They find it super exciting to take it on. They find it super exciting because they don't have to do it right now. Now it's like this is the project and they're finally like, oh, I don't have to go find the meaning of my life. I have to try to Understand the answers to those questions, which is a lot more tangible than what they've been dealing with. Why am I alive? And so what do I read? I'll read this and read this and read this and talk to this person and start going and start a contemplative practice. And you can start doing stuff to try to get the information that will give you some illumination around the. Around at least an understanding of those questions. And that's progress. That feels less diffuse, it feels less unanswerable still.
- [123:06]
Rich Roll
A steep mountain to climb.
- [123:09]
Arthur Brooks
Meaning's brutal, man. Meaning is brutal. I mean, it's like, again, this is the same thing. It's like we can conceive of our death, but we can't conceive of our non existence. Your prefrontal cortex is not ideally designed to confront questions that have understanding but no answers. This is what the contemplative traditions, they'll say to the junior monk, okay, for the next 40 years, chop wood and carry water. While you think about these Cohens. Yeah, because it's not straightforward.
- [123:42]
Rich Roll
As somebody who, who is in higher education but also came late to a life of academic kind of interest. Right. How do you think about the state of education and what changes would you make, knowing what you know about happiness and meaning and all these things, right, that are so important and so vital, yet aren't really part and parcel of any kind of curriculum? And when we have these young, very plastic minds in the traditional education system that was established decades and decades ago in a very different world, like what. What changes would you make that you think would create better, more fulfilled humans?
- [124:25]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, it's what would create more fulfilled humans versus what would create more competent professionals is a different thing. And so there's basically two parallel crises that we've got in higher ed today. One is that has become VO Tech, you know, that higher ed has become vocational, technical. And I'm all about VO Tech, by the way. I think it's awesome and it's really good.
- [124:45]
Rich Roll
There should be two different kind of tracks, right? Like, here's a vocate, here's a path to a vocation, and here's kind of like the deeper question, you know, how to be a happy person and like, you know, be functional in the world.
- [124:58]
Arthur Brooks
A really good citizen, you know, somebody who could really be a leader as opposed to, you know, you're going to, here's how you fix a diesel engine. I think we need people who can fix diesel engines for sure. And it's a very fulfilling thing to do. But the whole idea that we've reduced a lot of higher ed to. Will they get a job and will they make money? Is a big problem. The parallel track is people go to college to become indoctrinated and propagandized about a certain way of thinking as a decent person. What to think is not what you should be getting in college. How to think is what should be going on in college. And so those two things have kind of enveloped those. The culture of higher education in a very deleterious way, particularly over the past 15 years, which is that you got this activism and cancel culture. And here's what you need to think, which has been hugely problematic for mental health in particular, where you go to college and you realize you just didn't know your whole life what a victim you really are and how crummy your life actually is and how terrible. All those people who don't think like you are and you're being activated to be angry and aggrieved and avoided victim. That's a lot of what's going on in college today. And that's a big problem. The other side is I'm going to college because I'm going to study this, because that's the way I'm going to get a job, and I'm all about getting the job, et cetera, et cetera. The college experience is supposed to be between those. And that's a lot of what's been lost. Let's talk to people about how to think what humanity is all about. What are the biggest questions? What is the greatest that has been thought and said, to quote Matthew Arnold about the real essence of culture itself. You know, what will actually make you into the kind of person who can lead others to a life of greater happiness? How can you become a more tolerant individual in a pluralistic society based on Enlightenment values? Crazy. That's like old school, man. But that's what we need to get back to and to militate against the two temptations of activism and utilitarianism.
- [127:01]
Rich Roll
Yeah. On top of that is layered all manner of social expectations around career trajectories and upward mobility also. Right. So it's sort of like you're 18 and you have to already know what it is that you want to be pursuing and what you want to be studying, as if this is like a sort of proxy for the rest of.
