The PHYSICS Of Happiness - Arthur C Brooks - #509

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 — Arthur Brooks has just done the unthinkable. He’s shattered one of the most enduring myths in both science and society with the precision of a physicist and the insight of a seasoned psychologist. We’re talking about the belief that our minds peak in our thirties and only decline from there. Well, it turns out this belief isn’t rooted in physics but in flawed psychology. Worse, this myth is holding us back as a species. In this insightful and personal episode, Arthur explains that cognitive decline is not inevitable and that our best, most meaningful work might still be ahead—if we adjust accordingly. Arthur himself is no stranger to reinvention. From performing with the Barcelona Symphony to leading one of Washington's most influential think tanks, and now teaching at Harvard, he’s experienced multiple intellectual lifetimes. Today, he studies happiness—not as a vague ideal, but as a measurable, achievable, and deeply human pursuit. Together, we explore why high achievers often feel more depressed after reaching their biggest goals and why lasting fulfillment requires something different altogether. Arthur shares research on emotional temperaments, the science of fluid vs. crystallized intelligence, and the dangers of fame, power, and success. He also gives us a behind-the-scenes look at his collaboration with the Dalai Lama, and why AI might be a surprising ally in extending our cognitive abilities as we age. — Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:31 Arthur’s pivotal career change(s) 00:05:22 Failure CV and resistance to disillusionment 00:08:36 The entropy of happiness 00:11:57 Judging a book by its cover 00:18:04 Crystallized vs. fluid intelligence 00:28:48 Will AI replace or amplify aging minds? 00:31:41 Modernizing academia 00:42:40 Balancing professional and personal life 00:47:05 The hierarchy of idolatry 00:58:33 Rapid fire questions — Additional resources: 📚 The Happiness Files by Arthur Brooks: https://a.co/d/7548rbL — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Happiness is a combination of enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning, and that has a lot of discomfort inside it.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Today I'm joined with the legendary Arthur C. Brooks, a distinguished Harvard professor and former professional musician. He shares his unique perspective on how happiness can come to those of us that study science and engineering using surprisingly mathematical principles.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  What got you here is not going to get you there is the whole problem.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Arthur shares his unique perspective and how this knowledge can fundamentally change your approach to well-being.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  The arrival is not the thing. The whole point is the process of what you're doing and loving the process and dedicating yourself to the process.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  This isn't just a theory. It's a practical roadmap for human flourishing. Let's go.

• 0:44Brian Keating?

  Arthur, first of all, I want to start with something that hit me like a lightning bolt. While I was writing my upcoming book called Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, I quote you about this brutal truth. You quote from people such as the eminent, esteemed Paul Dirac, who said that "better dead than living still once he passes his 30th year." Now, that's not, you know, such great verse or poetics, and Dirac hated poetry. He won his Nobel Prize at 31. Was his life after that more depression than happiness should have been induced after winning the Nobel Prize?

• 1:16Speaker 00

  No, he actually had a very happy life. So Paul Dirac did his Nobel Prize winning work when he was about 26 years old after finishing his PhD. I think it was his dissertation at Cambridge that led to a modern understanding of quantum mechanics and then won the Nobel Prize at 31. And then it's like, where are you going to go from there, man? And the truth is, he did wonderful work. But I think that probably his master stroke was when he was in his 60s. He decided that Cambridge had crummy weather and he took a gig at Florida State University, moved to Florida, and every afternoon, after eating lunch with his colleagues, he would go and work on a paper a little bit, then take a nap and then have a swim all year round.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  And so the truth of the matter is that Paul Dirac figured out that his life could continue, but it couldn't continue in exactly the same way. That's what all of us have to understand. Especially the high achieving people that watch this show or listening to this show, many of whom are academics like you and me. What got you here is not going to get you there is the whole problem and you have to let yourself change. You have to let yourself develop. You have to let your conception of what's going to give you fulfillment, satisfaction, meaning and enjoyment that has to change along with you changing as a person.

• 2:34Brian Keating?

  They say that all research is me search. Now, when I'm looking into, you know, the properties of subatomic dark matter particles, I, you know, I've put on a little bit of excess weight. So, so maybe that's part of it. Maybe it's a diet plan. I just eat dark matter. But you really exhibit this in some ways that are exceptional. You went from playing the French horn, you know, and traveling around following after a girl and, you know, spoiler alert, you got the girl and you've got three wonderful kids, but you went from playing the French horn to economics, to teaching at Harvard, to reshaping how we think about human flourishing and human behavior. So I guess that my question to you is this, did you intuit this understanding that you were running against a cognitive clock? And did that make you want to pivot constantly from these multi-different dimensions and axes that you so handily did?

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Well, I got lucky insofar as that my first career was as a classical musician and I went into early decline as a French horn player. So I had a lot of early success as a professional. I went pro at 19. I left college and then I had what my parents called a gap decade kind of, where I wound up running to Barcelona. As you mentioned, I was chasing a girl to Barcelona. I was playing in the Barcelona Symphony, which is a very nice career, I have to say. But I noticed that wasn't getting better and things that used to be hard were now impossible. Things that used to be easy were getting hard. And so the result of it is that by my late twenties, it was pretty clear the writing was on the wall. I had to do something else. That I wasn't as good as I used to be. And if I was going to, you know, I'm a married man and I'm starting my life.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  I had to study. I had to figure it out. And so the result is I was forced into the, the, into the situation in which I had to reinvent myself as a professional, as a responsible adult. And so I went to college by correspondence. I studied. I got my bachelor's degree a month before my 30th birthday. And I found that when I was studying, I was So interested in things that weren't music that I wound up getting a masters and then quitting music entirely and going to get my PhD. But it was entirely precipitated by what felt like an existential crisis. I mean, there were days where like, like, if I can't play the horn, I might as well die. I literally thought that, which is absurd, you know, it's like everybody's listening is like, because you can't play the French horn? Come on, man, you need a psychiatric treatment. But look, everybody watching us is a striver.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  You're not listening to this podcast if you're not a striver. And so your thing is your thing and you see yourself in that thing. You've objectified yourself probably as seeing yourself in terms of your own success. And that's a mistake. You're a full human person and the manifestation of your gift can, can, can, can be in, found in all sorts of different walks of life. And I found that out because I had to. And the result of that was I've, I've felt able to change course every seven to 12 years for the rest of my career. And I've had four different careers.

• 5:16Brian Keating?

  One of the neologisms or portmanteaus as our mutual friend Steven Pinker likes to wax rhapsodically about is what I found so exciting is called a CV of failure, a failure CV. And, and usually we're used to thinking about, you know, kind of burnishing and saying how impressive we are. And, and usually it's the case that the people with the shortest CVs are the most impressive. But you talk about research study and I think it's in the, yeah, it's in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by, by Lynn. And you talk about the conversations and studies that this researcher named Lynn did. They all have insatiable passion and hunger to discover the truth about a problem. Winning a Nobel Prize was never these people's modus for their hard work. This isn't just a moral principle, you say, it's a practical one.

