Harvard Professor: You Won’t Be Happy Until You Fix This | Arthur Brooks

 Human behavior is complex, meaning you can see it, but you can't ever solve it.
 Wow, my faith isn't a complicated problem.
 My faith is a complex problem.
 He's a social scientist, Harvard's professor.
 He's spent his career decoding why happiness isn't found in success alone.
 Arthur Brooks.
 Oh my goodness.
 The great man.
 He changed my life.
 Did you ever ask him why he believed in you?
 I don't know, boy.
 I believed I had a calling and so did he.
 The most famous social scientist in the world, man, I was nervous.
 He said, you know, you got something special here.
 If I can never help you, just let me know.
 We know you are this thought leader here.
 I want to know more about the human.
 I learned to be the world's greatest French horn player.
 I had French horn players on my way in my bedroom as a kid's horn.
 Your father died when you were 38.
 Every day, I think, would my dad be proud of me?
 You still today, thank you.
 Every day.
 You still aren't sure about the answer to that question.
 Well, the truth is, I don't have any regrets about my life.
 I've had a charm life in so many ways.
 But there's one thing I do regret, which is we begin every episode the same way.
 Oh my goodness, the great man.
 I love him.
 He changed my life.
 Tell people listening who aren't watching what you're looking at.
 This is James Q. Wilson, the most distinguished social scientist of the 20th century.
 A political scientist who taught at Harvard for 25 years and then he,
 he said, I like the sunshine and he moved to Malibu, California and taught at UCLA.
 He won the Congressional Medal of Honor.
 And he was on the board of directors of the Rand Corporation.
 Or I was doing my PhD.
 And I was a lonely soul.
 I didn't know what I was going to do with my life or my career.
 I had been a professional musician all the way through my 20s.
 You were?
 Yeah.
 So I dropped out of college when I was 19, you know, dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs.
 And I went on the road as a classical musician, which was my dream, with no intention
 ever to go back to college, which was weird.
 My dad was a college professor.
 His dad was a college professor.
 It's the family business.
 But somewhere in my mid 20s, I realized that I didn't have a permanent future in that.
 I was making a living.
 I was playing in the Barcelona orchestra.
 I, you know, I had a normal life I got married.
 It was good.
 But I realized I wasn't going to be able to support my family.
 And it wasn't the life that I wanted.
 And so I went back to school by correspondence.
 Didn't meet a single soul.
 I did my whole bachelor's degree for $10,000.
 And then enrolled in a PhD program in Southern California at the Rand Graduate School.
 Not knowing what I was going to do with my life.
 I just, I didn't have a background in academia.
 I was, you know, I was kind of going in circles.
 But you said it wasn't what I wanted to do.
 But I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.
 So what did you know you didn't want to do?
 I don't know, boy.
 David, it's so funny because it's, you know,
 it's so common with, you know, people in life that they,
 they have a sense of that there's a destiny,
 but they can't quite define it.
 And now I'm a behavioral scientist and I study meaning.
 And the reason for that now I understand why there's that sense of ambiguity
 when it comes to our vocation and what we're meant to do.
 The calling is so hard because actually the calling is something that you have an
 understanding of in the right hemisphere of your brain,
 which is not where your language center is.
 I know there's something I'm supposed to do, but I can't define it.
 Because you define things in the left hemisphere of your brain.
 And you understand things in the right hemisphere of your brain in your own life.
 So is the calling the feeling that motivates us in a direction?
 Even though we may not have the language to define it.
 And so you know there's something out there for you,
 but you don't know what it is.
 And that's where I was when I was working on my doctorate,
 when I was at the Ren Graduate School.
 I know there's something intellectually,
 there's something spiritually,
 there's something that I'm supposed to do in life.
 But it was getting late.
 I was 34 at this point.
 This is a little later than other people.
 I mean, other graduate students would be like,
 so what's it like to work full time?
 And I was like, FDR doing fireside chats,
 like a blanket over my knees or something.
 I felt like an old man.
 And I was finishing up and I had to tell you, David,
 I was in a bit of a panic because I didn't know what I was going to do next.
 And I had my dissertation defense,
 which is what you do when you do your PhD.
 You write this long tone.
 And then you defend it in front of a committee.
 And it was a bunch of faculty.
 And then a bunch of scholars that were invited in,
 including a couple of Nobel winners in economics,
 very distinguished people,
 and including the great James Q. Wilson,
 the political scientist.
 One of the most famous social scientists in the world,
 man, I was nervous.
 And my dissertation defense went poorly.
 I didn't make a good case.
 I passed.
 You know, the economists, the Nobel prize winners,
 and James Q. Wilson came up.
 He said, you know, you got something special here.
 If I can never help you, just let me know.
 And I thought to myself,
 I mean, I don't know how to catch that check.
 I don't know how.
 So I graduated.
 I took a job.
 I was teaching at Georgia State University.
 And along the way,
 teaching economics and public policy,
 which was what my PhD was in.
 And I started to write a book.
 And I wanted to write a book.
 It was the first time I'd ever done anything like that.
 And I thought, I'm going to write a book like
 the greatest social scientist who ever lived has written his books.
 So of course, I was reading James Q. Wilson.
 Thinking he's such a kind man too.
 I wonder if I'll ever meet him again.
 And how did he write his books that stuck with you?
 They were interesting.
 They were useful.
 They were an expression of love for humanity.
 They weren't an expression of his ego.
 He was trying to take on.
 He wrote a great book called The Moral Sense
 about how human beings are actually endowed
 with a sense of what's right and wrong.