- [127:20]
Arthur Brooks
Your life, which is a recipe for unhappiness, quite frankly. There's really interesting research goes back to the 1990s from a social psychologist at US named John Driver. He did work on professional These professional trajectories that people have. And he says there's four. There's four kinds of people psychologically. The first type is the type that all colleges think we are, which is called the linear career trajectories. So you came out of Stanford, went to law school, became a lawyer, and you'd change jobs every time you got a better lawyer gig. That gave you money, more money, more power, more admiration of other people, and just linear. That's what college treats people as, in this utilitarian way. There are also. There's the expert career trajectory, which your dad had or your grandfather had, which is you. You know, you had stability in your life. You didn't live to work, you worked to live, and you had a home life and you did a good job, but you got a 3% raise every year, and you just kind of stayed with the same thing for a long time. That was my dad, too. There's the transitory career trajectory, which is, I don't work to live at all. I only work, and I wouldn't if I didn't have to. I only do it because I got to pay the rent. So now I'm going to be a barista in Portland, Maine, and I think I'll probably drive a moving truck out of Tucson for a while. And, oh, I fell in love with a girl in San Diego, so I moved there. That's what your parents are worried about. That's what everybody's parents are worried their kids are going to be. But the big majority of creatives who are watching us and, and you and me are called the spiral career trajectory, where every seven to 12 years you get a new career of your own imagining that's based on all the things that you've learned and all the creativity you want to bring to bear and all the things written on your soul that you want to do next. And life's an adventure, man. Your career is part of your life, and it's a big adventure. And one of the things that we're not good at in higher ed is preparing people for the spiral career trajectory that characterize the people that are most inflecting in our society. These are the people, and they're not going to be happy if they're set up as linears. They're going to feel like losers and they're going to feel like, I couldn't hold a job for more than 10 years and how come I burned out so early? And yeah, it's true. I gave up a really lucrative career as a lawyer so I could Become an ultra marathon runner. There's a lot of money in that. And the truth is that's the way it had to happen because that's the way you were designed and that's how you're going to create your maximum value. And a broad panoply of intellectual experiences and inputs in college will prepare you to do that in a wonderful way that will be empowering for you and inspirational to others.
- [129:59]
Rich Roll
When you think of all of your career changes and kind of reimaginings, it feels amongst our generation to be somewhat radical. But when I think of the younger generation, no, this is just normal. Like when you're thinking about how you're going to speak to them, you're speaking their language with respect to this. Like that's, that's natural. Yeah, like, yeah, I'm going to go, I'm going to work here for a while. I'm going to go down to Costa Rica and work on a mango farm or whatever. And then it's like, it's no big deal. Right? Like this is. Life is an adventure. It doesn't have to be the pejorative of the barista, you know, the bouncing around and kind of reacting to your life, but intentionally kind of curating your life around experiences in that way feels like the vernacular of kind of.
- [130:45]
Arthur Brooks
That's a little bit more of this transitory experience though, where people who are sort of checking out, they're rebelling against what they thought was the ultra careerism of their parents generation. Were they going to be anti careerism? Which is a. That reaction is problematic on its face too because that's not really a spiral. That's not this idea of I'm going to dedicate myself to real excellence and then learn a new thing.
- [131:07]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I get that. I guess what I'm getting at is more of conscious intentionality around how you're pursuing your life through experiences that are creating growth and meaning. And then when you've kind of exasperated that it's like, okay, onto the next thing, like I've learned what I needed to learn and like, you know, like my mental health isn't doing so well with this boss. And so I have enough kind of self respect to like step outside of this and go pursue it elsewhere and.
- [131:41]
Arthur Brooks
Enough perspective to be able to do it. And you know, and again, not everybody can do that because that's a relative.
- [131:46]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I mean, of course, for sure.