• 6:01Brian Keating?

  Unlike dreams of winning accolades like the Nobel Prize, our core research values are resistant to disillusionment. What does that mean? What does it mean to be resistant to disillusionment?

• 6:10Speaker 00

  The whole idea here behind this is that the true, the goats in science, for example, and that's in the physical sciences, like your, or your world, or behavioral sciences like me, they're insatiably interested and they love the process of learning because interest is an intensely positive emotion. And so they have a lot of curiosity and that's the fuel. The fuel actually has to be the curiosity in what you're trying to do. It's not the Nobel Prize. I mean, that's like, the Nobel Prize, by the way, is a good day. Number one on the New York Times bestseller list, that's a nice day. But it's nothing more than a nice day. And if you don't understand that, you're going to be falling prey to what we in my business call the arrival fallacy.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  That's that, look, I love making progress toward a goal. So when I hit the goal, then it's going to be the best day ever and I'm going to enjoy it for the rest of my life. And that is patently false and that's, you're setting yourself up for literally a clinical depression. All sorts of neurophysiological hell. A hurricane in your head is going to happen if you actually think that when you, and remember, look, we all did this, Brian. So you remember the day that you defended your dissertation successfully? Right? It was great. And the next day was another day. You know, I remember the day I got tenure and I'm like, I worked hard to get tenure. And I got tenure because I started late. I didn't finish my PhD till I was 34 years old. And then I, and I worked to catch up. And so I got my tenure, you know,

• 7:36Speaker 00

  just like six years later, five years later, and then, you know, to get promoted. And the day I got my tenure, I got the letter in the mail and my wife and I went out to celebrate. And we talked the whole dinner about the fact that our young child at the time had bitten another child at school that day. And we're like, Now he's a Marine. Now he's a sniper in the Marine Corps. Yeah. So it's like, it turns out that those violent instincts, when they're turned outward, can be good for America, you know? But, but, you know, but the whole point is, it's like, the thing, the arrival is not the thing. The whole point is the process of what you're doing and loving the process and dedicating yourself to the process. And that's one of the great secrets to satisfaction.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Is the struggle towards something worthwhile and and getting a lot of value out of the struggle per se.

• 8:26Brian Keating?

  Let me pause there because what Arthur just said really connects to something that most people have never really thought about and and you've talked about it, I know with Chris Williamson on his podcast. And that's that you can never be happy. It's it's really kind of paradoxical. Happiness is not a state of a wave function that physicists can probe and and look at its behaviors. It is a process and you described this so beautifully well, and I wonder if I could run a theory by you, I call it the entropy of happiness. Which is basically that you have many, many ways, as you said, you win the Nobel Prize, you're very happy for that day, right? But if you win two Nobel Prizes, your, you know, marginal increase in happiness is not that much. In fact, there's only one person who's ever won two Nobel Prizes in the same field of physics and Marie Curie won it in different fields.

• 9:09Brian Keating?

  So there's only two people who have really won it in two different fields, right? So in that sense, you can't really double your happiness, right? You can't, it's very hard to double it, even to be a billionaire. You know, from a millionaire or from just our average quality of life, that's not really that simple of of a process. But to become infinitely unhappy and and I'm not, I I will never mention this to a fellow parent, but we both know the greatest fear of being a parent or grandparent or whatever is is would result in infinite increase in unhappiness. Therefore, there are more ways to be unhappy than to be happy. Therefore, happiness is an entropic process, which is great because almost nobody understands entropy anyway, as it said.

• 9:51Brian Keating?

  So what do you make of this? That that because there are so few ways to really double your happiness, 10x your happiness, that we spend so much disproportionate time trying to achieve that impossible goal?

• 10:01Speaker 00

  So the the reason is because we want, we want to be happy. And the reason it's so hard is we're not built to be happy. Mother Nature doesn't care. If you know, Brian and Arthur happy, Mother Nature doesn't care less. Mother Nature has only two goals for Brian and Arthur, which is survive and pass on your genes. That's it, man. That's, those are the evolutionary imperatives. And and all of our emotions, the emotionality, positive and negative, that lead us to feeling happier and you know, happiness is not an emotion. It's not a feeling, but it has feelings associated with them as. Evidence of happiness that that is actually has a much stronger bias toward negative than positive because you know the ancient Keatings that were wandering across the savanna

• 10:42Speaker 00

  looking for something to eat they stayed alive because they were fearful and resentful and ungrateful and suspicious that's why they stayed alive not because they're like today's a great day said a guy right before he gets eaten by a leopard you know and so the truth of the matter is we're evolved for a lot of this negative emotionality even though we we don't want it we don't want it and so the result is understanding the proper place for our emotions and working on building a life that's full and interesting and rich and moral and ethical and spiritual and deep we're supposed to be fully alive putting the the natural unhappiness in our life in the context of a full life and that's ultimately what

• 11:26Speaker 00

  happiness is is a is a combination of not of you know it's not the the maximum amount of feeling good dude people who do that they wind up you know living in their mom's basement till they're 45 the happiness is a combination of enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning and that has a lot of discomfort inside it

• 11:44Brian Keating?

  So Arthur you're never supposed to do what we're about to do which is to judge a book by its cover so I was graced by your assistant your team at Arthur Brooks Incorporated to get a digital copy I don't have my physical copy that came out this week as this podcast being released so let's do what you're never supposed to do Arthur and judge a book by its cover

• 12:15Brian Keating?

  Arthur so tell us tell us the origin of this book's title its subtitle and this whimsical cover illustration

• 12:22Speaker 00

  This book is actually a compilation of the 33 most popular essays I've written in the Atlantic over the past five years About work and life, where you treat work and life like an enterprise, where it's you're an entrepreneur in the business of your life. And, and when I write about life like that, people, it really lights people up. And I'll get 500,000 or a million readers. And so I, I, we, the Harvard Business Review packaged up the top 33 of these things into one, into one book. And, you know, usually my books are a big new idea, completely original out of the pipe. These are the 33 things around the same thing. And it's intended to be read one essay a day. So it's a 33 day project to read this book, The Happiness Files. And that's why it's called The Happiness Files.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Each day is a different file that you've got there. And so the result is it looks like a bunch of file folders, a very Harvard Business Review kind of thing is the way that that works. And I think it's a lovely, I think it's a lovely idea on their part, I have to say. Usually I have a lot more input into the covers, but I like their idea.

• 13:22Brian Keating?

  Typically people will say, uh, you know, what that, uh, I ask them about the cover. They'll say, well, I had no choice in the cover or the title, or at least you approved of it. Now, it's rumored that your next book or a future book of yours will be entitled The Happiness of Art, not The Art of Happiness. Why are artists so miserable? And what can we scientists out there learn from those people that should be, you know, by all measures, very blissfully enjoying their, their extra, you know, sexual selection, mate, mate potential, you know, guitarists get a lot more attention from the opposite sex than do, you know, astrophysicists, at least in my experience. So tell me, Arthur, what, what is it about art that leads so many to feel that it's concomitant with unhappiness?