 And it was based in data.
 It was based in science.
 But it was profoundly human at the same time.
 I said, that's what I want to do.
 I want to use science and ideas to lift people up
 and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love,
 like James Q. Wilson.
 So I was trying to write a book like this.
 And I thought, man, if only I could talk to him again,
 but I didn't know.
 I'm not going to bug the guy.
 Super famous.
 He's really busy.
 And I got an email from him
 because he heard I was working on that book.
 And he said, that sounds really interesting.
 Can I read what you're writing?
 I said, how is it possible?
 I mean, this is like the pulp reaching out to you.
 So I sent him a couple of chapters.
 Man was I ever nervous.
 And he said, I like it.
 You want me to write the forward for your book?
 Dude, I know, I know.
 And he wrote the forward for my book.
 And it was the beginning of an intellectual life.
 I didn't know I could achieve.
 It was the beginning of the life that I knew I wanted to have
 but was unable to articulate it.
 Because he's the one who believed that actually could be true.
 Even in my catastrophic dissertation defense,
 it wasn't worth anything.
 He saw the germ of that and nobody else did.
 Why did the dissertation go so poorly?
 I don't, you know, it's because I,
 I mean, I was certainly prepared.
 I was very nervous.
 I was writing about something that wasn't very interesting.
 I was talking at a level, a sort of a technical level.
 But you were passionate about it.
 You know, yeah, I was.
 I was actually writing about the economics of symphony orchestras.
 But well, because I'm, okay, but let's, let's noodle on this for a moment.
 Because this idol of yours is there watching it.
 Yeah.
 You say it was a disastrous performance.
 And what I'm taking away from that is clearly that guy
 who ended up believing in you thought it wasn't really about the content.
 But it was maybe more about your character
 and what he was feeling coming from that.
 Yeah.
 He, what he, he was legendary for as a talent scout.
 Oh, that's among scholars.
 He would find young people and he would say,
 this work is crummy, but you're not crummy.
 Uh-huh.
 You see, you know, that's, and that's in almost every industry.
 There are people like this.
 And so, so you're, your friends were mutual friends with Sherry Lansing,
 a legendary figure in Hollywood, where she would actually see talent
 where other people didn't see it.
 That's one of her great super skills.
 I know people in business who've done that.
 We'll see people inside a company that's not performing very well,
 but they'll say that person.
 That person's going to be a CEO.
 How do you know?
 I just know.
 It's kind of a pattern detection skill.
 It's a, it's an incredible, it's an incredible ability.
 So what's the social science observation from Arthur Brooks
 about what that belief in that moment does to a young and hungry person trying to prove himself?
 I believed I had a calling and so did he.
 He believed that I had a calling too.
 It was kind of an anointing in a way.
 He believed that there was something in there that
 could and should be developed into something that was actually special,
 something that could be, and not just popular in the public,
 not just a big public and electrical career.
 He thought there was something that that I could do to lift people up using science.
 Did he believe in God?
 Yeah, he did.
 He struggled with it like a lot of intellectuals of his generation.
 He was raised Catholic in, in Texas.
 And, and he struggled with it a lot of intellectuals of that time.
 So he was born in the 1930s.
 And, and they came of age in the 50s and 60s when most intellectuals would be
 questioning that in ways that a lot of younger intellectuals were more comfortable.
 So I was raised in a religious home and I'm, I'm openly religious.
 I'm openly Catholic.
 I practice my Catholic faith, you and I've talked about this.
 And, and part of the reason is because I believe that the creator and the creation are not
 intentioned.
 If I were studying Picasso, for example, I would want to know a lot about Picasso's paintings,
 but I wouldn't find Picasso in the painting.
 I would also want to know a lot about Picasso.
 The faith and reason, the iron sharpens iron, they make each other better, but that was not,
 that was a hard thing for a lot of people who were a little bit older.
 And so I remember when we later became close friends, Jim Wilson and I, and he said, I envy you.
 I said, you don't need me.
 You're the great man.
 He said, because you have faith.
 He says, I struggle.
 I said, Jim, I struggle too.
 So I asked this as someone who thought about going into the priesthood.
 Yeah.
 Who went to the priesthood?
 Every Catholic boy thinks about the priesthood at some point or another, right?
 Who went to Mass every Sunday and then during the week because I went to Catholic school?
 As I get older, I've started to question more.
 Right.
 I think it's a normal process of adulting.
 You seem to only be getting more faithful and more convinced.
 Why?
 I am more faithful, but I also question and I question it at a deeper level as well.
 And those things are not incompatible on the contrary.
 This is actually something from the sociology of religion.
 There's a great sociologist named James Fowler who looks at how people tend to evolve in their
 religious life.
 The reason that a lot of people who come from religious homes, they fall away.
 It's because they learn that there's a good and merciful God who's all love to all people.
 But then they see a lot of suffering in the world and they say,
 it doesn't add up.
 That doesn't add up.
 But here's the problem.
 Thinking tends to be very binary in your 20s.
 And when things don't add up, you've got to get rid of one or the other.
 And so a lot of people cast off their faith because it doesn't make sense in the world.
 By the time you're in your 40s and 50s, of course, you realize nothing makes sense.
 The world is really, really messy.
 The book of Job is something people often talk about when they look at suffering.
 So Job is biblical, old testament figure.
 He's a man of God.
 He's a righteous figure.
 And he suffers.
 You know, the dark one comes into his life and kills his family and scatters his flocks and
 everything is ruined.