- [131:47]
Arthur Brooks
But to the extent that we can in college, give people the wherewithal to think not just about, I'm going to quit because I Don't like my boss, but I'm going to have a series of experiences where I create value in different areas of life. I'm going to have a full life, a life. I'm going to be fully alive and I'm going to do something that really benefits humanity in all sorts of different ways. I mean, these are the people that really do change life on Earth the most. And that's what you need, a college. A fully variegated intellectual experience at the higher ed level. That's what colleges are supposed to do. It's not for everybody, but for people who do it, man, they should be learning a lot about a lot of different things and having their mind blown in different ways so they can think. So they can learn how to think. Think.
- [132:34]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I mean, the final thing I want to kind of quickly cover before I release you, you back to your life.
- [132:41]
Arthur Brooks
This is awesome. This is my show.
- [132:43]
Rich Roll
All right. On some level, like higher education is about risk mitigation, right. And I've heard you talk about, like your life is a startup, right? And you have to pursue it entrepreneurially. And in order to do that, well, like, you have to like, sort of embrace risk. So. So that's almost orthogonal to this idea. Oh. You go to a college and you're on a track and there's a certain expectation, whether it's an illusion or not, of some level of security that is mitigating the risk of a very scary world that awaits you.
- [133:15]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, it can be. It depends on what your perspective is going into the college experience if you're going to. And this is another big mistake that we're making. Higher ed is making life safe. On the contrary, college should be dangerous. I don't mean dangerous like you're going to get drunk and fall out of a dorm window. There's a lot of challenging your ideas.
- [133:36]
Rich Roll
In your world, stress testing your totally.
- [133:38]
Arthur Brooks
This is not a safe space. You should go into college and be like, holy cow, I don't know what I'm going to hear in that class. I don't know what nut job is going to stand up and give me this radical opinion. And I'm going to go, that's awesome. Come sit next to me. Because I totally disagree. That's what it's supposed to be, is intellectually dangerous. That's what it's supposed to be about. So you come out with this courage. You come out with this sense of fortitude. You come out with this sense of strength, of intellectual strength that you've got where you can hear Things that you disagree with and you can engage in a world that's full of dissension. And that's not what we're finding. People are going to college and getting safe spaces and trigger warnings and, and, and, and they're hearing that certain points of view are completely off limits. And that's, that's just dumb because it makes people weaker. And that actually leads to the risk aversion that you're talking about. We should have risk seekers going to college for precisely the reason that they don't know what they're going to get.
- [134:35]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I, I'm, I'm hearing all of that and I'm agreeing with you. And I also have an awareness, like we're two older white guys talking about this.
- [134:43]
Arthur Brooks
I know.
- [134:43]
Rich Roll
You know what I mean? Like it's.
- [134:45]
Arthur Brooks
I know, I know that's the case. But we're not two older white guys talking about this. We're two human beings talking about this. And there's a lot that could stress test our basic paradigms. And we need that just as much as anybody else needs it. We need to live in the idea space. So when I talk about a university that's intellectually dangerous, I don't mean within the parameters of my point of view. I say all of it, man. All of it. Of it. Including the stuff that says that I'm the bad guy or whatever. Whether I agree with it or not, people need to be challenged is the bottom line.
- [135:21]
Rich Roll
I mean, I think for everybody's well being to sort of Susan David's thesis, like emotional resilience is a function of putting ourselves in uncomfortable situations. And part of that is having our ideas challenged. And even if the result of that experience is to strengthen what you already believed, I think this is a critical aspect of maturing in a healthy way.
- [135:45]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. I have this great colleague at the Kennedy School, Harvard. His name is Tarek Massoud. He's a Egyptian guy. And he's a big thinker. He's a fantastic intellectual. He's the editor of the Journal of Democracy and he says that the university should be like a gym. It's like a gym. You don't go to the gym to feel no pain. You don't go to the gym to not be stretched. You go to the gym because something is uncomfortable. So you will get stronger. That's the whole point. And everybody should be able to go to the gym. There should be a gym for everybody. That's his whole point. And I think that's right. I think that's right. And when we don't do that. Then people get weaker. When people get weaker, more flaccid intellectually, we have problems downstream that we're seeing in our society today, which is a complete lack of ability to listen with warm heartedness to people who have different points of view. Is the polarization and the populism that we have on both sides of the political spectrum. We have the fact that the ideologies, the polarized ideologies on campus are centrally responsible for the increase in mental illness that we see for young people of their anxiety, of their depression. Those are things that actually come from this environment where you're convinced of grievance and victimization and those are signs of intellectual weakness. And I think that we're responsible to higher ed.