• 14:04Speaker 00

  So, yeah, my next book is actually called The Meaning of Your Life, by the way. That's coming out next April, but I'm still, I will write a book about the, you know, the, the bummed out musician at some point. And, and I've thought about that an awful lot. And I think, I, I think I've cracked the code. I think I know the answer. I wish I had this knowledge back when I was a professional French horn player, I have to say, but then again, I was playing my scales. I wasn't studying neuroscience in those days. So here's basically how it works. We all have what's called an affect profile. An affect profile is the intensity of your positive and negative emotions. Your positive, negative emotions exist. Independently of each other because they have different functions. Your negative emotions keep you alive and thriving because they alert you to threats.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Your negative, your positive emotions keep you alive and thriving because they alert you to opportunities that you should approach. You need both. They're literally produced by different parts of the limbic system of the brain. Everybody has a different emotional profile in terms of the intensity of their positive and negative emotions. You can fit the population into four equal quadrants with respect to their emotional profile. Now, anybody who's listening to us right now, you can go to my website and figure out which you are, all free. Arthurbrooks.com and you can take a test to find out which quadrant you're in and you're going to see right now why it matters. Some of the population, a quarter of the population is above average, above the median, obviously,

• 15:28Speaker 00

  in both positive intensity and negative intensity. These are super high affect people. This is 65% of CEOs and entrepreneurs, even though it's 25% of the population. Those are called the mad scientists. Brian, you're probably this profile because you're a mad scientist. Me too. I'm the maddest of the mad scientists. I'm 95th percentile in positive emotion and 90th percentile in negative emotion. Everything for me is like, super intense, right? Okay. Now, there are some people who are very lucky, who are high positive, low negative. Those are called the cheerleaders. There are some people who are low, low, who are low positive and low negative. They're very low affect people.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  These people who never, never, never freak out. These are called the judges. They make great surgeons, hedge fund traders, they just don't freak out. And then the last group have high negative emotion and, yeah, exactly. They, no freaking out. And then the last quarter are high negative and low positive. Those are called the poets. And there's a reason why they're called the poets. People who have high negative emotionality and low positive intensity of their, of their emotions. These are people who feel negative events very, very deeply. And what we find in the limbic system of the brain is they have a very active part of the brain called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in-

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Ruminative sadness, which is a part of clinical depression and romantic activity, where you ruminate on another person and creativity. So if you're thinking about writing an opera or a poem, that's when you're really ruminating on an idea and that leads to intense creativity. That's why artists are typically, we think of them as depressed, romantic and creative. Because the same part of the brain that gives them this poetic temperament, which is really, really hard to cope with, because they feel the negative really intensely and the positive really lightly. There's the scientific explanation. There you go. Of course, this is the audience for your show that can appreciate that.

• 17:29Brian Keating?

  That's right. And one of the most important branches of physics is called solid state physics, which is actually a terrible name, but it used to be called like applied condensed matter physics, which is even worse. But anyway, it has to do with the properties of matter in its most, you know, kind of relatable state, which is as a solid, you know, we can't really relate to plasma and gas and liquids. Well, some of us relate too much to liquids. But you're known for this popularization of research from, I think it was the 60s by Ray Catrel, which was a Catel, which is about fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. And I wonder if we could pivot now to a discussion about how, you know, many of the audience members are professors or teachers in some way, even as a graduate student, you had to teach, I had to teach.

• 18:12Brian Keating?

  What do we benefit from getting older and getting off of the fluid intelligence curve as a scientist, say, in particular? And then what are the benefits of getting onto the crystallized intelligence curve when that does occur? And my question to you, maybe after you explain those two concepts, is are there ways that you can actually borrow from another phase when you're in the phase of liquid intelligence, borrow from the crystal and vice versa? Can you actually learn and apply tools from the orthogonal, you know, dimension, if you will, while you're in a different dimension of your career or your life?

• 18:46Speaker 00

  This is the work of Raymond Catel, who is a great social psychologist in the branch of psychometrics and intelligence, which is the measurement of human intelligence, human cognitive horsepower is what it comes down to. And these days, we think Just IQ, but but that's actually not the most interesting thing. His work talked about the manifestation of intelligence at different phases of life. And what he found was that younger adults have something he called fluid intelligence, which is based on working memory, focus and innovation. Brand new ideas and you're able to crack the code on problems by yourself. Now that's what wins you Nobel prizes. And that's one of the reasons that he finds that that tends to peak in your late 30s and then decline.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  And that's the reason that most people do Nobel Prize winning discoveries in their these days, their late 30s. And there's a bunch of research on this and I'm bringing calls to Newcastle by telling Brian Keating this because you write books on Nobel Prize winners. And they're 65 years old when they come on your show and they did their work when they were 38.

• 19:46Brian Keating?

  The average age is like 80 of them.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  I'm thinking, you know, because I'm a social scientist, I'm thinking of The Economist. The Economist win when they're in their 60s. So, okay, but but and and the problem is that a lot of people, which is why Paul Dirac talked about how your life's over after 30. What he meant was that that your your fluid intelligence declines. And it turns out that that innovation in your research is actually way harder than it used to be. Working memory is not as available as it used to be. And people thought of that for the longest time as degradation, sort of neurodegenerative misfortune. But it's not. It turns out that the brain actually just changes to a different form of the brain based on basically the hippocampus, which stores episodic memory is full.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, your working memory is not as good because you have to you have to reassemble memories from different parts where the where the the the component pieces of memory are stored in different places in the hippocampus and the filing system is no good. So a guy comes up to you on the street, says, Brian, good to see you, man. You're like, what's his name? And you send your little librarian to the back of the stacks and he goes up three flights of stairs and stops for coffee. And 15 minutes later, he comes back and says, that guy's name is Mike. And Mike is long gone and Brian feels like a moron. But it's not that the problem is not that there's something wrong with your brain. The problem is that your library is full. I mean, my. Young adult kids, their library has one book in it. They open it up and say, Mike, right? So that's the difference is the way that this works.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  So what you have, however, is not just slower working memory, what you have is more stuff that you have access to. So you have better pattern recognition and instructor capability. You're better at seeing talent, mentoring people, discussing ideas and recognizing patterns across fields that you don't even know. That's why historians are much better that what you find is that the best historians do more than half their work after the age of 65. Cause they have to have a huge library. Meanwhile, poets, which are innovators with words, do their best work before the age of 40. And more than half their work before the age of 40. Poetry is a fluid intelligent profession. History is a crystallized intelligent profession.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Okay, now let's talk hypothetically about a 50 some year old physics professor at a California, big elite California university. You know, anybody like that, Brian?

• 22:13Brian Keating?