 And at the end of the book, he asks God, why did you do that to me?
 The 38th chapter of Job.
 And he said, I want to know.
 And God says, well, I mean, obviously you're so smart.
 Then I'll tell you why you suffered.
 As soon as you tell me why I created the heavens and the earth.
 If you know so much, then you will understand why you suffered.
 And the truth is, by the time you're in your 40s and 50s and 60s,
 I'm 61 years old, life's messy man.
 And so the result is there's a lot that I don't know.
 And at the same time, I can love God more.
 And say, I don't, I don't, Lord, I don't understand your ways.
 I don't understand your ways.
 But I can form my will to yours.
 Do you struggle more based on what the scripture says?
 Or God's so-called people say?
 Well, I struggle a lot with the people, exactly me too.
 Because people are imperfect like me.
 And if I have enough sympathy and empathy to understand how imperfect that I am,
 then it would be idiotic for me to think
 that people who are involved in the hierarchy of the church would be better than me.
 I mean, we're just, we're imperfect vessels.
 I feel the same damn way.
 I would love to share with you a story and get your take.
 Catholic school, all my life, went back to recognize one of my teachers
 as being someone who had believed in me.
 Wanted to get some b-roll at the school.
 And the Catholic priest at the school said,
 I would rather David not come on campus,
 because I don't want the kids to see him living openly as a gay man.
 I don't think it would be a good message.
 And I remember in that moment,
 having after I got through sort of the rub and the burn that that felt.
 I remember having the thought of,
 do I allow this to drive me away from the faith or not?
 And I made the decision not to.
 But I struggle when a man of the cloth becomes someone doing that.
 You know, and it's, we see this all the time,
 we can come up with any number of examples of human beings making decisions
 that we don't think are consistent with the love of God in our lives.
 But in that moment, we're called to do what?
 In that moment, we're called to live up to the tenets of our faith
 and to say that God is good.
 That God is good, even though people aren't always good.
 Beyond what happens to us.
 Exactly.
 From the fallible men.
 Exactly.
 Right.
 And there's a lot that we don't understand.
 It means just a huge amount we don't understand.
 And so here's the problem getting back to the scientists who are born in the 30s
 and coming of age in the 50s and 60s.
 They were quite binary in their thinking about behavioral science.
 We're going to come up with a solution, David.
 We're going to come up with, we're going to understand,
 we're going to have the equations of human behavior.
 Because the science is advancing and the neuroscience and the social psychology.
 And everything's going to become clear.
 And now people of my generation, a little bit later,
 and especially scientists who are 20 years younger than me are like, no, you're not.
 Because this is not a complicated problem, like how to build a toaster.
 This is a complex problem.
 Human behavior is complex, meaning you can see it, but you can't ever solve it.
 All the things in life that really matter are not complicated,
 like building an algorithm or a piece of software to find pizza at 10 pm.
 All the things you really care about are the complex things that you really understand deeply,
 but you can't ever solve.
 Like your marriage, your marriage is not a complicated problem to solve.
 It's a complex problem to live and love.
 And that's what we're starting to understand at a much, much deeper level.
 My faith isn't a complicated problem.
 My faith is a complex problem.
 To the extent that you're willing to share what is your marriage like with your wife,
 because it seems to be quite close.
 It's complex.
 It really is complex.
 And I've been married 34 years.
 And I still haven't figured it out.
 Because we don't know, there's the complexity of the human character,
 the psyche, the way that the human brain works,
 the way that the soul interacts one with the other,
 has so many variables.
 It goes beyond what any supercomputer could possibly solve.
 And that's why I love my marriage.
 Because we are two spiritual beings interacting.
 And she's the person I will lay my eyes on as I take my dying breath.
 I'm completely in love.
 But we argue every day over dumb things or silly things.
 And that's the way that it works.
 That's how all complex relationships actually work.
 Those are the things that matter to us.
 It's funny.
 You know, people say, I want a cat.
 I'm lonely and I want a cat.
 Why do you want a cat?
 Why don't you just get a mechanical cat?
 Because your brain knows the difference.
 The mechanical cat is a solved problem in the left hemisphere of your brain.
 The real cat is a living thing.
 And that living thing is complex and unpredictable.
 Because in point of fact, it's alive.
 And my marriage is more like a cat than a mechanical cat.
 I once said to someone who I love immensely that we have a complicated relationship.
 And this individual said to me, you know, it kind of hurts when you say that.
 And I said, as a storyteller for me, if I were to tell you everything's wonderful,
 it would seem not real.
 Right.
 Complicated to me is real.
 Right.
 And we're both still here because we love each other so much.
 Yeah, really a complex relationship.
 A complex.
 And that's really.
 And of course, I think they'll like that word better.
 Oh, complex is better.
 But it's kind of a, it sounds like logic chopping.
 But as a mathematicians, I was talking about the difference between complex and complicated.
 Complicated things are problems that you can solve.
 And they're always the same.
 Complex things are things that you just live with.
 A football game is very complex.
 You can't simulate it with any computer,
 which is why you want to watch.
 And you feel nervous and it's fun because it's complex.
 And when you have a complex relationship with somebody,
 that's a meaningful relationship.
 You do have complicated relationships with people.
 There's just, you know, work people and, you know, people that you meet and, you know,
 the person at Starbucks and all that.
 That's just algorithms and formulas.
 But there is meaning in the complex relationship.
 Oh, yeah.
 That's where all the meaning in life comes from complexity.
 All the things that you really love and that bring you the meaning of life are complex.
 When I first met you, it was through my experience of watching you on stage.