- [137:03]
Rich Roll
Yeah. When, when is this book going to be done?
- [137:07]
Arthur Brooks
And out there, March of 26, God willing. You know how books are.
- [137:12]
Rich Roll
You know, I'm in it myself.
- [137:14]
Arthur Brooks
Well, called the Meaning of youf Life and, and, and how to Find It. And I'm in the, you know. You know, when you're writing a book, you remember in the 60s there was that famous book called On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler Ross.
- [137:25]
Rich Roll
Yes.
- [137:25]
Arthur Brooks
The Swiss psychiatrist who talks about the stages of death and dying. Those are the same stages. Is writing a book. Right. There's like shock and then there's denial and then there's rage, and then there's bargaining and then there's. Finally there's, there's acceptance.
- [137:42]
Rich Roll
Which phase are you in?
- [137:43]
Arthur Brooks
I'm still in rage and denial.
- [137:46]
Rich Roll
I'm, I, I'm squarely in that camp right now. It's deeply painful. And you know, you're, I'm like, why did I sign up to do this again? Remind me.
- [137:57]
Arthur Brooks
It seems so good.
- [137:58]
Rich Roll
It's always good when it's done and somehow it always does get done.
- [138:00]
Arthur Brooks
You like having written books?
- [138:02]
Rich Roll
I like how, yeah, I like having written them and then getting to, you know, go out and talk about them. The writing part, I know it's funny.
- [138:10]
Arthur Brooks
Because books, it's, you know, books are still a cultural phenomenon and your life will be kind of. These are the. It's like your children. They're punctuated around particular offspring. And you think that's so anachronistic. If you think about it, you write a book, it's a huge bestseller. If 500,000 people buy your book, it's a blockbuster. That's like an average week of your podcast.
- [138:35]
Rich Roll
Yeah, but you killed yourself for multiple years to make it happen. But there is a staying power that is indelible I think with books and people are reading books more than ever right now. I think. I think they're, you know, not just relevant. They're crucial and important.
- [138:54]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. It's. It's an incredible phenomenon that, that actually doesn't change and what a privilege it is to be able to do them.
- [139:03]
Rich Roll
Well. You're always welcome here anytime you want to come by and share your thoughts. I really enjoyed this today and I.
- [139:09]
Arthur Brooks
Just love this conversation with you. I wish I saw you more. I wish I lived on the same coast, but doing your show is an opportunity to see my friend.
- [139:16]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Excellent, man. Well, I love you, Arthur. And you've changed my life life in. In many positive ways. And you're. You're a mentor from afar and up close. And I really appreciate the work that you do and cherish the time that we spend.
- [139:30]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you, Richard. I love you too.
- [139:32]
Rich Roll
You have a newsletter right now. They have the Art and Science of Happiness.
- [139:36]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, it comes out every Monday morning.
- [139:37]
Rich Roll
At 9am People can sign up for that.
- [139:39]
Arthur Brooks
Arthurbrooks.com 500 Words of Ideas on how to live a happier life.
- [139:44]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Cool. And everybody else, check out Arthur's books if you haven't already, and his column in the Atlantic.
- [139:52]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you.
- [139:52]
Rich Roll
Cheers, man. Thank you.
- [139:54]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you, Rich.
- [140:07]
Rich Roll
That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. Conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page@richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, My books, Finding Ultra, Voice of Change and the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power meal planner@meals.rich roll.com if you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page@richroll.com today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Daniel Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg, Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace.
- [141:53]
Arthur Brooks
It.