  Let me check.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  So what's good about that, but what you find typically is that it's much easier to do innovative, brand new idea generation. When your brain is less crowded and working faster, which is to say in your twenties and thirties. And it's much, much easier for you to be a great instructor, teacher, mentor, when you're in your 50s and 60s. So this podcast, by the way, is a teaching exercise. This is a public education exercise. And I dare say that 25 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to do it. You wouldn't have been able to do it. What are you doing? You're discussing, you're bringing pretty sophisticated scientific ideas to people who are not necessarily PhDs in science. Why? Why can you do that? Because you have crystallized intelligence.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  That intelligence increases through your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and stays high for as long as God gives you your marbles. 80s, 90s. So when people come, you know, brand new professors come to Harvard where I teach and they say, I mean, right out of their PhD. And I'm the mentor, cause I'm an old guy. And they'll say, what's the secret to get great teaching evaluations? And I say, get old. Because those are the best teachers is the way that that works. But that's one of the reasons that you should, as you get older, be a popularizer. Bring retail ideas, bring them to the masses. You're uniquely qualified to do that. By the way, keep writing your papers if you want, but don't beat yourself up. I mean, I read my papers that I was writing in my early 30s.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  When I was working on my PhD, I was doing military operations research at the Rand Corporation to, you know, support myself and, and, you know, I was doing, you know, neural nets and genetic algorithms, you know, early AI stuff and applying it to behaviors, to human behaviors for, you know, highly kinetic activity in the military. And it's like, I read that stuff, I'm like, what are you talking about? I can't even read that stuff now. And now I have an audience of 500,000 readers a week for my column. And I'm retailing science ideas every week in the Atlantic and I couldn't have done that then. And by the way, I'm a lot happier now.

• 24:16Brian Keating?

  Just to push back with a love and respect, it is sad though, for great teachers like, for example, Dirac, his brother-in-law, I think was Niels Bohr, I, I forget, it was, or, or it might've been Pauli. It might've been Wolfgang Pauli, another Nobel laureate. And they said-

• 24:30Speaker 00

  I think it was Wolfgang Pauli, right?

• 24:32Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it was Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli said about Dirac, he said, he said, Paul never uses two words when none will do. And it was sort of a way for me to recognize this thing called the curse of knowledge, which is what I want to push back on what you just said. And that oftentimes you know so much that it's, it's almost impossible to relate to your very young self that didn't know anything. So how can you at this stage of your career, 50s, 60s, whatever you are, relate to a 31-year-old assistant professor at Harvard? I mean, how is that possible? Aren't you cursed with the knowledge that you've accumulated? Not just the knowledge, I like to say the wisdom that you've accumulated.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no, it's true. But you know, that's the same question, by the way, as how can you be a really, really good parent to your teenager? When you know so much stuff that they don't know? And you're talking to somebody who thinks they know everybody? How old are your kids? I can't remember. How old are your kids?

• 25:28Brian Keating?

  I've got a lot. It'll take too long to, to tell you all their ages.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  Okay, you got a bunch of kids.

• 25:32Brian Keating?

  I have a fourteen year old, yeah, yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and your fourteen year old, I remember being fourteen and that's the point. The point is not being paralyzed because I know so much more than an adolescent child. The point is remembering what it was like to be an adolescent child. And the memory of that is part of your crystallized intelligence. That's the key thing. I remember my brother had kids a lot, a long time before I did. And I said, when I first started having my kids, my kids are in their twenties. My kids have kids, so I'm a grandfather now. And at sixty-one, it's the best thing ever. And, and I asked my brother, give me one piece of advice for being a father. When my kids are coming along, he thought about it, he said, don't freak out. And I said, well, you gotta be more specific, man. I mean, what do you mean, don't, what, what do you mean, don't freak out? He said, just remember what it was like to be a little kid.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  Right? You've got all the wisdom and you might be able to help them. But the best thing that you can actually do is to remember what it was actually like. And this is when I'm mentoring the thirty-one year old assistant professor. I remember what it was actually like. I put myself back into that situation. And then I give them a little crystal ball about what it's going to be like when they're a little bit older. So that I can help them make really good decisions, you know? So I'll give you an example of this. So I'll get young professors who they're up against, you know, tough teaching circumstances. I mean, when you come out of your PhD, you've taught in graduate school. But you go to a big university, an elite university, and you teach undergraduates. They're going to light you up like a Christmas tree, man, on the evaluations. They're going to light you up. And it's like merciless, a brand new PhD.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  And so they'll, a lot of the professors will say like, yeah, you know, I, I know it's hard. So the first year, I'm just going to focus on my teaching, right? And I say, no, no, you're going to do your teaching as best as you can. And you're going to have emotional fortitude and you're going to get better. And any moment that you have, you're going to go back to your office and work on your paper.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Because that's the currency of the realm. That's what's going to get you your, you know, your at three years renewal and at six years tenure. And depending on where you're teaching, et cetera, et cetera. And I give them advice like that because that's a crystal ball into the future. And that's just the That's an avoidable error.

• 27:43Brian Keating?

  So here's something that's keeping me up at night that kind of brushed upon with your fellow colleague, George Church, recently on an episode here. And that's, you know, we're sort of evolving into these, you know, homo siliconus, or, you know, we're kind of converting to these convergence of, of, you know, technology and squishy matter. And the question I have for you is, does that give us old guys an advantage? Because we, you can't accelerate, thanks to the thermodynamic laws we already discussed, you can't accelerate the wisdom accrual process. So our young colleagues with all their fluid intelligence, we can wipe the floor with them because ChatGPT-5 just released today, knows way more than every Harvard professor, even you, and every PhD that's ever lived in

• 28:26Brian Keating?

  every subject, not just in one subject like you and I might be specialist in. So don't we have an unfair advantage now due to AI? Will it lead to increased flourishing for older academics like us? I mean, can we recapture basically our youth for fluid intelligence courtesy of this 10 millisecond response time supercomputer we all have with us?

• 28:45Speaker 00

  It sort of depends on how we decide to use it. What, what I think that the, the AI, it's interesting because, you know, we're working on, I have two startup partners in a, an enterprise I've got that's creating a twin of me that's been trained on so far 986,000 words that I've written or spoken and will be another couple million words before all is said and done. And it'll be released in, in January. And what it'll be is, you know, something that can accompany my students so they can responsibly and in a careful way answer questions as I would and, and in point of fact have, and also branch out into areas that I haven't done research on, on the basis of how I tend to answer questions, but looking at research that I've actually never

• 29:26Speaker 00

  seen before. And so the whole idea is for all of us, how we're going to be able to use artificial intelligence. If we are creative people and idea originators, it's going to make life great. It's going to make life better because it's going to do a lot of the work of sort of filling out paragraphs, you know, doing, doing sort of make work that we, and we're going to be able to specialize even more in the beauty that's idea Origination. On the other hand, if you know, we're just kind of journeymen academics who can plug and chug, you know, you know, rack and stack the articles on the basis of a one particular recipe, it's not going to make life better. It's going to make us replaceable. And I think it's going to depend.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  It's funny. It's going to reward creativity. I was talking to somebody at one of the big social media networks the other day, one of the very, very top people. And he said, what is doing right now in Silicon Valley? Is that it's creating a superstar market among engineers? I said, what do you mean? He said, the really, really creative ones are making a million dollars a year. And the ones who just knew how to write code are now saying, you want fries with that?