 And I remember being captivated by your ability to talk about science in a human way.
 And so I went and sat down from you.
 And we visited for a while.
 And I found you to be two things that I find immensely meaningful, present and available.
 Right?
 You know the people who look past you, right?
 And then you know the people who are able to maintain eye contact,
 which you do so brilliantly.
 Having said all of that, thank you to you.
 We know you're welcome.
 We know you are this thought leader.
 I want to know more about the human.
 Yeah.
 Where did you grow up?
 So let me take one little detour first because of what you just said.
 Do it.
 It's very easy when you're with other people to not be present.
 And the reason is because the human brain is excellent at time travel.
 What that means is the prefrontal cortex, which is evolved only over the last 250,000 years.
 It's the super computer of your brain.
 It allows you to think about the past,
 to imagine things in your past having gone differently and coming to a different present
 so that you can learn or going into the future and practicing different scenarios in the future.
 And then coming back to the present and say, I'm going to choose this path.
 That's why humans and misapiens are so successful as we can time travel.
 And we're doing that all the time.
 Most people, however, what they marginalize is now.
 When you're with somebody and you're looking at them in the eyes,
 you're here now.
 And here's the thing to remember, you can't love in the future and you can't love in the past.
 You can only love right now.
 And so here's the thing.
 If you miss that, you've just missed love.
 And that's a big problem.
 That's the reason people are lonely is because they're not here now with the people
 who are in front of them.
 God, I feel that.
 So how do you stay present?
 You stay present by doing it on purpose,
 by realizing that you can't miss the moments.
 It's okay if you're thinking about the future because you've got to figure out what you're
 going to buy at the grocery store.
 You've got to figure out if you're going to take a turn on
 to pull the double of art.
 I mean, there's a lot of things you need to think about in the future.
 Or what you want to do with your career or anything else.
 But the truth is that when you're with other people, that's your opportunity to love.
 Don't miss the opportunity.
 And if you're looking past that person to the next person,
 you're not here now and you're not experiencing the love that you actually need to experience
 and that you deserve to experience.
 Born and raised where?
 I was born in Spokane, Washington.
 My father was a college professor at a little college called Whitworth College,
 Christian College.
 We moved on as a baby.
 So I don't remember it.
 I grew up in Seattle on Queen Anne Hill on the north side of Queen Anne Hill near the ships canal.
 And kind of a gritty part of Seattle.
 Beautiful because Seattle is involved in Lee and my dad taught us Seattle Pacific.
 Seattle Pacific University.
 And that's where I grew up until I was 18 and left.
 Mom?
 My mom was an artist.
 She was an accomplished painter of some minor round in the Pacific Northwest.
 My father was a mathematician.
 Family moved where?
 You said moved until, grew up there until?
 Well, I was 18.
 I moved.
 They didn't.
 Where'd you go?
 I went to, I went to, I had a brief attempt at college.
 Came down to California and studied at a conservatory for a little while for about 10 months
 and then went out of the road as a musician.
 And I'm playing the French horn.
 I was a French horn player.
 I wanted to be the world's greatest French horn player.
 I had French horn players on my wall in my bedroom as a kid growing up.
 Well, really?
 Yeah, I also had, you know, the quarterback of the Seahawks, but
 but it was the great, the Dennis Brain Barry Tuckwell,
 the greatest French horn players in the world at the time.
 Not names that our viewers are going to be familiar with, but boy was I.
 And I practiced five hours a day.
 It's all I ever wanted to do.
 And so when I went out of the road, you know, I went pro in 19.
 I played with a chamber music ensemble for six years.
 Two of that also collaborating with the great jazz guitar player, Charlie Bird.
 So I toured with Charlie Bird, the Bossa Nova guitar player for a couple years
 and there made some albums with him.
 And then at age 25, I moved to Barcelona to join the orchestra.
 Actually, I didn't go to join the orchestra.
 That was a pretext.
 I had met a girl that I was in love with who didn't speak a word of English.
 And I didn't speak a word of Spanish.
 So I quit my job and I moved to Spain.
 Took a job in the symphony orchestra there in an attempt to learn the language
 and close the deal with a girl that I had this intuition in my right brain
 that this was my calling to marry this girl.
 In hindsight, was it?
 34 years in, three kids and four grandkids, so far so good.
 How'd y'all meet?
 We met at a music festival in Dijon in France.
 Is she a musician?
 She was.
 She was a singer, a rock and roll singer.
 She had dropped out of high school at 16 to sing with a rock band in Barcelona
 and she was a trumpet player.
 And that's what she was studying in the Burgundy region of France.
 And I met her on tour.
 I was on a concert tour.
 We met at a wine tasting of all things.
 If you loved it that much, why aren't you still doing it?
 Because I loved it until I didn't.
 And the truth of the matter is I don't think I loved music.
 And the energy behind what you do actually has to be an inherent love for what the craft is.
 As you know, as somebody really, really successful in your business,
 you love what you do.
 I do.
 You love conversations with people.
 You do, because you love people.
 And this gives you an opportunity to love now.
 I do.
 And that's a vehicle for that.
 And I didn't have the love that I needed to actually propel that.
 Plus, I wasn't going to be the kind of French horn player that I wanted to be.
 And I saw the writing in the wall.
 I didn't listen to music for a long time after it quits, as a matter of fact.
 Now I do.
 Ah, I love music now.
 And so after that, you did what?
 We re-immigrated the United States together after we got married.
 We moved to South Florida, where I was working by correspondence on my bachelor's degree
 while teaching in a music conservatory.
 And then at age 31, I left to start my PhD.
 And then I had decided at that point, I was going to do something else.
 My wife, the musician, she recognized that I had something I could do besides being a musician.
 She saw that I could actually, I had a brain that worked for other things, potentially.
 And she gave me the courage.
 I said, what if I can't support us?
 What if it's a catastrophe?
 She says, I don't care.
 She was raised in poverty by a single mother.
 So I don't care.
 I'm in poor.
 It doesn't matter.
 We have each other.
 And it was exactly what you want.
 What was it about academia that interested you?
 You know, it was the family business.
 I think there's an epigenetic expression there.
 And I'd seen my dad in academia.
 You know, growing up in the university, I was running around at a college campus.
 And by the time I was studying and getting more deeply into the intellectual world,
 and the world of ideas, I'm like, oh yeah.
 I was running away from this all these years, but it's so good.
 Look, I mean, in families, it's funny.
 I mean, the bushes are in politics.
 The Rothschilds are in banking.
 The Gambinos do mob stuff.
 And the Brookses are academics.
 Your father died when you were 38.
 He died at 66 years old.
 Did he get to see the sun finish his dissertation?
 He did.
 He didn't see what I'm doing now.
 And it's funny.
 Are you close with your father?
 Yeah.
 Is he proud of you?
 Immensely.
 Yeah.
 I think every day because he died when I was 38.
 And I was still teaching, I was teaching at Syracuse by that time when he passed away.
 I hadn't gone to run Big Think Tank in Washington, DC, which I did later for 11 years.
 I hadn't left and come back to Harvard.
 I wasn't writing books about happiness.
 I wasn't doing any of the things that I do now.
 And every day, I think, would my dad be proud of me?
 You still today, thank you.
 Every day, every day.
 I love my dad.
 But you still aren't sure about the answer to that question.
 Well,
 hope so.
 I hope my dad's proud of me.
 Hope so.
 I want him to be.
 I want my dad to say, he's intellectually honest.
 He's good to others.
 He's compassionate.
 He's a Christian man.
 He's good to his family.
 I want him to think that.
 Yeah.
 So I'm hearing you say you want the left brain to verbalize that from him.
 But do you feel like the right brain in his way felt that towards you?
 Yeah.
 Yeah, I think so.
 I do think so.
 It was hard.
 He had a hard time, but in his life, he was sick at the end of my mom was real sick.
 And so they were dealing with a lot.
 They were distracted by a lot, as a matter of fact.
 And the truth is, I don't have very many regrets about my life.
 I've had a charm life in so many ways.
 But there's one thing I do regret, which is when I was in my 20s,
 and I was bombing around, and I was living in Europe, and I guess I was living the dream,
 such as it was.
 And I remember thinking, those are really interesting people.
 My dad was a brilliant mathematician.
 And my mom was a wonderful artist and a very talented violinist and pianist as well.
 And so it was all arts on one side and science on the other.
 And we had interesting conversations.
 And it was a great household to grow up in.
 But I wanted to get to know them as adults.
 And I remember thinking that.
 And I remember thinking, and this is something I would urge everybody watching us to consider.
 I had got lots of time because their parents had lived to be pretty old.
 I had one grandfather who lived to almost 95.
 And I'll have plenty of time.
 And then I didn't.
 And my dad got sick and died at 66.
 I got sick and died pretty fast.
 And my mom, she had a lot of neurodegenerative decline.
 Such that by the time she was that age, it wasn't the same.
 And so you don't have time.
 With the people that you love, you don't have time.
 That's an important lesson.
 And that's the lesson that has really shaped my family life today, David, in what way?
 I have three adult kids and grandkids.
 And we had a big family meeting a couple of years ago.
 Were you going to raise your kids?
 Why don't we all live in the same place?
 And we all packed up and moved to the same place in Northern Virginia.
 They had been raised when I was running this think tank in Washington,
 DC in the Washington, DC region.
 And they went to good Catholic schools that they liked.
 And they wanted to send their kids to these Catholic schools as well.
 And so we made a family decision, got a great big moving fan.
 One family came from California and one came from Boston while we were living as well.
 My little girl had to finish up college.
 But now we live in Northern Virginia.
 Because man, David, I'm not screwing up again.
 I'm not going to make the same mistake twice.
 And I don't have to.
 I get instant replay.
 You know, I messed it up by not getting to know my parents in the way that I should have.
 But I'm not going to not know my kids and grandkids.
 He's trying to do what you wanted to see from your dad.
 Yeah.
 And it's great.
 I mean, we live with one of the families.
 We live with my son and his wife and their two sons in our house.
 And another family lives right at the street.
 And my little girl, she's still, she's a lieutenant in the Marine Corps.
 And so she's down at Quantico, Virginia.
 And so she's close by too.
 For now, she'll get posted someplace.
 But we'll all wind up in the same place.
 Because we did it on purpose.
 Because there's not time.
 You don't know.
 How old are you now?
 61.
 61.
 And dad died at 66.
 Mom died at 73.
 But she was, there was 20 tough years that receded that.
 My brother who's still lives in Seattle was, you know,
 primarily taking care of her.
 And my brother's really, really good man.
 Somebody I admire very much for that and many other things.
 Your new book, the title is the meaning of your life,
 finding purpose in an age of emptiness.
 Biggest takeaways.
 Biggest takeaways are that the number one reason for the explosion of mental health crises
 in the United States for people under 35 years old is the lack of a sense of the meaning of life.