• 30:32Brian Keating?

  I mean, what you and I do, I call it the world's second oldest profession, you know? It wasn't more than 400 years ago when this guy Galileo Galilei, you know, he was a professor. That's how he earned his, his bones back in Padua in his career, before he became famous for writing books, which we all know is how lucrative, well, you do. But it's basically been a guy scraping on a piece of rock with another piece of rock. And it really hasn't changed much, even in the 388 years that Harvard's been around. So what, what kind of phase transition might we expect? Is there sort of a quantum level jump that we can take to get academia, which seems to be the most reason? I thought COVID would kill it. I mean, you talk in this book about death by Zoom and many other detriments to happiness and ways to improve things in the workplace.

• 31:17Brian Keating?

  But I thought COVID would kill academia as we know it, charging 30 grand a year at Harvard or well, yeah, for Zoom classes, as great as they are, still, it wasn't the same as being in person. And yet now academia is strong, the brand is stronger than ever, you know? Harvard hasn't admitted more students than it did in 20, you know, 2020. So what can we do to up, update at least to the, you know, 1800s, if not the, the 20, you know, 2020s? What, what can we do to modernize academia as you see it, as Renaissance men and women that we aspire to create?

• 31:48Speaker 00

  So the learning process among Homo sapiens, it has very much to do with the, with our ancestral environment and the way our brain works. We have the same brains now as we had 250,000 years ago. And the result of that is when we try to do things that are outside of the, that they don't synchronize with our ancestral environment, they don't work very well. So I'll give you a perfect example of that. You know, people said, we're never gonna ever see each other ever again because we're not gonna be together. We're gonna work by Zoom. Now, there's a lot of things we can do by Zoom. If we had been doing this podcast five years ago, you and I wouldn't be talking together on Riverside, which is this great technology. This great technology was largely propagated during the COVID era, right?

• 32:27Speaker 00

  But the truth is that our fundamental relationships are not different than they were. So I'll give you an example of this. I don't have a Zoom marriage. I have an in-person marriage. I don't have a Zoom religion. I have an in-person religion. I'm doing the same thing. I go to mass every day as a Catholic. I'm doing the same thing every single day that people were doing 1,800 years ago for the exactly the same reasons. Now, in other words, there are certain things that are synchronous with the ancestral environment, ancestral brain, and things that are asynchronous, that don't work out that very well. So what can we think about technology and what have we learned from COVID and virtual work that we can actually talk about with respect to

• 33:08Speaker 00

  other technologies like AI and how they're gonna update the university or anything else that we do? And the answer to that is to the extent that it complements the way that we actually learn, it's gonna be beneficial, it's gonna work, and it'll be adopted. And to the extent that it substitutes for these ancient technologies and techniques that really, really work, they won't last and they won't work, is the whole point. So the whole idea of you're gonna get your entire education sitting in your mom's basement, being taught by a bot, well, no, you're not. Because a good deal of learning is relationships with other people, is how this comes in. This is how we learn. You know, people sitting around a campfire, telling, you know, the ancient mythology of the, of the origins of the world, right?

• 33:51Speaker 00

  I mean, how was Genesis 1:1 passed on? It was not passed on by, you know, a bot telling somebody that. It was humans doing that, and that's how our brains will learn these things. So to the extent that we can use AI to make it a little bit better, improve the knowledge, that then we can actually share with each other as actual brothers and sisters in the flesh, great. To the extent that we try to replace each other as humans, I don't buy it.

• 34:15Brian Keating?

  So about nine years ago, our commencement speaker here at the University of California, San Diego, was your co-author and friend, the Dalai Lama. And we asked him, I got a chance to ask him a question. And that was, you know, what basically, what is your daily routine? I mean, for lack of a better word, I know yours, you go to mass, you just mentioned it. Religious Jews like me, we, you know, pray every morning as well. And the question to him was, well, he, you know, he's Buddhist, right? So what was his, what is his, you know, sort of daily ritual in terms of creating happiness? And he started off by saying, well, I wake up and you know this better than me, probably three in the morning, and I meditate for eight hours. And then my eyes just glazed over.

• 34:58Brian Keating?

  I said, well, you obviously don't have kids, which, which I knew, but, but, you know, having young kids and having other, you know, kind of demands on your time, actually is probably the thing that will make you most enduringly happy, right? And him lacking that, he has a brother, I believe. I know that he was asked once, you know, if his brother, if his brother died, would he be, would he be unhappy? Would he be sad? And he said, I would try not to be. And I found that so hard to relate to, Arthur. And the question I have for you is this, in quantum mechanics, there's a famous measurement problem that by measuring a system, you change it. There's no way for an observer to not interact and thereby affect the behavior and the outcome of quantum systems. So how do I know if he's really happy?

• 35:42Brian Keating?

  Even if I could meditate eight hours a day, or be like you, you know, super fit, you know, incredible career, grandchildren, all the things that, that I aspire to someday as well. But, but how do I know that you're really happy? In other words, how does it, how can we observe and what can we glean from that, bearing in mind that we always affect what we observe?

• 35:58Speaker 00

  It's interesting, because I've known the Dalai Lama quite intimately for the past 13 years. And, and since I first started going to Dharam Sala, we've done a lot of writing together, and we've done a lot of conferences together, and, and a lot of very, very, very meaningful private time together. He's written about happiness, but he has transcended happiness, and that's what we need to do too. Here's the interesting thing about it. What the Dalai Lama is, is fully alive. And to be fully alive... Alive is an ancient concept of a good life well lived that Aristotle would have called eudaimonia, as opposed to what moderns often think about, which is I want to feel good today. I want to have an excess of positive emotionality. You gotta transcend that. That's not the goal.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  I mean, it's interesting. I wish I wish I'd known this as a younger man, but so how does the Dalai Lama? And by the way, the protocols of the Dalai Lama for first thing in the morning, I'm very intimately aware of these things, and they're super good for every scholar who are watching us today. And there's good neurophysiological data to back this up. The one thing, let me take a, can I, can I take a side note, go down this rabbit hole for a second? Yeah, we do. All the better. Because you know, we got all these professors listening to us. And, and when I was a young professor, I was like, how can I be more creative and productive? Why? Because I gotta write my paper, or later I want to work on my book. I gotta, I gotta do my lecture notes and, and I'm, I'm spent. I don't have any ideas. Okay. So you gotta optimize your brain chemistry such that you have