 That's, it's extraordinary and an unbelievably clear.
 The tripling of depression, the doubling of anxiety, the increases in loneliness,
 they're best predicted by an inability to articulate the meaning of life.
 And that's a brand new problem.
 That's a problem that exploded contemporaneously with the increases in depression and anxiety
 after 2008.
 And you know why this is.
 That was of course when technology took over people's lives.
 And it has a very strong neuroscientific explanation as well, which is
 as we've been talking about.
 People are no longer effectively using the right sides of the brain,
 which is where you find mystery and meaning and love and happiness.
 Okay, so let's help people.
 What do we need to do to trigger the right side of the brain?
 Live like the old days is what it comes down to.
 Now number one, we have to get clean because we're deeply,
 deeply addicted to devices and technology.
 And I'm not against devices and technology.
 I'm not against dating apps or social media or and you'll have to
 try my cold dead hands for my iPhone because it's really important part of how I conduct my
 business and in my life, but it's a tool.
 And people have been using it to self-soothe and to as a form of relationship in a way that's
 been incredibly deleterious.
 So in this book, I give the science back ways to get clean from that particular addiction,
 to use it in a responsible way and then to participate in the parts of life that people
 took for granted, but they're now kind of extraordinary and like falling in love and finding
 your calling and getting closer to your faith, looking at beauty and learning how to suffer.
 How do you know that something is the calling for you?
 This as a right brain phenomenon once again is not something you can articulate very well.
 This is where we started our conversation.
 I knew there was something.
 What is it?
 And it's actually getting in touch with the what is it question.
 Now, one of the the hallmarks of people who actually feel that they're living their
 calling is basically two things.
 And we see this in a lot of literature, but people will recognize this in their own lives.
 It's not money or power or position or prestige or the title on the door of your office.
 It's whether or not you believe you're earning your success,
 that you're creating value with your life and value in the lives of other people.
 And second and even more importantly that you're needed, the people need you,
 that you're serving other people.
 Meaning and work comes from a sense that you're earning your success.
 It's a merit thing.
 It's not a 10 year thing or a loyalty thing to some boss,
 but rather that you're earning your way.
 And more importantly that people need you.
 A lot of that is inward looking, right?
 It's perspective.
 But what you also preach is you find joy in the outward looking how can I serve.
 Yes, yes.
 And that's the I self, you know, the psychologist talk about the I self and the me self.
 And all that's talking about the I self is when you're looking out of the world
 and participating in the world.
 The me self is when you're looking inward to yourself as the mirror.
 And you need to look in the mirror as you know whether your hair is right or you know whether
 you're driving properly, you know, who you are.
 But if you look in the mirror, it'll be miserable because no happiness ever comes from the me self.
 All happiness comes from the I self.
 Meaning comes from looking outward, looking outward to create a value and to serve.
 That's what it comes from.
 There have been moments in my life where I have felt like I was in like the worst funk.
 And my funk's don't last long, but what happens is I feel them.
 Like I force myself to sit in it and dig deeper in it and the way I get out of it
 is I intentionally force myself to go and do something for someone.
 That's just can be very small.
 But Arthur, that is my way of getting myself out of that funk after I sit in it and talk to myself
 and be like, you really feel like, right?
 Yeah, yeah.
 This is really a struggle.
 Maybe you crack the code.
 You crack the code.
 That's transcendence.
 You transcend yourself when you do that.
 It's funny, you know, I had this physical therapist where I come back hurt sometimes
 and so I go to this guy.
 It's a very talented guy, very loving guy, a very intuitive guy.
 You know when you go to a physical therapist who is intuitive,
 it's not just about crack, crack, crack, you know, they know you in a certain way.
 Yep.
 And I said, so you got these gifts, you know, how'd you get here?
 Is it a long path?
 I said, oh, tell me, right?
 Because that's a behavioral scientist.
 Which, by the way, you are a behavioral scientist.
 You think so?
 Of course.
 Of course, you're intensely interested in human beings
 and why they do what they do.
 That's why you're so good at your job.
 If you weren't, you'd be looking past me,
 but you're looking into my soul right now.
 So he's good like this.
 And there are a lot of people who are
 behaviorists in all different walks of life.
 And he said, I said, tell me the story.
 How'd you get here?
 He said, well, you know, I started off.
 I was a fitness influencer.
 I was like, what?
 He says, yeah, you know, selling supplements and, you know, workouts
 and working on my body all the time and pictures.
 My shirt was off and I said, how was that?
 Was that fun?
 He says, horrible.
 I didn't eat what I wanted for 10 years.
 He says, I was just freaked out about food
 and I was looking in the mirror.
 And I was always being really critical of my body.
 And he said, it was like mental illness.
 I said, it had to stop.
 He said, he came to the conclusion that he had to be free.
 But he couldn't be free until he made a bunch of changes.
 So he got off social media.
 He literally took every mirror out of his house.
 No more mirrors in the whole house.
 And he showered in the dark for a year.
 So he couldn't see his abs.
 Wow.
 And then he went to school and become a physical therapist
 and acupuncturist.
 And he's never been happier.
 And he's never been happier.
 And his life is full of love.
 Why? Because he transcended himself.
 He was intensely focused on the me self.
 And he did all of these, I mean, this guy's wise to do this.
 But not very many people have this kind of presence of mine to do it.
 And he got into the eye self.
 And now he's focused on other people.
 His business is thriving.
 And he has lots of friends and he's happy.
 And we all have a version of that inside ourselves.
 Help me diagnose what I'm about to say to you.
 You and I know some pretty well-known famous people.
 And I've always said that when I sit down with famous people,
 I don't start to connect until we talk about some struggle.
 Because it is in the struggle where I can have a conversation with that person.
 When we talk about their successes, I can admire them and I got a cheer for them.
 But what is the social science behind why that's where I lock in with people?
 And that's where I always try and go.
 Because that's where we all have in common.
 And it's funny because it's St. Paul in the New Testament in the Christian Bible says
 that when I'm weak, then I'm strong.
 And he talks about the thorn in his flesh and these letters,
 these epistles to these struggling Christian communities in the ancient world.
 And the reason he talks about these things is he was Mr. Big.
 I mean, it's St. Paul.
 He was the man.
 He would come to town and everybody's like,
 Oh, it's Paul's here, right?
 He talked about the ways that he had struggles like everybody else
 because that's how he connected to them at the human level.
 And that's how he would actually be able to uplift them.
 It's just me too, me too.
 I have these struggles too.
 We all have these cool things.
 I mean, you're like famous guy on CBS.
 That's not relatable, David.
 That's not relatable.
 It's a great thing.
 It's a meritorious thing.
 You work for it.
 That's not a relatable thing.
 I'm a professor at Harvard.
 That's not relatable in its own way
 because it's hard to do, right?
 What's relatable?
 The relatable is a relationship that I have with other people,
 the struggles that I've actually had,
 the insecurities that I've had
 because everybody has those things.
 I want to go back to the person who believed in you.
 I heard he was sort of a godfather,
 if you will, of community policing.
 Yeah.
 Can you tell me what he believed about that
 and how that was sort of a calling for him?
 Yeah.
 So James Q. Wilson was incredibly influential
 across a whole bunch of different areas.
 He wrote a very famous book called Bureaucracy
 that talked about, and it wasn't casting aspersions.
 It wasn't insulting about,
 get away, I always say Bureaucracy,
 and people with sneer, but that's not what he meant.
 He meant, you know, that this is how government tends
 to work, and here's how it can get better.
 A very famous book.
 The moral sense I talked about before
 was that the most important book ever written
 about the science of human morality
 and how we could understand it at a different level.
 Another thing he talked about was in criminal justice,
 how communities could actually look out for each other
 in ways that police never could.
 And if you're outsourcing all of the security
 for your community of cops, I love cops.
 Thank God for cops.
 But if you're going to outsource your security to cops,
 you're going to have a lot of problems in your community.
 A huge amount of problems in your community,
 you got to take care of each other
 is what it comes down to.
 And his philosophy was you clean up the blight,
 you remove all the abandoned cars,
 you do that, and that contributes to a safer neighbor.
 Yeah, and you actually hold communities to standards.
 You know, we say we don't Jay walk here.
 We don't break windows here.
 We don't spit on the sidewalk here.
 And we hold each other as a community
 to higher standards of decency and behavior.
 And when you do that, the little things actually
 getting rid of the little things makes life more livable.
 And it tends to rule out the big things too.
 Did you ever ask him why he believed in you?
 The way he did.
 I did, and he didn't know.
 He had this like, he had this sixth sense about people.
 You would say something.
 The penny would drop with him
 when you would make an observation
 whatever it happened to be.
 And that wasn't that when he recognized
 that I could be a social scientist like him,
 that wasn't the only time he did that.
 He did that later too.
 When I was teaching at Syracuse
 and things were going really well in my career,
 he'd written the forward for this book.
 And that book became popular.
 President George W. Bush read the book
 and then my life changed because, you know,
 the president reads your book.
 And they didn't change all in good ways.
 By the way, you know, just continue
 to become controversial, etc.
 But which was not what I was looking for.
 But when I was in the middle of that,
 you know, my career was going really, really well.
 He was on the board of this thing,
 Tenkin Washington DC.
 That's a different business.
 And they were looking for president.
 I never run anything.
 I was in my early 40s at this point.
 I never run a single thing.
 I never raised a dollar in fundraising for a nonprofit.
 I'd never had a single employee.
 I mean, I was a French horn player,
 turned social scientist.
 And he called me up and I see
 that I think you should be the president of this thing tank.
 And I love this thing tank.
 I mean, this is the best thing tank in the world,
 starting in 1938.
 It was a very, very important institution.
 And I had read their work
 and I had many intellectual idols that were there.
 He was on the board.
 So I think he should be the president.
 I said, what are you talking about?
 He said, will you interview?
 And so I did.
 And they gave me the job.
 And the foundation was the American Enterprise Institute,
 which did public policy research,
 working with Congress,
 working with the judiciary,
 working with governors all over the world with heads of state.
 And it had some of the most distinguished scholars in the world
 that were talking about how to build better public policy
 and economics for in policy,
 education, health, et cetera.
 And he believed that I could
 out of Syracuse, New York go to Washington DC
 and raise hundreds of millions of dollars
 and hire some of the best scholars in the world
 and successfully run a big institution as a manager.
 Not as a social scientist as a manager.
 He saw that.
 I didn't believe it.
 I didn't believe it.
 When he died, you spoke at his funeral.
 Yeah.
 I'm a massive believer in the practice of gratitude.
 So I have this company called Do Good.
 And I believe it is an act of doing good
 to practice gratitude.
 Yeah.
 What did you say about him at his funeral?
 I said a lot of what we're talking about here,
 which is he had the uncanny ability to
 find the good and others.
 To do good is to find good.
 It's one thing to, it's funny because, you know,
 what this is is to do good is to find good and others.