• 37:24Speaker 00

  the maximum amount of sustained dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. That's the goal. Dopamine is a neuromodulator that, that, you know, gives you focus. It gives you anticipation of reward. It gives you a heightened sense of creativity. So the problem is that, you know, when you, you get into the office at nine or 10 in the morning and you've been doing stuff and you had a kind of an argument with your wife or husband and, and then you kind of goof around for a little while and you answer email and then you get some coffee and you go talk to the person in the next office and, and then you don't get anything done. Why didn't I get anything done today? Here's what, you spent your dopamine in the wrong place. So here's how the Dalai Lama starts his day. And here's the version of how I start my day that I built on the Dalai Lama's protocol and

• 38:06Speaker 00

  has fundamentally been a game changer for my productivity as a scholar and as an author. He gets up at 3:30 in the morning. The first thing he actually does is he exercises. He has an exercise bike and it's hard now because he turned 90 in July and, and his knees are kind of not great and the whole thing. But for many decades, he would do half an hour of aerobic exercise every day to start the day. And then he meditates. It's true. Before he ingests any nutrition, but the meditation that he does is called Analytical meditation where he'll look for the first two hours. He'll look at a passage in Tibetan Buddhist scripture and meditate on what it means for himself and the world. Then at the end of that, then he'll take some nutrition. He doesn't drink, he drinks tea.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  So that's where he gets some caffeine and caffeine is an unbelievably potent nootropic substance, which just, just sucks dopamine into your prefrontal cortex. And then he eats healthy food. He's not a vegetarian, as a matter of fact. He eats healthy food, including protein first thing in the morning. And then he's able to undertake his creative tasks over the course of the day, whatever they happen to be. So I built my protocol on this. It's changed my life. I get up at four thirty. Four, every day when I'm home, I'm on the road about forty eight weeks a year, but I try to simulate it no matter what time zone I'm in. Four forty five to five forty five, I have a combination of zone two cardio and strong resistance training.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Which is really, really important. Anybody who's over thirty, you better be picking up heavy things or you're going to get sarcopenia. And it's also extremely good for your brain to lift weights. And then I get cleaned up and I go to Catholic mass every day. It's my worship. It's my, it's my version of his analytical meditation. And only then, about two and a half to three hours after I've been up. Then the natural adenosine in my brain, which is an inhibitory neuro, neurochemical in my brain. It is actually that has resolved. So I'm not feeling groggy anymore. Then I administer the psychostimulant of caffeine and I get a clean dopamine surge into my prefrontal cortex. I have only sixty grams of protein in terms of yogurt and berries, et cetera.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  And then I hit the books and I get four hours of creative concentration. No meetings, no calls, just writing and thinking and prep and research. Every day from eight to noon, every day from eight to noon when I'm home. And that's, by the way, that's how you do it. Look at like, we're scientists. You and I are scientists. I mean, you're a real scientist. I'm like a scientist, but you get my point. We're supposed to live in an evidence-based way. We also believe in the metaphysics of, you know, a good God who loves us, which means that we not only believe in the creation, but the artist, which is a beautiful thing, too. But we better live in an evidence-based way that lives up to our standards.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  And that's one of the ways that we can actually do that, or seeing ourselves as a research project.

• 41:00Brian Keating?

  Let me ask you a selfish question. You travel a lot. You just mentioned, you know, traveling ninety percent of the year or almost over more. I feel great guilt when I leave my kids, especially because, you know, the youngest is seven and then the oldest, I said, is fourteen, a lot of them in there. My question to you is, you know, when I go away, sometimes it's for work. I don't need more money. I don't need more publications. I've got a chair professorship. I've, you know, written books, many books, and I'm writing more. I don't need to do anything, but when I get that invitation and, you know, they want me to speak and they're gonna pay me, which is rare for a physicist. I know you experienced this in different ways, but for a physicist to get paid to give a speech is pretty rare. It's very tempting, even though, as I said, I don't really need the money necessarily.

• 41:43Brian Keating?

  And I count things in terms of Shabbats away from my children. I say, how, is this work? Because you only get two thousand Shabbats, right? You only get, or sorry, you only get one thousand Friday, Saturday, Sunday, one thousand weekends if you're, if you're secular, right? So you get one thousand weekends with your kids between age zero and eighteen, and then ninety-five percent of your life with them is gone. Basically, you're gonna not live with them as much. So my question to you is, how do, you know, should I not feel guilty about it? Should I feel guilty if I'm gone for, you know, point one percent of my time with them? That's quite a good deal, and I do feel guilty about it. How did you overcome that? Or how did you kind of negotiate that with yourself and with God, maybe too? Because of being such an important role as the, as the founding parental role model with your wife, you're basically like a god to your kids.

• 42:25Brian Keating?

  So how do you, how do you resolve that for yourself? And I'm asking purely selfishly.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  You know, our own personal example is how, is how we actually bring our sisters and brothers along. You know, I mean, there, people want to know how people have done it and done it poorly, and I've done it poorly at times. You know, before I was running this. Lab and my happiness business out of Harvard, I was the president of a big think tank in Washington DC called the American Enterprise Institute. And that was a crushing job, man. I was the president of that thing for 11 years and I was, I never worked less than 80 hours a week. And I had to raise $50 million a year and I had hundreds of employees and I was on the road, you know. I had to raise $250,000 every business day of the year. It was brutal, man. It was absolutely brutal.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  And, and I was in a panic in the early years of that, such that I, I made a lot of decisions that I later came to regret. Quite seriously, I made decisions where, you know, my kids kind of grew up and, and I missed a good deal of it. And, and I thought to myself, why? And the answer is because I was trying to be special rather than happy. It was really quite selfish, I have to say. And so the result of it is as I've grown older. And I'm very close to my children now and I'm very close to my, I live with some of my kids and grandkids in a big house, in a multi-generational house. That's a decision that I've actually made for physical proximity, like a Catholic family from 1940. My kids got married early and started having kids in their early twenties because, you know, raised them Catholic, they do Catholic stuff.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  And, but I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna miss it. And I have protocols around my life such that I don't miss Shabbat. I don't miss it. So yeah, I travel every week, but I don't travel Sundays. I'm home on Sundays. I'm at Mass with my family on Sundays because it's super important to me to actually do that. When I'm home, I live in Northern Virginia and I have a home in Boston because of my, because of Harvard is my university, but my family's in Northern Virginia. Wherever I am, when I'm with my family, I don't take dinners out. I have protocols, just like I have protocols for, for, for productivity. First thing in the morning, I have protocols to maintain proper relationships.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  That I believe that God, that, you know, what is the divine spirit and the love that is my antenna to God here on earth, which is my family. It's my wife, it's my marriage. And I messed it up, I messed it up a lot of times when I was in my 40s. And I'm not missing it in my 60s. And so the result is you're just not going to find me on the road on Sunday. I'm gonna be home by Saturday night, usually by Friday night, and I'm gonna goof around with my wife on Saturday, and Sunday is dedicated to God. Because that's what I wanna do, and that's what I think that God wants me to do. And, and that has worked really, really, super well. And I'm ra- helping to raise my grandsons, which is the best thing ever.

• 45:10Brian Keating?

  That's amazing. And that means you have, you know, people that share a common enemy under one roof. That's, that's incredible. You've invited them in. The children and the grandchildren. Okay, it seems to me, at least in my early life, that I aspired to things in the professional world, most notably for me, the Nobel Prize. In that, yeah, I had a very difficult relationship with my father. He was a great scientist. He won a lot of prizes, but he never won the Nobel Prize. And like, a lot of kids compete with their dad at playing football, or doing wrestling, or whatever. We were compet- competitors about science. And I knew the only way to unequivocally, you know, defeat him, so to speak, was to win a Nobel Prize. And I, I kind of cri- you know, self-critically did worship it. And it seems to me, things like the Nobel Prize, or academia, tenure, et cetera, they

• 45:54Brian Keating?

  have a lot of the hallmarks of religion. And they're mostly practiced by secular people. I mean, for example, the Nobel Prize literally has a grave, you know, carved image that you get to, and you have to bow down in order to accept it, right? They have special regalia, special rituals, it's practiced on the death day, it's given away on the death day of Alfred Nobel, not his birthday. There's a lot of, you know, kind of scatological kind of conceits there. But also in academia, there's, there's hierarchy, regalia, there's all sorts of things that we can do that compare it to a religion. So, my question is, you've written a lot about, I think it was Thomas, or, or is the name of the scientist, about the hierarchy of idolatry. And, you know, bearing in mind the, the second and first commandments' imprecation against idolatry.

• 46:39Brian Keating?

  How can we, first of all, can you explain this, this concept of the four attachments? And, and how we as academics, perhaps, or scientists, and young people, listen to this as well? How can we avoid the negative sides of, say, the Nobel Prize, but also have something wonderful and God-like to aspire to, without actually worshiping and violating a vota zara, or the worship of foreign gods?

• 47:01Speaker 00

  It's a very deep concept that you raised. And the truth of the matter is, it's not an academic problem. It's a striver problem. It's people who strive for true excellence. And there are lots of reasons that we do that. And so, you know, I couldn't go back in time and I know the, I know the childhood of strivers, Brian. I mean, I, I know your childhood. There, it's always the same. It's, you know, it's, I can't get their attention unless I do incredible things. And then when I do an incredible thing, I get a pat on the head and I think, well, I guess, you know, that I have to earn their love. And then you go through the rest of your life trying to earn everybody's love, getting the next gold star. Every striver's got this pathology. And, and look, God's love is a free lift, free gift, freely given, and we're made in God's image.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  So we better give love as a free gift and we better take it freely given. The trouble is we're bad at that. We're really crummy at that. And so the result of that is that we're always trying to get the next gold star. And look, I, like, my dad was a scientist too. My dad was a big shot too. My dad was a, as a mathematician in his, you know, his descendants, his intellectual lineage helped mathematicians do that. His dissertation advisor and his dissertations dissertation advisor. My dad is a direct intellectual descendant of Gauss. He was brilliant. My dad was the most brilliant man I've ever met, right? And I'm still trying to get his attention. I'm hoping he's proud of me and he's been dead 23 years.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  It's like, I, God forbid, I should leave my professorship because my dad would roll in over in his grave and his dad, who was a professor, would roll over in his grave. I get it. I get the academic striver. I completely get that. But, but Brian, we need to be free. We need to be free to love freely and let, allow ourselves to be loved and stop trying to earn everybody's love. Now, what you were referring to a moment ago was how this conundrum is dealt with philosophically by Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, for those of us who are Catholics, who was a Dominican friar, but he was a contemporary more or less of Maimonides and Avoros. And they were all Platonists, Neoplatonists in the, in the Middle Ages, in the 12th, 11th and 12th and 13th centuries.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  And, and Aquinas really discovered Aristotle or real, really rediscovered Aristotle.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  For modern audiences and notice that Aristotle said that people are beguiled. Strivers are beguiled by four earthly idols. Money, power, pleasure, and fame. He called it honor. Honor is different. Like, you know, my marine, I have two marine kids and they serve with honor. You know, that's, that's, that's not what I'm talking about. Fame means the admiration and in academia, fame is extremely local. Right? It's like you're not going to be internet famous as a physicist, but when you walk into the room, you'll be like, Brian Keating, he wrote that paper on right? I get it. So we have this weird prestige version of fame in academia, totally. So, so these beguile us and when we turn those things into the thing that, but we think is going to give us satisfaction. We always wind up in misery.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  That was Aristotle's observation and Aquinas's observation for the modern world. So the game I play with strivers is called what's my idol? Because when you know your idol, Brian, you can be free. You can be free. What's your golden calf? You want to play as we, when we, as we finish the podcast, you want to play with my idol?

• 50:18Brian Keating?

  Let's do it.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  Want to be my contestant? Let's do it. Okay. Here's how it works. Now here are the idols and this is very good social science. Money, it's like money, which are resources, power, which is influence over other people. Pleasure, which is feeling good, comfort for a lot of people. And fame, which is the admiration or prestige of the world. Okay. One of those beguiles you more than the others, but I'm not going to ask you which one it is. I'm going to, I'm going to eliminate the ones that it's not.

• 50:47Brian Keating?

  Okay.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Right? I'm going to say, I want, I'm going to take these away one by one. And when I take it away, it doesn't mean, by the way, you don't have it at all. If you take, if you kick out money, it doesn't mean you're poor. It just means you're average. Right? And by the way, strivers hate being average. So, okay. So of these four, money, power, pleasure and fame, which is the one that beguiles you the least? And you're going to get rid of?

• 51:09Brian Keating?

  I would say money. I mean, I grew up pretty poor and you know, I wouldn't want to be poor again. I'm not, you know, as a public university professor, you know, you can't say I'm rich, but yeah, I, I think money is probably the least kind of worshipful of those idols.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. You're not that money motivated. If I said, you can go buy a boat, you'd be like, I don't want a boat.

• 51:29Brian Keating?

  I can see that and I hate fishing.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. And it's a pain. Okay, got it. Power, pleasure, and fame. What's next?

• 51:38Brian Keating?

  Power is not something that attracts me. I've never wanted to be a politician. I don't, you know, have respect for some of them. I don't have much respect for most of them. Ruling other people's lives, you know, especially since I've had kids, is of zero interest to me. So power would be maybe even easier to give up than money. So maybe, maybe I'll invert those two, but they're, they're kind of tied.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  Most academics will get rid of power. And the reason is because they hate people having power over them. That's what defines a university professor. Right? I mean, it's like the dean, are you kidding me? Why did he become a dean? Because he couldn't write papers anymore. You know, it's like, give me a break. You think I'm going to be a provost? Are you kidding me? Shoot me!