 See, this is this gift that he had.
 And this is a switcher row.
 You know, that I remember one time I was giving a talk
 about this, about virtuous behavior.
 And I was talking, you're getting a small college.
 And I said, one of the greatest things that you can do
 is to allow people to serve you.
 Because in so doing, you're bringing the virtue out of another person.
 It's an act of selfishness never to accept somebody else's generosity.
 Hold on, say that again.
 Is an act of selfishness to not accept the generosity of others
 because you're denying them the ability to to be virtuous and good.
 And I've known people like this.
 I know I had an elderly relative who said,
 I never even accept a glass of water at somebody else's house.
 She helped everybody.
 She helped everybody, but she wouldn't accept a glass of water.
 That was an act of selfishness to allow somebody to give you love
 is an act of love because you are denying them the ability to do good.
 Yes.
 Because they need to do good.
 If you need to do good, so do they.
 And that means they need to do good to somebody else.
 And when it's you, don't, don't pass up.
 Don't pass up their opportunity to do good.
 Wow.
 That's an, so I was giving that, making that point in the kid,
 kid puts up his hand.
 I mean, I'll get back to James Cuellson in a second.
 The kid puts up his hand in my lecture.
 And he says, what about what about people who literally have nothing to give you?
 Now, I said, well, give me an example.
 He said, we're in New York.
 He said, homeless guy in the street.
 And he stumped me for a minute.
 So I went home and I thought about it, prayed about it.
 And I thought, oh, but I do need something.
 So the next day, I'm in New York.
 And a guy asked me for, it says, I'm hungry.
 So these hungry.
 And so I get him some food.
 I mean, it's, it's, it's problematic money and substance abuse.
 And there's a lot of different thinking on how you should help homeless people.
 I get it.
 But when, when they're hungry, they're hungry.
 My wife, you know, who's a devout Catholic,
 like, always has gift cards for McDonald's and Chick-fil-A
 and stuff in his hand, he's handing him out all the time.
 I said, why every single time?
 She said, because that's the face of Jesus.
 All right.
 So you got to say, yes.
 And so I passed this guy.
 He asked me, get him some to eat.
 And then I said, will you do something for me?
 I said, what?
 Will you pray for me in my family?
 Because I need that, David.
 I'm a Christian.
 God hears the cries of the poor.
 We believe this.
 Or we don't.
 And I do need his prayers.
 I need his prayers.
 And he prayed for me.
 And his expression changed.
 He helped me.
 And, and he helped him.
 Because that's love.
 That's how love works with mutual reciprocity.
 And James Killwilsen,
 like so many other good people,
 he helped me be my best self.
 He made it possible for me to love other people.
 He served me by making it possible for me to serve.
 And his last act was he wanted me to speak at his funeral about him.
 He wanted that.
 Yeah.
 It was wonderful.
 Widow Roberta told me that.
 And I spoke to his funeral at the Harvard Chapel.
 He helped me.
 He still helps me, by the way.
 He said, you know, it's a,
 he said, when you're in, and tough times, you know,
 in your, if you're in an oppositional environment.
 If you're in, you know, in anything, if you're, you know,
 if you're a journalist and journalists are unpopular,
 you know, whatever it happens to be,
 he said there's a formula that always wins.
 And I said, what's the formula, James?
 Jim, what's the formula?
 He said, you got to be twice as productive and four times as nice.
 Hold yourself up to a more virtuous standard.
 Work harder, be nicer.
 You want to win?
 Work harder, be nicer.
 You meet somebody on the street.
 They haven't read any of your books,
 been to any of your lectures, or don't know who you are.
 They hear that you are some thought leader.
 And you have one takeaway to leave that with as they walk away from you.
 What is it?
 Happiness is not a feeling.
 Happiness is love.
 And to love is to will the good of the other.
 Notwithstanding your feelings.
 It's your choice.
 That's what it comes down to.
 Happiness is the decision notwithstanding your feelings to love somebody else.
 And it works every time.
 Happiness for yourself.
 Your happiness because you're loving someone.
 That's the right happiness is love.
 Full stop.
 It's an act of doing good.
 Which is what you're doing with this show and your career.
 Thank you.
 Thank you for coming and being so soul-forward.
 Thank you.
 I love it here.
 I appreciate it.
 Yeah.
 I'm Arthur Brooks.
 The person who believed in me was James Q Wilson.
 I thought you might want to know, but this podcast is at the heart of a company I found
 and called Do Good Crew.
 I've spent 25 years telling stories.
 It used to be the bad news and now I want to focus on the good news.
 The everyday heroes who are doing extraordinary things.
 You can join us.
 We do live events, but we also have the newsletter.
 It's free.
 You can sign up for it by going to www.TheDoGoodCrew.com.
 Our podcast was created by me, David Becknell.
 Our executive producer is Olivia Dolphos.
 Our booker is Sully Block.
 Foster Parks is our director of photography.
 Audio-technical production is Joseph Gabay and will Whitley from static creative.
 Our associate producer is Jonah Johnson.
 Our director of social media is Mariah Mall.
 The theme music for our show was created by our friends at Slipstream.
 Post-production and edit was done by long-lived digital.
 This podcast was brought to you by Canva.
 If this episode moved you in any way, consider subscribing to our YouTube channel
 or following and rating our show and whatever platform you're listening to.
 This really is the best way to help our show grow and touch more people.
 And we thank you for it.
 And one more thing before you go.
 If you want to join our crew, go to the DoGoodCrew.com.
 You're welcome. We're doing it.