• 52:16Brian Keating?

  My dean, Christine, Christine, she listens to the podcast. So I, I love you, Christine. She's amazing. She keep giving me that lab space, Christine.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  We love you, Christine. Yeah, I know. I know. Probably my deans do as well. So I love that. But by the way, I have great deans. But the whole point is, I grew up with an academic. And my dad always said, never just never exhibit the slightest competence in management, or they'll make you the dean. Take my word, son. He said, so, okay. So, okay. And so you don't want to have power over other people either. Because, you know, it's like, that's not the creative life. That's management. Are you kidding me? Crazy. Okay. Okay. So we got rid of two. And now we've got comfort or pleasure, feeling good, and the admiration of the world. Which one do you give up next? It's getting harder because obviously, these things you care about more. Which one do you give up next?

• 53:02Brian Keating?

  I mean, you know, I'm definitely, I like finer things. You know, I like good food, as you can tell. I like to eat. I like to, you know, do, do pleasurable things. But I'm not unnecessarily as, as, you know, worshipful of that. So I would say pleasure would probably go next. I mean, comfort, it's hard to, you know, peace is a different thing, right? Peace is the highest worshipful value, at least that we wish upon people, right? Even in my years as a Catholic, I remember, you know, we would wish each other peace, because without peace, nothing else is possible. Even if you have your health, if you're at war, if you're in a jail, it's, it's, and if you're not at peace with yourself. So anyway, comfort, I'm not saying that's the same as peace, but, but pleasure, yes, I could give up pleasure. Next, most easily.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  So now we know that what Brian wants is the world's adulation for his considerable gifts. And to be acknowledged for and recognized for his serious achievements. And that comes from the fact that you were raised a striver and strivers are going to strive. And you're going to go into large parts of your life trying to earn other people's love. And and that means strangers and that means students and that means administrators and that means your wife. And that means your kids and that means your parents and that might even mean God and that's pathology. That's an idol. That's an actual idol and that's what's going to always lead you astray, always going to lead you astray. Every anytime that you're like, you're mad at your wife, it's going to be because she's not appreciating something that you're doing.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  And she hasn't actually loved you enough and said, you know, that's so, thank you for, you know, thank you for doing all these wonderful things. You you're a good boy and you've earned more of my love. And when you don't feel like you get it, you feel resentful. This is a classic thing that strivers actually have. And that's the idolatrousness that we all have and everybody has an idol, by the way. This is not some weird pathology and some mental illness. This is just kind of how fallen humans have been wired. This is Genesis two, the fall of man.

• 54:57Brian Keating?

  And Exodus, right? It says Exodus, people think, you know, it says, you shall not leave yourself after, leave yourself after your heart. And your eyes lead you astray, but really in Hebrew, it means to prostitute yourself. The actual translation is, you know, you should not go astray after your eyes and your heart, after which you prostitute. And we physicists and scientists and academics, we think we're so sophisticated. But literally, we we worship an idol in about three seconds, whether it's the H index, which was invented here at UC San Diego. Or some other, you know, citation count or book sales or what have you. Anyway, Arthur, you've been so generous, but I do want to close with a fellow Arthur, a great Arthur by the name of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. He has three famous laws. By the way, did you know that he invented the word podcast unknowingly?

• 55:40Speaker 00

  I did not know that.

• 55:41Brian Keating?

  So you see behind me, there's a sign that says, open the, open the pod bay doors. So when Vinnie Sorico, an engineer at Apple, invented the iPod and pitched it to Steve Jobs. Thought the name, it looked like the pod in the pod bay doors of fame in 2001, a space odyssey, which is the origin or connected to the origin of the word podcast. So podcast wouldn't happen without a fellow Arthur. How about that, Arthur? Okay. So Arthur said many

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Another Arthur C.

• 56:07Brian Keating?

  Another Arthur C. That's right. You have to put the B and you're, you're, you'd be cited first because you have the B and he, okay. Here we go. So I'm going to ask you rapid fire, rapid fire will close out in three quick questions. Okay. He said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And my question is, you've basically reversed engineered the physics of happiness or human flourishing. And you've taken for what others suffer from. So what is it about happiness that is so chimeric? And, and that you've learned that is, is basically this, this 200, 200,000 year old software that's still operating on our million year old hardware. What is it about happiness and the pursuit of it in the, in the declaration of independence and on down?

• 56:51Brian Keating?

  Why is it so chimeric? Why is it so difficult that you have to write these books about it? Why is that just so simple? And we could just all, you know, practice as if it's not magic.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  Because mother nature doesn't care if you're happy and she gives you urges to think only about yourself. You will only become happier when you forget yourself by remembering others and remembering God.

• 57:12Brian Keating?

  Now, Arthur's first law, Arthur Clark's first law says that when I distinguished elderly, I'm not calling you elderly, but when a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is possible, he or she is very likely to be right. But when he or she says something is impossible, he or she is very likely to be wrong. Arthur, what have you been wrong about? If anything, what have you changed your mind about over your academic career?

• 57:34Speaker 00

  I've changed my mind about a lot of things, but a lot of it has to do with what we talked about here where I honestly believe that if I could achieve all of the dreams that I have, if I could arrive at the goals that I had set, then I would actually arrive at a certain level of happiness. And that's wrong for me and it's wrong for everybody.

• 57:55Brian Keating?

  Okay. Last question echoes the origin of this podcast name, which is that Arthur said, the only way to know the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. I want to give you the opportunity to go back to a 25, 30-year-old Arthur C. Brooks and get 25 seconds with him and ask him or tell him some advice. Would you change anything or would you let it play out the way it has in at least this branch of the wave function of the universe?

• 58:23Speaker 00

  I would tell a 25-year-old version of myself that your suffering has meaning. You've become the man that you're supposed to be, not because of the good days, but because of the bad days. Learn from those bad days as opposed to trying to eliminate your suffering and your life will be better as a result.

• 58:41Brian Keating?

  Arthur C. Brooks, one of my favorite thinkers, your mind, we're in love with your mind over here. I think Galileo, you know, he looks a little bit like you with that beard. Arthur, thank you so much. This is such a great book, The Happiness Files, out now.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  He's got more hair.

• 58:53Brian Keating?

  A little bit, a little bit. Arthur, this has been a real pleasure. Congratulations on all your success. I hope we can meet in person someday, maybe when you're visiting a marine or two down, down my way in, in San Diego County.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  I'd love it. I'd love it. Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it. Thanks for your show and thanks to all of your audience. Have a great day.

• 59:10Brian Keating?

  Thank you so much.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  I hope you enjoyed this episode with Arthur C. Brooks, exploring that happiness can lead to human flourishing. And I know that you'll love this episode I did with Google X leader Mo Gudat, who's devoted his life after the death of the sun to achieving happiness for over a billion people on earth. Click here. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe.