Happiness Is A Direction: Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks On Navigating Crisis, Building Better Relationships, Finding Meaning, & What Actually Makes Us Happy

Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, behavioral scientist, and the world’s leading researcher on happiness. This conversation explores the ineffable nature of happiness and meaning, explores why success addiction plagues high achievers, and discusses how science can open a portal to deeper truths. We investigate the dualistic tension between striving and surrender, as Arthur reveals how our fixation on striving often obscures the true source of happiness. Through a captivating shift in perspective, he sheds light on a new understanding of love, purpose, and fulfillment. The intersection of science and happiness begins here. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order 👉seed.com/RichRoll On Running: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll Birch: For 27% off ALL mattresses 👉BirchLiving.com/richroll Pique: Get up to 20% OFF plus a FREE rechargeable frother and glass beaker with your first purchase 👉piquelife.com/richroll Calm: Get 40% off a Calm Premium subscription 👉 calm.com/richroll Prolon: Get 15% OFF plus a FREE bonus gift 👉 prolonlife.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:05Arthur Brooks?

  About six years ago, I wanted to understand why I wasn't a very happy person. I was intensely personal and extremely selfish. I was 55 years old, and I said, "Who knows how many years I've got left?" And sure enough, because I was asking God, I had illumination. What I'm going to do for the rest of my life is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas.

• 1:32Rich Roll?

  An expert on the art and science of happiness, Arthur Brooks is one of my favorite thinkers, but also, perhaps more importantly, one of my favorite people. A French horn player, turned think-tank president, turned social scientist, Arthur is a professor at Harvard Business School, he's a columnist for The Atlantic, and the author of 13 books, including From Strength to Strength and Build the Life You Want, which he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey.

• 1:55Arthur Brooks?

  The deep metaphysical why behind just feeling loved and accepted is to understand the nature of love, to understand cosmically what it means to be accepted in the universe. The vehicle for getting that is more love in your life. And you need knowledge. You need to understand how you're living. You need to understand what the barriers to that are. You need to understand your brain to do that.

• 2:19Rich Roll?

  Arthur's somebody who shows us how to build lives of meaning that can rise from even the deepest ashes. And because this conversation, Arthur's third, transpired in the immediate aftermath of the recent LA fires, we talk about that. We discuss the relationship between adversity and meaning and how to cultivate well-being in times of crisis. We also discuss our pilgrimage to visit the Dalai Lama last year. Arthur shares wisdom he has gleaned over the years from that friendship. And we talk relationships, spirituality, the duality of science and faith, and transcendence.

• 2:54Arthur Brooks?

  So here's the thing. It doesn't matter how many answers you have if you're answering the wrong questions.

• 3:03Rich Roll?

  First of all, great to see you. Thank you for coming to do this today. We're on like day nine or 10 of being evacuated from our house from the fires. I don't know when this will go up, but you know, we're in the aftermath of this, you know, kind of devastating experience here in Los Angeles, which has been, you know, deranging and also clarifying. We're among the, you know, grateful and lucky in that our home was spared, but we were displaced. We've been living up in Ojai. And I've been reflecting on the experience. And I mentioned to you before we started that there was a silver lining in our personal experience, which is that we reconnected with all these friends that I didn't even

• 3:44Rich Roll?

  realize or had forgotten actually relocated to Ojai and had the experience of kind of being part of a community.

• 3:52Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 3:53Rich Roll?

  And the nourish, the nourishment that comes with that, that I think is lacking in many places throughout Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a very alienating kind of place and community is something that I've been craving. And it's one of the reasons why I enjoy going to places like New York where social collisions are just inevitable.

• 4:11Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Rich Roll?

  And that has actually been kind of really nice. And it speaks to, you know, the, the heart of what you talk about all the time with respect to what's important in terms of. Living a happy and fulfilling life.

• 4:23Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, love is really what is the nuclear fuel rods of happiness. And yet we neglect our ability to to experience love because it's the proximate relationships that we have that are going to make that possible with your friends, with your family, with your extended family, your immediate family, of course, with the divine, which means you need the quiet to actually make that happen. These things don't happen incidentally and they will be crowded out by the craziness of daily life. And sometimes you need something to intrude on your daily life, to tear away your daily life. You know, some, a lot of people will talk about this during the coronavirus epidemic, which net, net was really hard on people. The clinical depression quadrupled during the coronavirus epidemic. But a lot of people had these collisions of love that they wouldn't have had otherwise

• 5:06Arthur Brooks?

  because of the intrusion of that very unwelcome event. And I remember that, you know, we were living in Wobbin, Massachusetts, this suburb of, you know, Boston. And, you know, we met some people and we invited them over and they kind of, you know, snuck over during the coronavirus epidemic and we were just laughing and and we got together more and more and they would bring food and the kind of stuff that we just wouldn't have done. And we looked forward to these occasions and we deepened these friendships. And it was because of the outside influence that was making ordinary life impossible and reminding us of what really mattered.

• 5:44Rich Roll?

  I recently had the outgoing Surgeon General in here.

• 5:47Arthur Brooks?

  He's great.

• 5:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, what a wonderful, beautiful, like, heart-centered man that guy is and such a beautiful example of service, like, it really comes from the heart. You know that he cares about these things deeply and, you know, he was speaking about the loneliness epidemic and and in the context of this parting prescription for America, was talking about the crisis of community and and this idea of interdependence, like, we so pride ourselves on our independence and, you know, this myth of being self-made or whatever that we celebrate and herald in our culture and how we we sort of perceive interdependence as a weakness and yet this is a strength. And I think within the context of the fire that we just experienced, we saw that interdependence

• 6:33Rich Roll?

  at play, like, people coming together, despite what you might see on social media, like, boots on the ground, like, Community cohering to solve a common problem. People relying upon each other and how beautiful that is.

• 6:46Arthur Brooks?

  For sure. That was a really good interview, by the way. You did with Vivek Murthy, because you guys connected over this in a big way. And he's more than just a physician. He really cares about the soul.

• 6:59Rich Roll?

  He does. In an unusual way that you don't expect, like in the surgeon general, you know, in his vice admiral uniform.

• 7:06Arthur Brooks?

  I know. Navy officer. But that point about interdependence is really important. And you and I have been, I mean, the last time I saw you was in the Himalayas. I'm sure we'll get to that discussion soon enough. And interdependence is a key concept that we talk about with Tibetan Buddhism. And a long discussion that we had with our friends, the Tibetan Buddhists in Dharamsala in India. And the way to think about this, really for all of us, is the illusion that comes from the independence that we have. Now, I'm an American like you, and I'm an entrepreneur like you. And I love the rugged individualism. I think it's beautiful. And California, which is this, you know, the ethos of it is go west. And I love that.

• 7:50Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, our ancestors came from some old country where life was too boring and too codified, and they came here for a particular reason. We've got it on the genome. But but let's keep in mind that there is no true independence. And I'll give you an example, a California example for that matter. And the redwoods, enormous, incredible, thousand-year-old trees, hundreds of feet tall, they have a root system that goes down two meters. So you can have a 300-foot tree with six-foot-deep roots. And that's because they grow out. And the way that it stays stable is by intertwining with the other trees. They don't stay upright if it's not for the other giants around them.

• 8:34Arthur Brooks?

  We're redwoods. All the entrepreneurs who want to grow up and be rich roll. More power to you, is what I say. But don't forget that your roots are going outward. And if they're not intertwining with other roots of other people that have other ambitions and who can support you, you're going to fail. You're going to fall down. That's the bottom line.

• 8:55Rich Roll?

  And then layer on top of that, like the, the network of mycelium that's connecting everything underneath the soil, like, you know, then, then we can get meta and talk about like

• 9:04Arthur Brooks?

  Then it gets into metaphysics.

• 9:06Rich Roll?

  The oneness of consciousness, which I'm definitely going to get into in a minute. But, uh, maybe on the subject of, of, of the LA fires before we talk about dharm shala, like, what is your message to people who are experiencing tremendous suffering right now and, and, you know, grieving the loss of their homes and their neighborhoods?

• 9:24Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, grief is a physiological process that stems from a part of the limbic system that has been evolved so that we'll be averse to losing things or people that we love. And it makes perfect sense because we would not have evolved and survived if we were not averse to losing members of our kin or to, to, you know, parts of our lives that are very important to us. You have to be averse to loss. And so the part of the limbic system, it's called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and it becomes extremely active in times of loss. And that's what makes you feel sadness and grief. And it's normal. It's completely normal. When you've lost something that's dear to you, and especially someone who's dear to you, that you're going to be in intense pain. The, the pain is alleviated through time in the vast majority of the cases, but there

• 10:09Arthur Brooks?

  is one special hack to the matrix. There's one special thing that people can do to alleviate the grief in this part of the brain. And this where it gets from the biology into the metaphysics, which is to alleviate the grief of somebody else. This is how it works. When you work, you know, as I have, and you've talked to many people who've lost a child, there's almost nothing more unnatural than losing a child, losing a parent. Got it. I mean, this is the natural order of things. When you get married, one of you is going to die first, and it's going to be really, really hard, but nobody says it's unnatural that one of the spouses died first. You know this going in. Child dying is just, it's not natural. It's, you can't accommodate it emotionally.

• 10:51Arthur Brooks?

  So when you work in communities of people who've lost a child, time heals to a certain extent. But the way that you can accelerate the process and make it more generative than it would have been otherwise is to help other people who've had that loss. So when we talk about something like this, the fires, where people have lost things that are dear to them, their community, their home, their neighborhood, their neighbors are not going to come back, whatever it happens to be, helping people who are in crisis is tremendously pain alleviating. Because when you do that, you'll find that it will heal your own dorsal anterior cingulate cortex when you're starting to deal with the overactivity of that of others. And that's how the soul works.

• 11:33Rich Roll?

  It's tough to hear that if you're in the midst of the crisis, though, and you're the one who should be on the receiving end of that service and saying like, well, you can alleviate, you know, this pain that you're feeling by giving yourself to somebody else.

• 11:47Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, no, of course. And there, in the immediate throes of it, when the fires are still burning, it's one thing to just try to keep your food and clothing and take care of your kids, I got that, when you actually need relief completely. But there's never any point in our lives where, once again, where our roots are not interconnected. And remembering that is critically important. There's always somebody who's suffering more. There's always somebody who needs our love. And we always have enough love to give to somebody else. We have enough love that we can accept the love and service of other people, that we can give to other people who need us as well. And that interconnectedness is, it really relieves a lot of pain.

• 12:23Rich Roll?

  Attachment is the root of all human suffering. And every obstacle is an opportunity for growth and evolution. But there's also, you know, timing in delivering a message like that.

• 12:35Arthur Brooks?

  Of course. No, there's timing, for sure. I mean, you and I both believe that things to which you need to become detached will be ripped away from you. That's just, this is the way that it works, but that is an unhelpful message in the throes of the worst loss. That's something you can get in perspective, you can get over the long term, that you can, you can see that truth retrospectively in your life, you know, so everybody who's watching us right now has experienced loss, a really nasty breakup, the bankruptcy of a company, the divorce of your parents when you were a kid, whatever it happened to be, it doesn't have to be that your whole neighborhood burned down, you've had loss, right? Retrospectively, looking back on it, you can find a way that that was generative for you.

• 13:19Arthur Brooks?

  Now, there is a way with the little losses that we deal with, that we can get the knowledge, that we can get the benefit more in real time. I ask my students in my class, in my happiness class, to keep a failure and disappointment list. Ever talked to you about this before?

• 13:36Rich Roll?

  I can't remember, maybe.

• 13:37Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, so you have, they keep a little notebook, and each, each time something bad happens that feels like a loss, or feels like a disappointment, or feels like a failure, which is a lot, I mean, this happens to us pretty frequently, you write it down and leave two lines blank, and on the first line, you write down, it's like, that thing really bothered me, it really bothered me. And then, a month later, you come back to the first line that you left blank under it, and write down, what did you learn? What did you learn about that? What did you learn from that experience? And then, three months later, you come back to the second line and write down a good thing that happened because of that loss. And you're, you're filling in the notebook, and by the time you're going to a new thing that's really bugging you, really bothering you, you start to look forward to it, because

• 14:20Arthur Brooks?

  you're going to be looking back at the, at the knowledge and growth from past negative experiences, and the, and the benefit that it actually has come from those negative experiences. Well, never, never, never waste, sacrifice, never wastes your suffering.

• 14:34Rich Roll?

  That's a great practice, I like that. Basically, you're widening the aperture on perspective, right? And it's easy to say, well, you know, these things happen for a reason, or it will come of this, but to actually kind of track that.

• 14:46Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, and then say, the last five bad things that happened to me, here's what I learned, and here are the benefits that actually came from it. Would I go back and voluntarily accept it? No, of course not. That's not the way your brain works, that's not the way life works. But to say that these sacrifices and negative experiences are all pain, no gain, is just wrong, and the only way we don't benefit from them is by trying to eliminate the pain, as opposed to trying to learn from the pain. That's a really important thing. What you find is that that real masters in this who practice true gratitude, they'll wake up in the morning and they'll say, "I'm really grateful for all the wonderful, beautiful, generative things that are gonna happen today, and I'm also really grateful for the things I don't like today. I'm grateful

• 15:28Arthur Brooks?

  for those things, because I know retrospectively that that is gonna be the source of my growth. I'm not just grateful for the dessert, I'm also grateful for the vegetables." I realize I'm talking to a vegan here.

• 15:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's the engine of growth.

• 15:41Arthur Brooks?

  Yes, totally.

• 15:42Rich Roll?

  Totally. And reframe your relationship with them.

• 15:44Arthur Brooks?

  Exactly right.

• 15:46Rich Roll?

  How much, I'm wondering, like, how much do you think, or maybe even if there's social science on this, how much of our unhealthy relationship with attachment, disappointment, loss, other factors that are driving levels of unhappiness has to do with our unhealthy relationship with death that is sort of part and parcel of the modern, Western world? Like, we've all had experiences where an older person has been sick for a very long time, and then they pass away, and everyone's like, "I can't believe this happened," or like, "How could this happen? It's so tragic, it's so awful," when like, you know, death is the one certainty, right?

• 16:28Rich Roll?

  Like, and, and, and also, you know, I have all these longevity experts on the show, and all these people trying to extend lifespan, health span, and, and often wondering, like, how much of their motivation is being driven by like, this tremendous fear of, of death? And, and what that has to say about the modern, developed world's relationship with this inevitability, and how that tracks to how we're living our lives in the present moment?

• 16:55Arthur Brooks?

  It's, it's, most ancient cultures had a much healthier relationship with death than we do today, and it really comes down to a cognitive issue. And so, modern neuroscience has helped us understand why we're afraid of death. So philosophers have talked about this, and Ernest Becker, the founder of terror management theory around the fact that we can't cope with our death, but, but we understand neuroscientifically why that's the case. Everybody watching us can accept the fact that she or he is gonna die, that they're physically going to die, there's going to be bodily death. They know that, they understand that. And part of the reason is because we have consciousness with the big prefrontal cortex. Your dog doesn't know he's gonna die, but you know, Rich knows that Rich is gonna die.

• 17:36Arthur Brooks?

  The problem is that we don't have the hardware, we don't have the cognitive capacity to understand non-existence. So we can understand non-living, but not non-existence, which are two fundamentally different things. It's not a philosophical distinction, it's a cognitive distinction between the two states. And since you can't imagine not existing, you get a cognitive dissonance about your death that creates fear, because cognitive dissonance always provokes fear. I'm gonna die, but then I can't understand, I don't understand not existing. So I have this prefrontal cortex, this consciousness that helps me understand my existence, but doesn't allow me to understand my non-existence? That fundamentally is a huge problem, such that the only solution a lot of people have

• 18:21Arthur Brooks?

  to comfort themselves is to eliminate the whole concept of death. Now, you might say to yourself, you and I, we're quite spiritual individuals. And so, one of the ways that we deal with it is by spiritually eliminating non-existence. I'm gonna keep existing. That's how religion works. And all my behavioral science buddies are like, "Yeah, you just explained how you have created a religion to soothe yourself, right?" I just happen to think it's true, actually, which is the reason you can't conceive of non-existence, is because non-existence doesn't exist. That's my explanation for it, as a traditionally spiritual and religious person, to be sure. But be that as it may, it's a big problem.

• 19:05Arthur Brooks?

  When you can't conceive of non-existence and it's freaking you out, one of the easiest ways today is just, I'm not gonna think about it.

• 19:12Rich Roll?

  Remove it from your conscious experience.

• 19:14Arthur Brooks?

  I'm just not gonna, I'm gonna act as if it's not gonna happen. That's not healthy. By the way, that's how addictive behavior works too.

• 19:23Rich Roll?

  So then what is the message to the spiritually allergic?

• 19:26Arthur Brooks?

  The spiritually-

• 19:27Rich Roll?

  To how to rectify that cognitive dissonance?

• 19:29Arthur Brooks?

  Number one is to recognize that that is the problem that you're actually having. And so, a lot of people, so the existentialists, the 20th century existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, his contention was, I mean, you're in my contention, how you and I see the world, is you had an essence before you existed. And then you exist, and your whole journey through life is to understand that essence, and to live that essence in the service and love of other people. That's a really, really, I mean, that's, and that's an ancient idea. All major religions are based on that concept, that essence precedes existence. The existentialist said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no." Existence precedes essence.

• 20:12Arthur Brooks?

  You have to, you have to invent the reason for living. You have to invent your essence. And the whole goal of your life, the whole ethical purpose of your life, is to define what your essence is and live up to it. And in so doing, you'll eliminate the anxiety that you have about non-existence. That's, that's the whole idea behind Star Trek. To me, it's, it's just not, it's just not satisfying. Now, if you're a Nietzschean, Nietzsche would say, "There is existence, and there is no essence. So don't waste your time, don't worry about it, have fun."

• 20:46Rich Roll?

  Another way of articulating this idea of essence precedes existence is to say that, this is something I've been thinking a lot about, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced of, which is that consciousness is not a byproduct of matter. In other words, consciousness developing its complexity as a relationship to the complexity of a biological system, but rather, that consciousness is the substrate of the universe, and matter is a byproduct of consciousness. Like, in a non-duality context.

• 21:20Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 21:21Rich Roll?

  Like, in the way that Sam Harris teaches meditation.

• 21:24Arthur Brooks?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And there is a cosmic consciousness that might be exogenous to the individual. There is something out there that governs the greater consciousness of Rich and Arthur and everybody watching this. There is, and, you know, that- I don't know, let's call it God, why not? But not necessarily, depending on who you are. Now, if you're somebody like Robert Sapolsky, have you had him on your show?

• 21:45Rich Roll?

  No, not yet, but he's on my list.

• 21:46Arthur Brooks?

  He's phenomenal. He's phenomenal, but he's an ultra-materialist. And he believes that consciousness is an illusion. And free will is an illusion. That all of this is biological, all of this is radically material. And this idea that there's a cosmic rich, rich rollness out there, that that's just an illusion. It's a byproduct of the activity of your prefrontal cortex.

• 22:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't buy that.

• 22:14Arthur Brooks?

  It doesn't feel right to me either. And there's a reason, by the way, that there has never been a single documented, according to anthropologists, not a single documented civilization that's not religious. There's not a single one. You can't find a society in which people haven't actually searched for and had a concept of the divine. That doesn't mean they're all Catholic. Doesn't mean they're all Hindu. What it means is that we have an innate sense that there is the divine. That there is a cosmic consciousness, that there is a Brahman, a godhead. There is something out there. And you might say, well, I mean, that's, once again, a byproduct.

• 22:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's an evolutionary imperative.

• 22:53Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, it's like, or evolutionary imperative, or just a basic byproduct of this 30% of our brain by weight that is what made us conscious that we're alive and gonna die, and that's what's freaking us out. It's just that we're too, we're very advanced, too advanced for our own good.

• 23:09Rich Roll?

  I actually don't think we're that advanced. I don't think we're advanced enough to really grok the fullness of the conscious experience. And I think it's our lack of humility around our lack of, you know, cognitive capacity to fully understand what's actually going on. And to kind of egoistically decide that this is what it is, that is getting in our way.

• 23:32Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, no, I agree.

• 23:33Rich Roll?

  And robs us of the mystery and the awe and the wonder that I think is available.

• 23:36Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, no, that's right. So the, or, yeah, no, I agree with you. I agree with you.

• 23:41Rich Roll?

  So I have this sort of grand unifying theory of Arthur C. Brooks that I'm working on.

• 23:46Arthur Brooks?

  I can't, am I the first one to hear it?

• 23:47Rich Roll?

  Here's what I think. You know, here's what I think. I think that you are a... Social scientist and a Harvard Business School professor.

• 23:56Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 23:56Rich Roll?

  And you can kind of, you know, shroud yourself, drape yourself in these monikers, right?

• 24:03Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Rich Roll?

  But what's really going on here, you do this, I believe,

• 24:09Rich Roll?

  for the sole purpose of being taken seriously on topics that actually transcend science and are in fact deeply spiritual. And your deeper purpose, you talk about happiness and all these things, but really, your real purpose is to get buy-in, get people to sign up for this journey towards transcendence.

• 24:32Arthur Brooks?

  Wow. So what makes you think this?

• 24:34Rich Roll?

  Because I know that you're a deeply spiritual person. I mean, you're very principled around your religious practices. And I've spent time with you in India with the Dalai Lama. So I know that your spiritual curiosity isn't limited to Catholicism. And I know that you're a very effective communicator. And I believe that you have figured out, whether conscious or unconscious, that the best way to be of service to people is to provide this, this sort of easy welcome mat, like a door that swings wide open because everybody's interested in happiness and everybody is seeking greater fulfillment and purpose and meaning in their lives. And you know, through your own conviction and personal experience,

• 25:19Rich Roll?

  that these are things that are discovered through a spiritual commitment. But that doesn't necessarily translate. It's not exactly a great recruiting tool. And I'm not saying you're trying to recruit people into your religion. I'm just saying that I think that you are an example of somebody who understands, you know, that there is greater meaning available. And the best way to get people to start going on that exploration for themselves is to, you know, bring them in through science and terminology and talking about, you know, the prefunnel cortex and the amygdala and like, you know, this study and that study to get people curious about this world and then trusting

• 26:01Rich Roll?

  that once they're kind of rooted or invested in this exploration, that they will go on their version of the journey that you've been on.

• 26:09Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, it's a... You're accurate. Well, you're looking, Rich, you're adept. I mean, that's what you do. One of the reasons that you're incredibly successful, I dare say, is because of your intense curiosity and insight. So you actually prepare when you have a guest. I'm a, you know, I'm an old fan of the show. So I see you interviewing all different kinds of people and you analyze the person on the basis of deep background research, intense curiosity, but also penetrating insight into the person, into the person as a person. That's your super, that's your superpower as, you know, somebody in this business. It's one of the reasons that millions of people look at your interviews, right?

• 26:54Arthur Brooks?

  There's a lot of competition out there. You're buttering me up right now. Not really, because, you know, it's by way of saying, if you think this, then, then let's take it seriously. I'm a behavioral scientist going way back. I mean, I got my PhD about 30 years ago, as a matter of fact, and I'm really interested in human behavior, all different kinds of human behavior. I was trained as an economist, but I also did military operations research and, and most of my research was on philanthropy and the appreciation of beauty. Early on, when I was a conventional academic, writing my academic journal articles that no, no human could read because they were too mathematically complex to be understood by normal people. But at the taproot of it, what I really, really wanted was I wanted to understand why I wasn't a very happy person, who's intensely personal and extremely selfish is

• 27:39Arthur Brooks?

  what it came down to. About six years ago, when I, you know, I've had a lot of different career twists and turns. I mean, I wasn't like you, lawyer to ultra endurance athlete to podcaster, but, you know, pretty crazy. Like four or five careers. Yeah, I was a French horn player and then I was a scientist and then I was a think tank president in Washington DC. And when I, when I retired from that in my mid 50s, I said, I'm going to go back to behavioral science, but I'm going to write a new mission statement about it because I was 55 years old and I said, I've got, I don't know. Somewhere, I mean, we die young in my family. My dad died at 66. We have a tradition of trying to die young. You know, it's kind of what we do, but you never know. Who knows how many years I've got left? And to write that mission statement, I walked the Camino de Santiago.

• 28:25Arthur Brooks?

  Do you know what that is?

• 28:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we talked about this before, but yeah, I keep, ever since you shared that with me, I keep running into people who have done it and had transformative experiences.

• 28:33Arthur Brooks?

  You and Julie would love it. I mean, it would be, it would be, we should do it together. We should actually do it together because you know, now we've been to the mountains and let's, let's do the.

• 28:42Rich Roll?

  The plains, the valleys.

• 28:43Arthur Brooks?

  Right. It's, you know, it's up to 800 kilometers across northern Spain and you're just walking all day. Your whole gig is walking and praying and in contemplation. And people do it when they're, when they're, they're searching for something. You know, walking is a metaphor for walking towards something. And when I, when I walked that, it was because I was asking God to give me special information about what I was supposed to do for the rest of my life. I've always known, I didn't know. And so, and I didn't know, and it was hard. And on the last day entering Santiago de Compostela, which is a city in northern Spain, is the cathedral there where the pilgrims who for a thousand years have been walking this,

• 29:26Arthur Brooks?

  all different faiths, by the way, this is not just a Catholic thing. That's when you're supposed to have illumination and sure enough, I had illumination that came to me that what I'm going to do for the rest of my life is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. That's what I'm gonna do. Why? Because I want people to have what they deserve in the, in the pilgrimage of their own lives is to have the love and happiness that comes from these transcendental bonds of love of the divine, love of each other, love of their families and their friends, love expressed to the entire world through the way that they earn their living.

• 30:09Arthur Brooks?

  And the way that I'm gonna do that is I'm gonna throw out that welcome mat that says, I got the science, you can learn. The reason you haven't found it is because you don't understand it. And the reason you don't understand it is because it's not obvious. It isn't completely obvious. And now we have this opportunity. So there are a lot of people out there who say, you know, the welcome mat says, want bigger biceps?

• 30:33Arthur Brooks?

  What they want is not bigger biceps. What they want is love and happiness. That's what they love and want. That's what they want, because that's what everybody wants. So the science of happiness is bigger biceps.

• 30:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Arthur Brooks?

  In other words, Rich, you're right.

• 30:50Rich Roll?

  I mean, behind, it's sort of a lament that I have when people, I have this goal. I want to run a marathon. I want bigger, but whatever it is, it's like, all right, why do you want that? And then, okay, and then why do you want that? And peeling back those layers. And it does, it always goes back to like, I want to feel loved. I want to feel accepted. You know, I want to feel connected.

• 31:07Arthur Brooks?

  Right. And you know, the deep metaphysical why is behind just feeling loved and accepted is to understand the nature of love, to understand cosmically what it means to be accepted in the universe. That's what we want. We want to put ourselves into perspective. We want deep understanding is what we want. The vehicle for getting that is more love in your life, is opening yourself up to more love in your life, is to love and be loved. And you need knowledge. You need to understand how you're living. You need to understand what the barriers to that are. You need to understand your brain to do that. And so we do need, you know, self-improvement people, and we do need theologians, and we do need great gurus, and we need scientists.

• 31:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But ultimately, science can only take you so far. You can study happiness. You can try to, you know, formulate a theory about love and you can parse the difference between, you know, feelings, emotions, and you know, all these different, you know, kind of variables and aspects of things that drive or move us away from happiness. But fundamentally, the deeper questions or the real answers are not in behavioral science. They're in art, and they're in philosophy, and they're in spiritual traditions.

• 32:24Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah. So the way I teach my class at Harvard, it took a long time to figure out the architecture of the class, because one of the reasons that the science of happiness is insufficient to making you a happier person is because it's in the middle of the story. If you actually want to become a happier person, number one, you have to go to where the right questions are. So here's the thing, it doesn't matter how many answers you have if you're answering the wrong questions. The right questions are the secret to all enlightenment. Questions are more important than answers, right? So where are the right questions? From philosophy, from theology, from spirituality, from history, from beauty. That's where the real questions are. Then you layer on top of that what we understand scientifically about the mechanism of what

• 33:07Arthur Brooks?

  we're actually trying to get at, and that's where neuroscience comes in. Neuroscience is this, I mean, it's a brand-new field. There were no neuroscience departments 50 years ago, and now you can get your PhD out at any reputable university, but it's still completely contested. It's the Wild West intellectually. Then on top of that, you need data, you need empirical evidence about what's happening, which is where my field of behavioral science comes in, and then you need to be able to apply it. What are you going to do with your life? How are you going to change your habits? What are your contemplative practices? Are you going to commit to actually changing your behavior on the basis of this knowledge? And then, how are you going to share it? Are you going to be a happiness teacher? So those are the stages of what we actually go through, starting from the beginning. You're exactly right. You're exactly right.

• 33:51Arthur Brooks?

  Behavioral science doesn't ask any interesting questions. Aristotle asks interesting questions.

• 34:10Rich Roll?

  There's the nuts and bolts, like the practicalities of the things that you can do to, you know, drive your life towards meaning, purpose, happiness, and all these things. And, you know, protocols and actionable kind of strategies and tactics, and you talk a lot about that. And I'm less interested in the nuts and bolts aspect of this than I am in the internal contradiction in this kind of dualistic sense, like...

• 34:41Rich Roll?

  For all of the self-will and discipline that is required to improve your life,

• 34:47Arthur Brooks?

  Right.

• 34:48Rich Roll?

  There's a counterbalance of surrender and acceptance, right? Like, so, all of these things have a yin and a yang to them. There's self-will and God's will. There's, there's the importance of like, acting on your own behalf, the pejorative being selfish, and then there's being, being selfless, like, and how important that is. Like, all of these, these counterweights against each other. And I think where it gets tricky for people is trying to get your head around, like, how you, how you kind of operate in the world when two opposing forces are important to kind of inhabit in your behavior and in your kind of philosophy of life. Like, faith without works is dead. And, you know, we talked about being independent and the importance of being interdependent.

• 35:32Rich Roll?

  And, you know, the, the tension between what you have to do to move your life forward versus enjoying the life that you have, right? So, how do you think about, like, these dualities and, and making sense?

• 35:45Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah. People spend a lot of time stressing and anxious about outcomes. They, they, they focus a lot about the things that are happening outside themselves, as opposed to working on what they really can, which is the things inside themselves. So, people will be very stressed out and very unhappy and say, "I can't really move forward in my life until the economy's better. I can't move forward in my life until my health is better. I can't move forward in life until my marriage is better." They focus on the exogenous, because that's a natural thing to do. "What I care about is the outcome. What I care about is the circumstances under which I can thrive." But the truth is, you can't affect those things fundamentally. Happiness comes when you're all about what you can affect and surrendering

• 36:29Arthur Brooks?

  in the things that you can't. You know, I had a, you, you sent me a text message the other day that really, it was, I found it very moving, because you were in the throes, you didn't know what you were gonna lose. I mean, is my house gonna burn down? A studio gonna burn down? What's gonna burn down? Nobody knew. And it was close, right?

• 36:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was pretty close.

• 36:46Arthur Brooks?

  It was pretty close. And you said, "I'm doing everything I can." And I'm surrendering. What did you just tell me? I can't remember what I said exactly, but it's, it's, you know, like everything. You were surrendering. Well, it's an opportunity to deepen your practice of surrender, right? But, but to be sure, you're doing it exactly the right way because you're taking care of the things that you can actually take care of and you're not taking care of the things that you can't take care of. You can't make the fire not burn down your house if the fire's gonna burn down your house. You can lower the odds, you can change your behavior, you can protect your family, and then if the fire burns down your house, the surrender itself is the healthiest thing that you can possibly do. Now, that's an extreme case, but there's lots of things where everybody watching us

• 37:31Arthur Brooks?

  has something like this going on. Parents ask me this all the time, you know, so in religious communities, I talk to a lot of religious parents and they'll say, "Okay, okay, Mr. Behavioral Scientist, tell me what I can do to guarantee that my kids are gonna grow up in the faith." And I'm like, "I can't do that." That's the wrong thing for you to be worried about. "Well, I care about my faith." Of course you do. Here's what you worry about: what they see you doing in your practice of the faith. Why? Because there's a lot of science behind this. It actually literally doesn't matter what you tell your kids on any subject for their behavior. All that matters is what they see. Yeah. So if you don't want your kid to, you know, hurl curse words out of the car at somebody in traffic, never have them see you do that. If you don't want your kid to be a drunk, don't be a drunk, right?

• 38:15Arthur Brooks?

  And the number one predictor of your kids growing up in the faith is seeing you on your knees. That's it. Bowing before the Lord if you happen to be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim, right? Or any of the Abrahamic faiths. But you fill in the blanks for whatever your faith happens to be. Seeing, having, seeing you in a position of humility and, and practicing something, that's what really matters. And this isn't a broader, a broader case of this. I can't be laying awake nights about how my kids are ultimately gonna turn out as adults. What I should be worrying about is my own behavior, the example I'm giving my kids. Am I loving them in the right way? Am I nurturing them in the right way? Am I being the person that I want them to become?

• 38:58Arthur Brooks?

  That's a combination of intense action and total surrender. That's the magic brew. That's the magic brew of a life that basically says, "I can't control this. I can control this." And that's what I'm gonna be paying attention to. Unless you're Sapolsky and he would say that it's all predetermined.

• 39:20Rich Roll?

  I've sort of been thinking about this with a heuristic that I'm, that I'm working on, which is there's, imagine three buckets. There's, there's doing, and that's like the striving and the hustle and the work and the discipline and the showing up and the, you know, the working towards goals and all of those sorts of things. Then there's the undoing, which speaks to, you know, surrender and like the undoing of our attachments or our relationship to future outcomes or outcomes in general, which is sort of a different kind of goal setting, I guess. And then there's being, right? So it's on a, on a sort of Maslow's like hierarchy of need, like ultimately transcendence being like a state of just being, right? Where if you're in a state

• 40:04Rich Roll?

  of total presence, you don't need to ever set a goal. All the answers will come to you. You're, you're just in the moment and the right intuitive next action will come to you and you will, you will take that action.

• 40:16Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, no, that's, that's a really hard thing to do.

• 40:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 40:18Arthur Brooks?

  Because we're

• 40:19Rich Roll?

  Well, that's the peak of the, you know, that's

• 40:21Arthur Brooks?

  That is.

• 40:22Rich Roll?

  This is like what we're all striving for and that we've all fall short of, of course.

• 40:25Arthur Brooks?

  I know. And, and it's easy to, to look at that as some sort of, you know, enlightenment ideal, but we can take it down to a, an experience that all of us can relate to. So almost everybody watching us has had or has a really important romantic relationship in their life. The secret to a really happy and stable romantic relationship is being, not doing. It is. And this is what people always get wrong, especially dudes, by the way. It's like, I'm gonna do more. I'm gonna do more. No, no, no.

• 40:58Rich Roll?

  The solution is always to do more.

• 41:00Arthur Brooks?

  I know. Especially if you're a, if you're a striver, you know, and there's no non-strivers watching the Rich Roll Podcast, right? I mean, this is kind of the gig. And so do more, have more results, right? Do more, work harder, get more results. She wants you to be.

• 41:17Arthur Brooks?

  She wants you to see her. She wants the eye contact. She wants your presence. She wants your soul, man. She wants your soul. No, I'm gonna go do something. You're not giving her your soul. You're giving her your muscles. You're giving her your effort. You're giving her your money. She wants your soul. And that's just being, and that's super hard. But that's taking this grand enlightenment down to the granular stage. And why? Because your marriage is a simulacrum for the divine. That's the divine love as instantiated in your house and what you're doing. You're fused by the divine spirit. That's the whole

• 42:00Arthur Brooks?

  point of cosmic romantic love, is for you to experience what divine love actually is, is when you're actually making the eye contact with your beloved. That's what it's supposed to be. And you're denying yourself and her that divine love when you're not being, when you're just doing.

• 42:18Rich Roll?

  That's it, right there. Like, that is like, I mean, that's really profound in the case of like, my own marriage, you know, and as somebody who's an admitted diehard striver, and a striver who kind of arrived, you know, kind of found my thing later in life, and even though I'm like, old, like, I feel like I'm playing a young man's game.

• 42:39Arthur Brooks?

  Me too.

• 42:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's lots to talk about, about that. But I think fundamental to many strivers, and I guess I'll just speak from myself and my own experience, like, what is driving that? Like, what is, what's behind that? Well, it's a sense of feeling like you don't belong, and the way to feel that sense of belonging is to achieve great things, or to get noticed for doing, you know, doing things. And then, you know, kind of a layer beneath that is, is perhaps like, a fundamental sense of being unlovable, right? And so, the way you compensate for that is like, trying to be exceptional. And then, when you have a partner who's like, you know, I want your soul, and I want, I want your presence, that's very threatening, because if you don't feel loved, and you're being summoned

• 43:24Rich Roll?

  to be vulnerable, like, well, if this person really knows who I am, they will reject me. And so, I need to rush off and go make money and do these other things, and that, that'll be just fine and just enough.

• 43:36Arthur Brooks?

  Do you love me enough? You love me yet? You love me yet? Look at me. Like, all these people write to me, and they think I'm cool. Do you love me yet? She's like... I don't want your followers. I don't want your show. I want you. You know, like, okay, let me go do more.

• 43:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you don't really want me.

• 43:50Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, this is the thing. I mean, this is the striver's lament. And this is something that, you know, there's a weird empirical regularity that I find in my own work, which is that successful people are basically all insane. And, and, you know, I don't say this clinically, you know, insanity with some sort of, you know, DSM five designation of this, but basically they're not balanced in a particular way. Because very successful people in worldly terms are systematically violating cost benefit analysis for their own happiness over and over and over again. They're chasing these worldly idols such that they can actually prove to themselves through accomplishment that they're worth something. And there's three things that are wrong here. You don't love yourself enough.

• 44:33Arthur Brooks?

  You don't believe that other people would love you without your accomplishment. And deep down, you don't feel loved by the divine. You don't believe that God loves you, is what it comes down to. And that's deep, deep philosophical and spiritual work that needs to get done. And again, I'm not recommending that any striver become a slacker. And even if I did, it wouldn't matter. I could say, hey, Rich, become a slacker. Sorry, sorry, too late, too late. You can't. It can't be done.

• 45:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and in the parlance of recovery, like, the persistence of this illusion is astonishing, right? Because for every accomplishment or achievement, and, you know, you're then met with like that, that lack of fulfillment that you thought was inherent in that promise. And what do you do? Do you assess and reevaluate your strategy? No, you double down and you convince yourself that it's right around the bend of the next thing.

• 45:25Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, success addiction is just another kind of addiction. And all addictions, substance abuse, behavioral addictions, they're all filling a hole that can't be filled.

• 45:34Arthur Brooks?

  You're just throwing dirt into a hole that actually goes to the other side of the globe and falls out the other side. You can't, it can't be done.

• 45:41Rich Roll?

  So when you're at Harvard Business School and you're teaching your class to, you know, the next generation of ultimate ultra, you know, strivers and you drop that on somebody who's, you know, 23 years old, 24 years old, like that's, it's hard for a young person to, you know, hear that.

• 45:59Arthur Brooks?

  The sooner they hear, the better off they are. I mean, and, and the truth is that there is a solution to that, which is partially best. I mean, strivers got to strive at the end of the day and they're going to be exhibiting certain pathologies, to be sure. And by the way, I love strivers. I am one. My kids are strivers, right? And we'd be living in caves without strivers, without people who had not sacrificed themselves through their own pathological and unerring tendency to try to do more, see more, experience more. I mean, we need strivers.

• 46:33Rich Roll?

  So, so on a meta level, it is an act of service.

• 46:38Arthur Brooks?

  What can I say? I just love humanity.

• 46:40Rich Roll?

  I'm sacrificing myself.

• 46:41Arthur Brooks?

  That's right.

• 46:42Rich Roll?

  You know, like, I'm gonna go achieve.

• 46:44Arthur Brooks?

  But, but back to your marriage, but back to your marriage. That's what every striver says to her, his spouse, is like, "Look what I'm doing for us. Look what I'm doing for our fam. Look around you at this house. Do you think this house built itself? This came from my hard work and personal responsibility and my, my ability to actually build this thing. And why are you resentful of me? Because I don't want the house, I want you. I'll take the house. I want you." And so this is, and again, therein lies the solution. This is not a perfect solution because life on earth is tricky and we all have our issues, as my kids would like to say, as my kids would say, you know, everybody's got issues. But the truth is that, that love is the answer to this. To love and allow yourself to be

• 47:29Arthur Brooks?

  loved is the answer to this. And that, back to your question, that's why I do my work. That's because I want it and, and left to my devices, I'll just like keep throwing dirt into that hole. I'll just strive and strive and strive all day long. But I know on the basis of, you know, what I've learned. I know that, that I won't be happy, that it won't be enough. And it will alienate the people who are closest to me. And my wife will be miserable. And so I have to use the knowledge to actually love and allow myself to be loved in divine love and love in my marriage and my family and with my friends and through my work.

• 48:07Rich Roll?

  There's divine comedy and perhaps a little bit of irony. We talked about this the first time you were on the show. In that, you know, this, this epiphany and this commitment that you have to love and to really prioritize the things that you know are the drivers of, of you living your best life have put you in a position where now you have more demands on your time than ever before, right?

• 48:32Arthur Brooks?

  How ironic.

• 48:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so it's like, of course, this is how it was constructed, right? To test you like, okay, do you really, are you really going to, you know, walk your, walk your talk here when so and so is calling you and, you know, every kind of hot stage across the world wants you to grace it?

• 48:50Arthur Brooks?

  There's some irony in, you know, the first book that I wrote when I started this new venture was how to live, how to get happier as you get older by, by detaching yourself from the, from the, all the details of a, of a success addiction. And the thing blew up and everybody wanted me to come talk about it. And now, you know.

• 49:11Rich Roll?

  And you're like, this is it.

• 49:12Arthur Brooks?

  This is freaking awesome.

• 49:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:14Arthur Brooks?

  I'm finally filling that hole. Right, no, I mean, it's like this, there's, there's no small amount of irony in this.

• 49:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You know, that. And so what, what does trip you up?

• 49:23Arthur Brooks?

  What trips me up?

• 49:23Rich Roll?

  What is, what's the challenge that you kind of face presently and daily?

• 49:27Arthur Brooks?

  The things that'll actually feed my success addiction. It's basically as if I were writing a book about how to beat alcoholism. And then I went on the, you know, the lecture circuit and every single night I was at the best cocktail parties with the best liquor. And people were getting drunk around me wanting to hear more about my book is kind of what it comes down to. And so you it's an opportunity for me to to live in a way that reflects my values, to be sure. And that really starts at home. And that starts with my wife. That starts with my marriage. And we've made lots of progress on the basis of the knowledge. Knowledge is power when it comes to this. But then practice is fundamental to this as well. But the challenge itself has illuminated a lot of these pathologies. I write about the pathologies. I write about it for other people. I experience them in

• 50:08Arthur Brooks?

  my own life. And then I have to constantly hold myself to account. And by the way, I'm married to a woman like you are, who holds me to account. She's like, do you read your books?

• 50:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Arthur Brooks?

  Oh, that's what you're gonna write about? Oh, that's interesting. That's oh, great. Can't wait to read that. Yeah, let's get you to give people advice on how to be a good husband. What's your relationship with saying no? It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. But I have a I have a series of structures around me to make saying no easier. You know, I have people who work with me. And a lot of times, I don't know until later that there was something that I probably would have said yes to. They know my tendencies. I like adventures. So, for example, we put in place in my entire work life, with all of my colleagues, you know, people who run my organization, an algorithm. So every good business, every startup, has multiple objectives.

• 51:01Arthur Brooks?

  And it's very important to to be to be very explicit about the objectives, and then to put them in order. So that you have an order of operations. The order of operations is fundamental. So you're not doing things out of order, and then ultimately doing things that are that go against your values, or that make you unhappy, or wreck your business. So we have really four things that we want to do. And here's the order. I want my work to glorify God. I want my work to serve others. I want my work to be an adventure. And I want my work to to make a living. In that order.

• 51:33Rich Roll?

  So making a living comes last.

• 51:35Arthur Brooks?

  Comes last, and that's a very privileged position, right? Very privileged. There were times in my life when I was a professional musician where that couldn't have come last because I, you know, rent was due, right? And at this point in my life where I have a little bit more independence, it makes it easier. But my organization, the people who run the organization, great people who are totally values aligned, they know that algorithm and they will turn stuff down, knowing that my brain chemistry, that my dopamine is designed to focus on number three, which is have an adventure. That's my weakness. I want to go, dude, I want to have fun. I want to, I want to go to the Himalayas with Rich Roll and I want to hang out with the Dalai Lama and I want to have a great time. Good. Glorify God and serve others. But fundamentally, that was super fun.

• 52:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Arthur Brooks?

  That was a blast.

• 52:21Rich Roll?

  And, and somebody on your team told me when we were up there like, oh my God, we had to turn down, if you knew how much like money we had to turn down from all these speaking engagements that, you know, like coincided with the dates of that trip.

• 52:36Arthur Brooks?

  It's better I don't know, but fundamentally, you know, somebody dangles something, it's a big adventure in front of me and I'm going to want to say yes. I'm just going to want to say yes. And so I have a protection, a layer of protection around me, the people who, who work with me, who save me from myself, who will ask, is this going to do one and two? Is this doing one and two or not? I mean, these were our fundamental values and that's what you need. Everybody needs, we need to take care of each other. We need to protect each other in this way. And I realize this is a first world problem, but it, I could make myself real miserable real fast.

• 53:11Rich Roll?

  So I got a text from you, must've been, how long ago was it? My relationship with time is messed up, but you texted me and said, listen, I'm putting together a small group of people. We're going to go to Dharamshala and we're going to, we're going to convene with the Dalai Lama, like, are you interested in coming? And I was like, this is one of those moments, you know, like this question is not going to be posed to me ever again, you know? I'm like, I don't know what I had planned for that particular period of time, but I was like, I'm definitely not going to miss out on this. And so thank you for that opportunity. Julie and I joined you and your group and that was a truly transformative, transformative experience.

• 53:55Arthur Brooks?

  Who do we want to spend more time with and who's really going to get this thing? So it's you and me and Julie and Rainn Wilson, who's our buddy and who's a very deep guy. I mean, Soul Boom, what a great show that is, but that's a perfect person. He's and we're, you know, we're friends. We want to have a good time and he brought his wife and just a few people.

• 54:17Rich Roll?

  Lisa Miller.

• 54:19Arthur Brooks?

  Lisa Miller at Columbia University, who's one of the real world's leading experts on neuroscience of metaphysical experiences. And she's very personally, very religious as a, you know, an observant Jew. Wonderful person and you know, just a few, a handful of people, very different perspectives.

• 54:36Rich Roll?

  Sonia, Professor Sonia.

• 54:37Arthur Brooks?

  Sonia Lewamersky, who's, you know, not religious at all, but who's done fundamental behavioral science on, you know, gathering data on why it is that after you serve somebody else, you feel happier than when you serve yourself, you know, and you and I will be like, yeah, because God or something. And she's been like, no, no, no.

• 54:54Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, she went, I had her on the show and not that she went after you, but she challenged you on that panel where you shared the stage with the monks.

• 55:04Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's a giant. She's an absolute giant. And this is what we need in this, in this world is people who see things fundamentally differently and who are not, who are not just like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. They who are going to, you know, somebody who's, she's more things about things in a material fashion more when I would think about things in a more metaphysical fashion. And iron sharpens iron when you're looking for truth, as long as people have love for each other.

• 55:29Rich Roll?

  So you've been making this pilgrimage up to Dharamshala for many years, like 12 years at this point, annually, going to see him?

• 55:36Arthur Brooks?

  Almost annually. I've been to Dharamsala about, by the way, that you say Dharamshala because that's the Indian pronunciation and the Tibetan pronunciation is Dharamsala. So both are correct. In case people are wondering.

• 55:46Rich Roll?

  It's spelled with an H, but it's, I know that it's pronounced without the H generally.

• 55:50Arthur Brooks?

  The Tibetans pronounce it anyway. It's in case our viewers are wondering why we're pronouncing it in a different way.

• 55:56Rich Roll?

  It's funny, I had, I had like a disagreement with Julie before we went. I said it's Dharamsala and she's like, no, it's Dharamshala. And then she showed me and it was spelled with the H. And I was like, oh, I don't know why I always thought it was the other way, but now I feel better now.

• 56:08Arthur Brooks?

  No, and in Hindi, of course, there is no H because it's just that all of the S sounds are sh in Hindi and in Sanskrit based languages and all the T sounds are th. Sounds in Sanskrit based languages. So, you know, a very common surname is Datar. D A T A R is Datar. And so that's one of the, and that's the, anyway. So that's why there's a little bit of disagreement on this because of the, the translation into the English alphabet.

• 56:36Rich Roll?

  So what, what motivated you to make this first visit? And why do you continue to go and spend time with him?

• 56:43Arthur Brooks?

  It's the Dalai Lama. And, you know, he's the world's most religious, respected religious figure. And it's just worthwhile anytime. Anybody could have any amount of time in his presence is incredibly valuable and illuminating. And, and reinforces the best that is, that you've ever done in your life and thought and said. Those impulses will be reinforced just by being in his loving presence. He's a living Bodhisattva. He has a Buddha nature. He is somebody that the Tibetan Buddhists believe could break out of samsara, the endless cycle of birth and rebirth, but chooses not to for the enlightenment and love of all living beings. I mean, who's going to pass that up? I mean, this, this is, this beats Disney, Disneyland.

• 57:27Rich Roll?

  He's on round 14.

• 57:29Arthur Brooks?

  He's on round 14. Exactly right. Um, and I went to see him for the first time because I made a, I was running a think tank in those days. The American Enterprise Institute, which is, you know, a public policy think tank in Washington DC. Very nutty crunchy, talking about better policy, better defense policy, better economic policy. But I was making a list of people that I really personally wanted to meet, where I wanted to bring their perspective to what I thought was the policy debates. And so I went to, I, I, I got an audience with the Dalai Lama, you know, I had to go there. I got an hour and a half of his time and I flew to, I mean, Dharamsala is hard to get to. And so flew to India, did a bunch of meetings there. And then there were no flights to Dharamsala in those days. So we drove, you know, hours and hours and hours. We almost hit a goat.

• 58:13Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, it was just harrowing, right? On Indian roads, it's, it's, you've, yeah.

• 58:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Arthur Brooks?

  It's an experience. And in his presence, talking to him for 90 minutes, there was a, he, he, when I met him, you know, in his little drawing room in his home, he looked at me and he knew me. And it's as if he had known me for a long time. And he said, hello, old friend. And I thought, that's just the way he talks. And they said, nah.

• 58:42Arthur Brooks?

  Old friend. And I wanted to know what that meant. And in the first 90 minutes, I got a little bit of insight into what he actually meant because he knew me so, he seemed like he knew me so deeply. I invited him to come to the United States and I hosted him for a series of conferences in the United States around the, around economic policies, around how we're supposed to, how we're supposed to bring more love and enlightenment to the hustle and bustle and to and fro of making actual federal policy.

• 59:10Rich Roll?

  How did that go over with the AEI inside the Beltway crowd?

• 59:14Arthur Brooks?

  They were, everybody was fascinated by it. Everybody was fascinated by it. We got this bumper crops and tons of journalists and why is the president of the American Enterprise Institute hanging out with the Dalai Lama, which was, you know, it's big Vanity Fair spread about it, the whole thing. It was just a lot of curiosity is the way that that worked. But it was opening up my mind in ways that my mind had not been open before. I felt an intense and deep kind of love that I haven't felt with, with people outside of my family. And, and so I went back and invited him to the States. I hosted him a bunch of times in the United States and I went to have conferences with him and personal time with him in, in Dharamsala. We made a documentary film together at one point. We co-authored some articles together, which was an incredibly interesting experience.

• 59:59Arthur Brooks?

  And the result was that my, I love him. He has deepened my understanding of what it means to be a human on earth. He's helped me to be, I think, a better person and a more well-rounded person. And I feel like it's somebody that I truly have known for, I just don't know how long and under what circumstances.

• 1:00:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So when he says, hello, old friend, like, how do you decode that? What do you make of that?

• 1:00:23Arthur Brooks?

  It's hard to say, except that he has a perspective as a, as a living Bodhisattva across multiple lifetimes according to his beliefs. And one has to interpret it as such. I don't know how to assess that. You know, I don't have that, that special insight. I don't even have a religion that, that admits those ideas. But it doesn't matter because when you're with him, what matters is the intense love of the commonality of human experience. The guru that he is becoming to you in that moment and telling you things that ultimately you need to hear.

• 1:00:56Rich Roll?

  So we arrive in Dharamshala and the evening before the first session at dinner, you make a big pronouncement about how you've done this many times and here's what I've learned. And what I've learned is I have a structure that I'm going to, you know, kind of apply, you know, to try to guide these conversations in a certain direction. But I've learned that the Dalai Lama has his own mind up about like what he wants to share, right? And that was exactly the experience in classic Arthur Brooks fashion. You show up looking fabulous and you spin a whole yarn about like where we are and where we're going to go and this is what it's going to look like and the whole thing, right?

• 1:01:37Rich Roll?

  And he just sort of, my sense was that he kind of looked around the room and tried to kind of figure out where everybody is at, you know, emotionally and spiritually and just sort of made a decision about, about what he wanted to share and what he thought like we could receive.

• 1:01:55Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, no, I crafted 45 plays for the beginning of the game and he came out and just like ran a trick play.

• 1:02:03Rich Roll?

  Not so much a trick play because you knew the trick play was coming, right? So I guess I've shared about this experience on the podcast before, but essentially every answer to every question was some version of love, more love, unconditional love, the unconditional love that a mother has for a child, right? Like that's sort of the answer to every question.

• 1:02:26Arthur Brooks?

  On this trip.

• 1:02:27Rich Roll?

  On this trip. So I guess I was going to ask, like on your previous trips or other experiences with him, was it that, was that the answer also or it was different with different groups?

• 1:02:35Arthur Brooks?

  He always talks about love, to be sure. He always talks about warm-heartedness. He always talks about how, you know, the dissent and hatred and conflict in the world is an opportunity for all of us to live up to our true nature, which is of Love for all beings, but he does it in different ways because he looks around and he says, Arthur has something he needs to hear right now and he's going to hear it. I don't really care what he asks, you know, he could ask about.

• 1:02:58Rich Roll?

  The questions were irrelevant.

• 1:03:00Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, you know, it's right. It's like, you know, it's like, they were really well thought out and you know.

• 1:03:05Rich Roll?

  You put a lot of time into it and you deliver them very charismatically.

• 1:03:08Arthur Brooks?

  Thank you. I appreciate that. And he's just like, no, no, no, no, no, this is Arthur needs to hear. And by the way, Arthur is here with these people because together they need to hear this. And he was telling us the, not the answers, but he was, because he doesn't actually, at the level of a Bodhisattva, when you're in the presence of a person with a living Buddha nature, they don't answer questions. They provide understanding to the true questions that are written on your heart, whether you knew it or not. That's what they're doing. And so we go in and you were wondering about love and so was I. And we were wondering about the nature of a lot of different things. And he coalesced around

• 1:03:48Arthur Brooks?

  a certain kind of understanding that created this temperature. And then he developed it more. And I know what my job is. My job is not to ask the right questions. My job is to interpret what he's saying. And so I've done this so many times with him at this point, that at the end, when I know he's finished, then he'll look at me like this. And now I know it's time for me to say, here are the six things that the Dalai Lama is trying to get us to understand today. And the first time that I did that, it was kind of baffling because I didn't remember doing it later. And I asked somebody about it and they said, no, no, no, this is, this is what happens. You were his translator on this day. This is what he does. And, and now I get to the point where I just look until I can see that

• 1:04:32Arthur Brooks?

  it's time for me to translate into the language that my companions can understand most readily, the message of the Dalai Lama on this particular day.

• 1:04:43Rich Roll?

  And can you recite or recall your wrap up?

• 1:04:46Arthur Brooks?

  I can't, I can't exactly at this point, because it was almost an out of body experience, but it's all the different ways that love is made manifest in our lives. Remember that when you're in a position of hostility with another person, this is your opportunity to show love. This is not your obligation to show love. This is your opportunity to show love because in so doing, you're going to be the person that you were supposed to be. You'll understand yourself more deeply. The fact that there's opposition in front of you is because it's time for you to learn this. Don't miss the opportunity. That's typically the lesson that he's trying to bring to us. And that will just, and I don't know why suddenly I'm able to come up with this,

• 1:05:30Arthur Brooks?

  but because this is what he's telling me.

• 1:05:32Rich Roll?

  And how did that message translate into behavior change for you in the wake of that?

• 1:05:38Arthur Brooks?

  It's fundamental because I, like everybody else, like I was working in Washington DC and I was running a think tank in Washington DC and I'm doing economic policy and I was in the back and forth of political battles, just like anybody else. And subsequent to working with the Dalai Lama, I changed my approach. I changed my approach to this. I look at political dissent now as an opportunity for us to understand each other at a much deeper level. I'm just not getting involved in ordinary political battles. I started to move away from anything like the culture war because I want more love, not less. I want the conflagrations in politics to actually lead us to understand each other

• 1:06:19Arthur Brooks?

  at a deeper level and to accept each other and to see the weaknesses and the foibles that all of us actually have and the insecurities that we have so that we can, we can have greater compassion for one another. And that, that's what he helped me to understand. I didn't know I was going to see him. It turns out that's why. I left the world of Washington DC ultimately because I wanted to spend the rest of my life, as I said, lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using the science that is my background. And the Dalai Lama was in the middle of that.

• 1:06:52Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:07:06Rich Roll?

  Hearing him talk about the unconditional love of a mother for a child was, I shared this with you, but like it was sort of deeply confronting to me because I have a problematic relationship with my mother who now is suffering from dementia. But obviously, that was exactly what I needed to hear. And this is the sort of, you know, project of healing that I've been on right now. I have to heal for myself.

• 1:07:29Arthur Brooks?

  Tell me more about that. Did you realize that your mother did have unconditional love for you? That went unrecognized?

• 1:07:34Rich Roll?

  Yes. You know, but I get caught up in the story, you know, I mean, the story of a grievance or whatever. And I can point to this and that. And I'm the one who suffers as a result of that. Right? And I'm, I'm not in a position to have any kind of direct healing experience with her because of her, because of her condition now. So the onus is on me to resolve that internally and then demonstrate it externally, which, which I've, you know, which I've been in the process of doing. I was in Washington, the day after the election, actually, visiting with my parents. And I had, I had an amazing experience with my mother where I was able to express unconditional love and gratitude to her in

• 1:08:19Rich Roll?

  a way that I don't know that I ever had before. And in a way that would not have been possible had I not been on that trip with you, had you not invited me on that trip. And it was incredibly healing. And it was also an amazing experience for my father, who was present for that, to just witness that, you know, I thought, I think that it went a long way. And I still have work to do, but it was an incredibly healing experience that I, that I think.

• 1:08:49Rich Roll?

  To the extent that she could hear it, you know, behind the condition from which she suffers, and I know that she did, like, it was, you know, I know that inside she could feel it and hear it. But like, also for me to be able to just do that, you know, it's incredibly meaningful and liberating.

• 1:09:09Arthur Brooks?

  People are imperfect. I mean, we're just so imperfect. And now, you know, we're the age where that our parents were when we were young adults. And, and we're like, golly, they're just like, they're terrible. And now we're that age.

• 1:09:23Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 1:09:23Arthur Brooks?

  And then we have kids who are like we were, looking at us going.

• 1:09:26Rich Roll?

  I look, and I look at them and I'm like, what are they really thinking?

• 1:09:30Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah. And the, you know, the unconditional love from your mother, from my mother, from, from our parents, that, that was problematic because they're complicated people. And we were helpless and the resentment that came because of the, because of the style of the love. And when we were messing us up and when we were so helpless. And then it comes around and we have this grace and an opportunity to show unconditional love when they're helpless. Cause now your mother's helpless. Your mother's a child and you're the adult and you have the opportunity to show this unconditional love as imperfectly as it is. But it requires letting go of that thing, you know, that, you know, the old South Indian monkey

• 1:10:14Arthur Brooks?

  trap reference.

• 1:10:16Rich Roll?

  Now, what is that?

• 1:10:16Arthur Brooks?

  In South India, there's the, the, the way that they catch monkeys is that you have a, a box that has a hole in it that's just big enough that a monkey can put his little hand in there. And they put a ball of rice in the box. And a monkey will come along and say, rice, I like rice and puts his hand in to get it and to grab it. But when, when it's in his fist, he can't get his hand out. The monkey won't let go. And they just walk up to the monkey and grab the monkey. That's us. This is us. If you don't let go of that ball of rice, which is your resentment and your anger and your memories, forgiving is letting go of the ball of rice.

• 1:10:59Arthur Brooks?

  And this is the opportunity, when you recognize the unconditional love that was so imperfect in your mother, that was so imperfectly expressed, because she's human, you're just gonna hold on to that ball of rice until it's too late and the Dalai Lama was helping you to let go of the ball of rice.

• 1:11:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, incredible gift.

• 1:11:20Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, I know. It's just, and he's, he's a gift to humanity. And, you know, on his 14th pass.

• 1:11:28Rich Roll?

  It was amazing to get to know some of the monks also, and to discover that so many of them have like PhDs from American universities and are much more worldly than you would imagine, and have made this choice, you know, to live this life. And most of, at least, I think all the ones I talked to at some point had to flee Tibet and they're sort of a diaspora of them across India. But their joyfulness is infectious and undeniable.

• 1:11:58Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah. Monastics in every tradition are like this. And so if you meet cloistered nuns, which if they're cloistered, you probably wouldn't. But if you talk to monks, for example, Catholic monks or monks in almost any tradition, there's a, there's a deep joy that comes from the contemplative tradition that really comes from this intense relationship with God. This, this relationship that comes from, from, from paying attention to what really matters all day long, from not being distracted from it. Did you come with me up into the, way, way up into the, up into the forest? To meet the, we met a hermit on that trip. A guy who's been living by himself in one room for 27 years. And he only rarely, every couple of years sees visitors.

• 1:12:43Arthur Brooks?

  And I went and talked to him. I interviewed him. I actually wrote up one of my columns about what it's like to be, to be this hermit. He's just... He's so happy. He's so happy. All he, he lives in, you know, his room is, is mat. And then he cooks his meals out on his porch and he's got about 50 books in Tibetan about Buddhism. And he reads the sacred scriptures and he meditates pretty much all day, every day. People bring him food, you know, people from his community bring him food and his job is to pray for the world. That's what monastics do and to, and to, to help people understand through his prayer, their relationship with God. And, and it's, it's this joy that they actually get.

• 1:13:24Arthur Brooks?

  This joy that you actually see from people who are trying to do that. Now, you know, you could say to yourself, all right, man, I got a job. I gotta pay the rent. But we all need more of the monastic in us. And that means doing the work of, of trying to understand the divine better, of reading the sacred scriptures, of, of participating in a contemplative tradition. And one of the interesting things about my relationship with the Dalai Lama and his monks has done for me is it's made me a much more serious Catholic than it has been in the past. And early on, you know, people go to Dharamsala and they say, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna become a Buddhist. And the Dalai Lama's like, no, no, you Westerners, you, the reason that you're meditating is because you wanna feel better. That's, you're missing the point. You're just getting all spaced out because you wanna feel better.

• 1:14:09Arthur Brooks?

  The point of meditation is to make the world feel better. That's the point of meditation. I don't understand. Well, get with it, man. And so the Dalai Lama told me on one of my first trips, I want you to be a better Catholic. I, I gave him a rosary that was blessed by the Holy Father, by the Pope. And he kissed it and he said, I want you to be a better Catholic. I said, well, all right then. And, and I, I learned a much, much better contemplative technique by actually studying meditation with his monks, which is what I use when I pray my Catholic rosary every day. And one of the reasons that I attend mass every morning to start my day when it's still dark

• 1:14:50Arthur Brooks?

  is because I followed that injunction with great seriousness. I am a Catholic and he wants me to be a Catholic.

• 1:14:57Rich Roll?

  Do you have any internal conflicts that you have to resolve around the differences in spiritual perspectives between Buddhism and Catholicism?

• 1:15:09Arthur Brooks?

  Less than I ever thought I would, interestingly. I mean, there are big differences. I mean, Buddhism is non-theistic.

• 1:15:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Arthur Brooks?

  And Catholicism is, I mean, the Abrahamic religions and the Karmic religions are, there's a lot of difference between them, to be sure. But the whole point is, what I've realized is I don't have to resolve that. It's just not my responsibility. It's not a good use of my time to try to resolve that. That's, as they say, it's above my pay grade. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to bring more love and happiness to the world through my contemplative tradition, through my professional practice, getting back to my scheme in my career. What am I really trying to do? I'm trying to bring the world together in more bonds of happiness and love, doing what I'm doing. And part of what I do is to become a better professional and to write, speak and teach.

• 1:16:00Arthur Brooks?

  But part of it is to be on my knees every day en masse and to be praying my rosary at night. And the Dalai Lama led me on that path of righteousness, most interestingly. What's the resolution between the traditions? I don't know. And I'm less interested in finding out than I used to be.

• 1:16:16Rich Roll?

  There also seems to be an internal conflict between science and faith. Science is the devotion to better understanding through practical methodology, whereas faith is about relinquishing the need to understand fundamentally, like on some level, right? And many people see these things as being at odds with each other. But for me, and I'm curious about your perspective, like, the more you learn and understand, the more magical and mystical and amazing and mysterious everything seems to be, right? I feel like these things actually complement each other.

• 1:16:56Arthur Brooks?

  Completely, completely, absolutely. I mean, the more I learn about science, the more religious I am. The more religious I am, the more I care about science. And part of the reason is because, I think of it this way. If I were an art historian and I were an expert in Picasso, I'd have to have exhaustive knowledge about Picasso's paintings and about Picasso. But I couldn't find out anything about Picasso the man by just looking at his paintings. I could look at Guernica all day long and say, he's not in there. Picasso's not in there. Picasso the man is not in his paintings. The creator and the creation are complementary, but they require different disciplines to understand. Religion brings you understanding. Science brings you answers. These things complement each other. It's fundamentally unintellectual.

• 1:17:41Arthur Brooks?

  It's disgraceful that we would say that these things are mutually exclusive. It's a misunderstanding of the universe.

• 1:17:48Rich Roll?

  So when somebody comes to you and says, a scientist says, you know, I'm not a religious person because there's no proof of God. Like, how can you? If you can't prove it, I don't believe it.

• 1:17:58Arthur Brooks?

  Right. I say that you're looking at it from the wrong direction. You're trying to look into the Picasso painting and saying there is no Picasso. It's like the Soviet cosmonauts in the 1960s in this great coup against the religious West. We're orbiting the Earth, pointing a super telescope out into space and came back declaring, "We didn't see God, so he doesn't exist." And that's laughably, that's ludicrous to anybody who's in any way religious at all. That's what that's doing. Now, again, there aren't many, many scientists who say that. I talked to, I mean, I'll have a lot of colleagues who are atheists, for sure. They're very committed atheists. On the basis of their belief that there is no God, on their basis of the belief that it really is all material, they might be right.

• 1:18:43Arthur Brooks?

  They actually might be right. The whole point is, we don't know because it's a non-testable hypothesis. We can't know. And that's not where I'm actually choosing to put my intention, where I'm choosing to put my practice. Because I think that there is more. Can I prove it? Uh-uh. I can bring a lot of evidence to bear on my science, but the miracle of faith is belief without evidence. And that's an entirely different kettle of fish, but one that's complementary to what we're actually trying to do in the scientific realm.

• 1:19:18Rich Roll?

  Pete Holmes has a great joke about this. Do you know who Pete Holmes is?

• 1:19:20Arthur Brooks?

  Uh oh.

• 1:19:21Rich Roll?

  He's a comedian, deeply spiritual cat.

• 1:19:23Arthur Brooks?

  I should know.

• 1:19:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'll send you down the Pete Holmes rabbit hole after this. You would love this guy. Anyway, he has a joke that's a version of your Picasso example, which is like asking or demanding proof of God is sort of like asking Harry Potter for evidence of J.K. Rowling.

• 1:19:42Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, that's exactly the same.

• 1:19:44Rich Roll?

  In the text, yeah.

• 1:19:44Arthur Brooks?

  That's just a funnier way of putting it.

• 1:19:46Rich Roll?

  Where is J.K. Rowling in this story of Harry Potter?

• 1:19:48Arthur Brooks?

  So she doesn't exist.

• 1:19:49Rich Roll?

  From Harry Potter's point of view.

• 1:19:51Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, no.

• 1:19:52Rich Roll?

  There's no evidence.

• 1:19:53Arthur Brooks?

  So obviously, she doesn't exist.

• 1:19:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:57Arthur Brooks?

  No, no, and when you put it that way, people can more or less understand it. Now, that doesn't mean, given the fact that I can't find evidence of God, given the empirical methods that we have in science, it's possible God doesn't exist. But the truth of the matter is that it's entirely legitimate, even using scientific methods to say there's enough evidence that there's something more out there. There's something more out there. And grappling for different ways to find an experience of the divine, a deep understanding of the divine, all of the really important things in life, by the way, not just God, have understanding without answers. So I'll give you an example. Here's a question, Rich. Why do you love Julie?

• 1:20:40Rich Roll?

  Well, I think there's a series of reductive answers to that. Like, I could name a bunch of qualities, et cetera.

• 1:20:46Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Rich Roll?

  But fundamentally, the real reason is ineffable.

• 1:20:50Arthur Brooks?

  That's it. See, this is it. See, there's a whole realm of human experience that's ineffable, that's only based on understanding without answers you can articulate. That's super important. That's super important. You'll never find the meaning of your life if you're trying to live in the realm of answers you can articulate. You need to... Dig around in the soil of the questions that don't have answers you can articulate, but to which you can actually get understanding. Most of the karmic traditions, by the way, are taught to the novice monks through questions, not answers. You know, if you go to a Zen monastery, a novice monk will be given a bunch of koans. Koans are riddles. And they'll say something

• 1:21:35Arthur Brooks?

  like, okay, contemplate this question. What is the sound of one hand clapping? It's nonsense. No, no, no. The contemplation of that question will give you an understanding of a fundamental, underlying answer that you'll never be able to articulate. That, to me, is evidence of God. It's also evidence of my love for my wife, which, of course, is a simulacrum for my love of God. My experience of it in daily life, the fact that I can't articulate it is divine. That's the magic.

• 1:22:07Rich Roll?

  We're on the precipice of yet another Valentine's Day. People are thinking about their romantic relationships. That obligatory, you know, day on the calendar where we have to, you know, kind of show up and do the thing. I have all this resentment about that. That's another issue.

• 1:22:25Arthur Brooks?

  Mother's Day.

• 1:22:26Rich Roll?

  It is the occasion of like, how are we thinking about romantic love? Where are instincts leading us astray? And, you know, how should we kind of orient ourselves around like, you know, our partnerships with the people that we're involved with?

• 1:22:43Arthur Brooks?

  These are the deepest, most intimate links that we have in our lives is our romantic partnerships. And they're unbelievably important. They're cognitively incredibly impactful. They're super powerful. They're blissful and miserable at the same time. This is a, you know, the Fourth of July inside your head, basically. And they can bring you from the highest highs to the lowest lows. In hours, even if you've been married for decades. It's just the most incredible thing. And yet, they're harder and harder to figure out for a lot of young people today. We're finding that people are about half as likely to get married in their twenties as they were in the 1980s.

• 1:23:27Arthur Brooks?

  They're half as likely to be cohabitating. Outside of marriage, they're less likely, a lot less likely to be having sex. They're less likely to even say that they're in love. And so, there's a love depression that's going on. And a lot of my work is going into why and what do we do? And how do we fix it? What is behind that? So, you find that throughout history, that romantic love waxes and wanes. And to no small extent, it's a cultural phenomenon. And what we've been finding, particularly over the past 10 years, is there's been a lot of antipathy, a lot of activism that's turned the sexes against each other. You know, men and women don't trust each other.

• 1:24:08Arthur Brooks?

  There's a lot of, you know, politics out there about talking about how they're bad, they're predatory, they're exploitative. And when I say "they," I'm not specifying the gender because you can find it on both sides. And so, there's a lot of people in the culture war that are doing a lot of harm for young people and making it harder for them to form relationships. And that's a bad thing to do. That's just straight up a bad thing to do because more romantic love means more happiness. It means more families. It means more babies. And all that stuff's awesome for human flourishing. But then, of course, there is the explanation that a lot of people are watching us or thinking

• 1:24:48Arthur Brooks?

  of right now, which is the technological mediation, which has been tearing people apart. It's just getting harder and harder and harder. When you don't meet people in real life, you're less likely to form a deep human bond. That's just, it doesn't matter how efficient your dating app is. It's just not going to be a substitute for the relationship that you have another person. Look, there's a reason that you don't do your podcast over Zoom.

• 1:25:15Arthur Brooks?

  And the reason is because we have a better conversation when we have eye contact. And I could explain the neurobiology behind it. You know, the oxytocin that we produce when we actually have eye contact. That's a, that's part of evolution so that we can, we can link to each other as friends and kin. But the neurobiology doesn't matter. We know that you have a deep human connection. And when it's a romantic connection between two people who could conceivably fall in love, and you're trying to intermediate it with a dating app or social media or anything on the internet, you're gonna, you're gonna short circuit that thing and you're gonna get big problems.

• 1:25:50Rich Roll?

  Well, we're in the midst of it already. It's not like it's coming, it's here.

• 1:25:54Arthur Brooks?

  It's here. 62% of relationships now start over the apps.

• 1:25:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've got two boys, they're 29 and 28. And, you know, they, they come home and share tales of the dating apps. And, you know, this is basically the primary way in which young people interface with dating. And, you know, my boys, they're, they're not antisocial. Like, they're out in the world, they've got lots of friends, they're at, you know, bars and parties and dinner parties. Like, it's not like as if they don't have other ways to meet people or, you know, meet, meet potential partners. And yet, they still, you know, intermediate that dynamic through, through the apps.

• 1:26:33Arthur Brooks?

  Because that's how it gets done. It's crowded out everything. It's the easiest way to meet other people. And so it's crowded out everything else. It's kind of, it's basically, think of dating apps and dating as the VHS tapes, right? That it was a substandard technology that crowded out everything else because of market conditions and because of ease and convenience. That, that's what's happened. A worse technology crowded out better technologies because of market conditions under, under, under the certain circumstances that we see today. That's, that's basically what's going on here. It's crowded out, it's a bad thing, it's a lousy way to meet people that tends to be extremely ruthlessly efficient. And so it's just basically eradicated, you know, matchmaking and meeting through friends

• 1:27:19Arthur Brooks?

  and talking to people in bars and having your friends set you up on blind dates. By the way, your friends setting you up on blind dates, that's the single best way for you to meet somebody who could be your soulmate. The single best way.

• 1:27:28Rich Roll?

  How is there like some kind of study that establishes that?

• 1:27:32Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, absolutely. And there's a reason for that.

• 1:27:34Rich Roll?

  How could that be? Usually those dates go horribly wrong.

• 1:27:37Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, but that means you need more deal flow. You need to do more of them is the way that that works. But here's the reason. Your friends, they know you. They know who's somebody who is a good enough match, but a big enough compliment, who's different enough from you. And so we have a sense about how people are going to match up together. We can't quite articulate it. This is ineffable. Because love, as we've talked about before, is not an answered question. It's an understood question. And your friends really get this, or your family members really get this. I want somebody who's got the, I think she's right for Rich. How come? Because she's close enough to his values and his beliefs, but she's far enough apart that they're going to fall in love and find each other interesting.

• 1:28:21Arthur Brooks?

  You can't do that when you're making your own dating profile.

• 1:28:25Rich Roll?

  Or just, I don't know why, but I just know.

• 1:28:27Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:28Rich Roll?

  There's that intuition about.

• 1:28:29Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting because there's been some biological investigation about why you need somebody who's different enough. You've heard about the famous T-shirt sniffing study?

• 1:28:40Rich Roll?

  I don't think so.

• 1:28:41Arthur Brooks?

  From the mid 1990s. So, yeah, this is a great study where the scientists were trying to figure out whether or not you could distinguish whether somebody's a good possible mate for you simply by their smell. And so they, on a college campus where they recruited a bunch of undergraduates because they'll do anything for 20 bucks. And they had these guys wear these T-shirts around for 48 hours for everything.

• 1:29:05Rich Roll?

  I think you did tell me this, but like, yeah, keep going.

• 1:29:08Arthur Brooks?

  And they take off the T-shirts and they put them in shoeboxes and drill holes in the shoeboxes. And they give them to random women to sniff the holes in the shoeboxes. And then they rate the attractiveness of the person just based on the smell of the guys. And it turns out that there's a super strong inverse correlation between how close they are immunologically to the smeller and the smelly, and how attractive they find them. In other words, the more different than he is immunologically from you, which you sense with the olfactory bulb in the brain, below your level of consciousness, the hotter you find him. Now, there's a reason for that.

• 1:29:43Rich Roll?

  There's an evolutionary advantage to that.

• 1:29:45Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, exactly. You want people who are really different. This is called a major histocompatibility complex. And that's when you find somebody who's really different, your potential offspring have a better immunological repertoire against diseases. And so that's why you want to mate more with him, just based on the smell which you can sense in your olfactory bulb. Okay, now, translate this into the modern milieu. You want people, people who are different than you are hot to you. They're different than you. But you're going to be adjudicating your mate matches on dating apps as people who are exactly like you. You know, these are the people who vote like you, and they think Austin is a personality, and they eat sriracha, and whatever your thing is, right?

• 1:30:28Arthur Brooks?

  And pretty much, you're dating your sibling, which is not hot.

• 1:30:35Rich Roll?

  Doesn't the pendulum always kind of swing back and find its balance? Or do you feel like this is, you know, kind of a snowball rolling downhill? That is it just gonna wreak disaster?

• 1:30:46Arthur Brooks?

  No, it's gonna get better. Because when people won't voluntarily submit to misery forever. You know, they won't submit to, you know, the baby boomer culture warriors that are trying to get people to not love each other, to conscript them into some goofy culture war that they've got. Young people are gonna fight back and stand up to the man, say, "No, I'm gonna fall in love." "No, I want, I want to be happy." And when they do that, you're gonna find that heterosexual young people are gonna be more sexually dichotomous. You're gonna find that they're going to try to be more attractive than they have been of late, where it's kind of uncool to be as attractive as possible. You're gonna find that there's gonna be more of that naturally,

• 1:31:30Arthur Brooks?

  because people are trying to appeal to each other in sexual and romantic ways. And that'll be a healthy thing. So that'll be sort of the subtle way that people start to rebel against that, against the politics of loneliness and the politics of misery, which people our age have foisted upon.

• 1:31:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Arthur Brooks?

  A lot of young people today.

• 1:31:49Rich Roll?

  Well, I see that. I see that, you know, in the younger millennials and in the older, you know, Gen Z, Gen Z folks. Like, they... Are some of the more analog people that I know.

• 1:32:03Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03Rich Roll?

  You know, it's, it is an act of rebellion.

• 1:32:05Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Rich Roll?

  Like, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get like a record player and I'm gonna buy vinyl and I don't have the apps on my phone. Maybe I still have my account, but I only look at it once a day because, you know, you kind of do have to have that for

• 1:32:17Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:17Rich Roll?

  some level of social cohesion and connection with your, with your friend, your peer group. But to not be in that incessant scrolling that, you know, I find myself doing, you know, like I'm a bad example of it often. And I think there's something really beautiful and cool about that. And I think to, to, you know, your kind of point around getting your head around young people and how do they find meaning and purpose and fulfillment? What is unique to the younger generation that you can speak to? This is a generation that thinks more deeply and more profoundly about these bigger questions of life than, than our generation did. Like, we were just, let's get into the school and get the job and the career track.

• 1:33:00Rich Roll?

  And like, I wasn't contemplating like life's larger questions until I was, you know, in crisis, basically.

• 1:33:07Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah. Well, part of the reason is because you didn't have to. And, and, and this is, this is important for us to understand. So your, what did your grandfather do for a living?

• 1:33:18Rich Roll?

  Uh, he worked at the, the electrical company in the Midwest, in Michigan.

• 1:33:22Arthur Brooks?

  And so I bet you he never said, I don't know the meaning of life. I don't know the meaning of my life. I bet he never had a big existential crisis. And we actually understand why that is with our grandfathers. They had, they were bored all the time. I mean, they're, they didn't hate their jobs, but their life, they didn't, they didn't have any earbuds. They didn't have any podcasts. They were bored a lot. They were pushing a plow or working at a factory or working at the electric company. And a lot of their, their day was incredibly monotonous. They didn't even have computers. They were just doing this thing. And so the result was that their brains were actually accessing certain structures that we now call the default mode network. The default mode network is what turns on when you're kind of turned off.

• 1:34:05Arthur Brooks?

  And those structures are important for you to assess questions of meaning that have understanding without answers.

• 1:34:12Arthur Brooks?

  You need to be bored and for your mind to wander. And so the more you're of a generation where you had a lot of boredom. And when you and I were, when you and I were boys, there was a lot of, I mean, you were growing up in the suburbs of DC, right?

• 1:34:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:24Arthur Brooks?

  And I was growing up in Seattle and we're just bored all the time. And, and, and, you know, my mom would be like, don't watch Gilligan's Island, go outside. And I'm like, I'm bored, but that's the point. And so you're just doing stuff. And the result is you have a very active default mode network and you're using the structures in your brain to access meaning without even trying. Well, guess what? Our kids don't have that. Young people today don't have that because we have anti boredom devices. You and I are part of the anti boredom economy because we're creating content that people can, and I'm glad they have this content. I mean, I'm glad they have this show, but the truth is that they need to turn off the podcast and stop scrolling. And when you're at a light, don't look at your phone and let your default mode network

• 1:35:09Arthur Brooks?

  actually turn on, because if you don't, then you're going to have a big meaning crisis. So the fact that a lot of people are saying, young people are saying, it's like, I want to find meaning in my life. That's great news, but it's also, that's evidence of the crisis. That's evidence of the fact that we're, that we're denying people the ability to actually find these questions of meaning. This is a big part of my research today is about the technological crisis of meaning in our society, how it's changed our brains and what we can actually do about it, how people can, can intervene in this and stop it before it's too late in their lives.

• 1:35:40Rich Roll?

  It's this incredible act of rebellion that requires an unbelievable amount of discipline because basically what you're, you're putting the onus on the individual and the ask is you have to put away this incredibly addictive thing that is calling your name at all hours of the day, right? Well being is a function of the systems of your environment. Like if you think of the blue zones, the people who are that, you know, among the happiest, among the people who live the longest, they live in. They live in communities that are conducive to making the healthy best choice that is leading their life in a productive direction. But everything about our modern culture is an antagonist to that, including our

• 1:36:24Rich Roll?

  devices that are maybe are at the peak of it, right?

• 1:36:26Arthur Brooks?

  Right now, we're at peak addiction at this point.

• 1:36:28Rich Roll?

  And it's what, you know, it's sort of like, yes, we have to make these individual choices for ourselves, or a generation has to make it for themselves. But fundamentally, what is the responsibility of, you know, the organizations, the corporations, the regulatory bodies, the governments to protect us? Or is it just on us? Like, how do we see our way forward?

• 1:36:49Arthur Brooks?

  So that's a super good question, because it becomes a public policy question. It becomes about how a self governance question, to be sure. But we see this pattern repeating all the time. So when, when societies that never had alcohol and then suddenly have alcohol introduced, everybody becomes really alcoholic, right? It just rips through the societies and then they mature and they start saying, no. And, and, you know, new generations will be like, I'm not going to do that. That ruined, you know, three generations of my family and you get a lot less.

• 1:37:17Rich Roll?

  Or you overcorrect and you have, you know,

• 1:37:20Arthur Brooks?

  Fundamentalism.

• 1:37:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, basically. And then it has to swing back or whatever and find its balance.

• 1:37:26Arthur Brooks?

  They don't last. They don't, they actually don't last. And so the same thing with tobacco, for example. I mean, when our dads were boys, all, all men smoked. They just all smoked. And now, and, you know, when I was a young guy, I was a musician, I smoked, but then I quit in my twenties. And there's no chance, actually, one of my, one of my sons, because he was a Marine, he was smoking. But, you know, it was, that's unusual for young people. And, and so it's less and less and less likely because the society changes and it starts to recognize how deleterious these behaviors actually are. That's what's going to happen, I predict, with these device addictions that are capturing our brains in all these sorts of ways. Okay, but in the meantime, this is your question. Before we get there organically, what's the responsibility?

• 1:38:11Arthur Brooks?

  Now, there's a lot of responsibility by the individual to take care of yourself. And the same way that, by the way, if you have a tendency in your family toward alcoholism, you have a responsibility to pay attention to this and not get addicted. I mean, that's a, that's an ethical responsibility that you have, right?

• 1:38:30Arthur Brooks?

  If you're a parent, you have a responsibility to take care of your kids because the research is now unambiguous that these things, overuse of devices is extremely dangerous for your children, just is. But there's also public policy that we need to be thinking about. My friend Jonathan Haidt, you've had him on the show, right? Phenomenal. He's doing the best work, his new work.

• 1:38:49Rich Roll?

  That book is huge.

• 1:38:50Arthur Brooks?

  The Anger's Generation, every place, right? And the reason is because, see, John Haidt's a visionary. He's the most visionary social scientist of our time. He always sees the thing that everybody's going to be thinking three years ahead. It's uncanny. The guy's like Jeremiah, the total prophet. And it's so incredible how good he is at doing this. And so what he's recognizing is how bad this is and we need a, that we need public policy answers to this. We need, you know, we need age limits that are a lot more rigorous and that are a lot older than they currently are that could actually do a whole lot of good. And we need to be thinking more creatively about these public policies.

• 1:39:30Rich Roll?

  The ripple effect of his work in that book is already, I mean, there are already like schools that are, you know, kind of banning cell phones during school hours.

• 1:39:39Arthur Brooks?

  These are table stakes. You know, the whole idea that you should ban phones from schools, duh. And it's so easy, you know, by, you know, governors could have, by executive order, could say, public schools in this state, you're not going to be able to use cell phones during the school day in the public schools. And then, of course, he's the bad guy, or she's the bad guy, that, you know, then the superintendents can throw the governor under the bus and the principals can throw the superintendents under the bus and the parents are going to freak out because the data on these, on these experiments have shown that parents really freak out when the kids are freaking out. But the kids like it better after 14 days. It takes two weeks.

• 1:40:17Rich Roll?

  As long as it applies to everybody.

• 1:40:18Arthur Brooks?

  It's like it's mutual disarmament. It's détente when it comes to, it's, as opposed to the mutually assured destruction that we've got in cellphone use today. But the idea that you can have public schools and people sitting in a cafeteria, young kids. Looking at their phones as opposed to talking to each other. That is complete insanity and it's a self-imposed kind of misery. It's totally irresponsible.

• 1:40:44Rich Roll?

  Well, the downstream dysfunction of all of that is, you know, we can only begin to kind of imagine. But I know as, you know, our youngest is 16. And so I'm kind of tapped into that age group.

• 1:40:57Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Rich Roll?

  You see a generation of people who've been reared on these devices. And as a result, they have very little experience or not enough development in terms of like engaging with people one-on-one. And they become kind of anxious or conflict averse, not conflict averse, just sort of averse to like picking up the phone and calling somebody if they can text. Because it's just, it's less confrontational, you know, like it's less anxiety producing or whatever. And so they don't develop the skill to like interact with another human being. And so back to the subject of dating and intimate relationships, like, you know, then they're, then they're, you know, 21 and they're at a bar.

• 1:41:38Rich Roll?

  But they're all looking at their phones and they're not interacting with each other because they don't have the skill sets or the comfort with how to kind of navigate, you know, vulnerable, open intimate conversation.

• 1:41:49Arthur Brooks?

  Right. So one of the ways that we can solve this inside families is to have family phone-free zones. Like no phones at the table, no phones after 7:00 PM, right? This is important such that we can actually mediate human contact. You know, we can have relationships with each other where we're talking to each other. But the worst thing is when your adolescent is looking at his phone at the table, right? And the reason inevitably is because so are you. You know, you're peeking at your phone underneath the table and, you know, did I get that text? And, you know, what are they saying on social media, which is idiotic because the answer is nothing, nothing of importance. Nothing that's even remotely as important as the conversation you might have with your teenage kid that would actually happen.

• 1:42:31Arthur Brooks?

  But, you know, once again, if you don't want them to do that, you shouldn't do that is what it comes down to. So a lot of Gen Xers and baby boomers are the ones that are providing the bad example on this.

• 1:42:41Rich Roll?

  In terms of dating, particularly with, you know, millennials, Gen Z.

• 1:42:49Rich Roll?

  The apps themselves create like an imbalance and inequity in terms of like matchmaking, right? Like, there's a whole world of discussion to be had around that, and I don't want to spend too much time on it, but it does produce a sort of despairing dilemma for a lot of people, especially when this is like the only way that people are like interacting in order to date.

• 1:43:11Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, yeah. So, the, each one of us has a bundle of benefits and costs in our personality, and things that we bring to the table in a potential match, you know, having to do with our, our, our basic personality and the resources that we can actually bring to a match, and our sense of humor, and our relationship with God, or whatever it happens to be, all these wonderful things and not so great things. And when we meet in person, people can assess the, the full range of what we're bringing, of who we are as a person. When you mediate it through an app, you're compressing that to a very small set of characteristics. And so, people who have the, who have the characteristics that are positive in that very small band are going

• 1:43:54Arthur Brooks?

  to be getting all of the action. So, this is a big, and, and what, what is that small band of characteristics? Things that are easiest to display on the internet, which is largely looks and, and, and resources, you know, how rich you are, and, you know, where you live, and how cool you are, and how good-looking you are. And when you do that, then you're going to probably take, you know, whereas 70% of men, for example, are dateable, you're going to take it down to 10% of men, who are basically dateable, because the other ones are just not going to be attractive, um, as mediated by these mechanisms. And so, they're going to get all the hits from the women. And so, what you find is that, it, it's pretty interesting stuff that shows that,

• 1:44:34Arthur Brooks?

  that men find 80% of attractive women, and women find 20% of men attractive, or something like that. It's just like inverse proportion, and it's upside down. And so, the result is, you're going to get these asymmetries, these incredible asymmetries, which doesn't just, is not just bad for women, it's bad for men, because what it does is it torques the incentives of men to be next, next, next, next, next. And men are not supposed to behave that way. If you want to, if a man who wants to be happy shouldn't have that much variety. Because all that's gonna do is it's gonna create an addiction. All it's gonna do is gonna torque the dopamine in his brain. Because there's this dopamine, one of the D3 dopamine allele.

• 1:45:19Arthur Brooks?

  And for sexual variety. All that's gonna, you're gonna get really, really, really good. At wanting as much sexual variety as you can possibly get. And you'll just become an addict. It's like living in a liquor store.

• 1:45:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, meanwhile, from, from the female perspective for, you know, a desirable female. That person is gonna have just an unlimited, you know, capacity for as many, you know, there's gonna just be an unlimited amount of men who are gonna wanna date that person. Right, so it's working both ways in unproductive and unhealthy ways.

• 1:45:56Arthur Brooks?

  It hurts everybody.

• 1:45:56Rich Roll?

  But these platforms fundamentally are failing to serve like, you know, the vast majority of the people that are on them. So at some point, it does feel like, look, it's not working for almost everybody who's on these platforms.

• 1:46:08Arthur Brooks?

  Right.

• 1:46:09Rich Roll?

  Platforms, right? So, so something better has to come. Or there has to be, you know, kind of a paradigm shift.

• 1:46:15Arthur Brooks?

  Right.

• 1:46:16Rich Roll?

  Because those people, you know, why would they stay there? Like, there has to be an alternative to this. Of course, the alternative is real life experience.

• 1:46:23Arthur Brooks?

  Real life experiences, and that's what the rebellion is gonna be. It's gonna be a rebellion to real life. Things that can't go on forever won't, as a general rule. And you find that the majority of people on the app say that the apps are insufficient for meeting their needs. That's what most people say. And they, and they regret the fact that most, that, that that's where they have to go to meet people to have a potential romantic relationship. And when you're in a regret about it, then sooner or later, you're actually gonna get rebellion against it, is what we're actually gonna find. The early data, by the way, there's a pretty interesting study that just came out that shows that, that couples who meet and ultimately marry based on the app, some are really, really successful. But on average, they tend to be less stable marriages. Those that start on the app.

• 1:47:04Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 1:47:04Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And we have enough data now because the apps have been around long enough to track these things.

• 1:47:09Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. They're more likely to result in, in, in divorce.

• 1:47:16Arthur Brooks?

  If you've been on the app. So that doesn't mean, again, your results may vary. You know, the people who are listening to us are like, I met my wife on the app. This is meaning to me divorce. No, it just means that that's that that tends to be the case in a statistically significant fashion. That was an empirical regularity that we see for sure, which just means that these are, they tend to be matches that are not quite as good.

• 1:47:37Rich Roll?

  Do you feel in any way that, you know, you've seen this sort of trend around like the trad wife, like they're sort of a traditional values kind of, you know, ascendancy right now? Is that in some way, does it track that that is like a reaction or some kind of response to this dating app culture?

• 1:47:55Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, sure, for sure. Absolutely. It's what you'd always get. You get a kind of a, a sort of a techno utopianism is always answered by a kind of fundamentalism. That's what you always get. I mean, you get sort of this Amish behavior as a result of this, you know, modern society, this sucking all the life out of and all the love and all the interests and all the adventure out of our relationships. So let's go back to 1950 is the whole point.

• 1:48:18Rich Roll?

  Or like, you know, 1860.

• 1:48:20Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, I know. It's a, but you know, American society is animated by fads and panics. Fundamentally, American society is about fads and panics. Not all societies are. We, every society has its pathologies, but that's ours, you know? So this is the thing that we're all doing and nobody questions it. This is the thing that we all believe. Here's the thing we're all mad about right now.

• 1:48:40Rich Roll?

  Right. Except now it's accelerated, like the, the sort of life cycle of these things, like just happen. It's just so rapid.

• 1:48:47Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah. And we're going to look back on a lot of the stuff that most people think is just basic civilized views right now, and we'll think of them as barbaric in 10 years, probably.

• 1:48:55Rich Roll?

  So it's one thing for you and I to talk about meaning, purpose and happiness as people who are in the, in our kind of era of crystallized intelligence and we're, you know, we're, we're looking, we're looking, we're looking backwards at our life and trying to make sense of things, but. As somebody who's now kind of directing your focus on younger people, like, what's different about how you talk about these issues with respect to that generation versus ours?

• 1:49:22Arthur Brooks?

  So, when I'm talking, so, the first book that I wrote about this was From Strength to Strength, that's how you and I met. That was the first book that, that, you know, the first time I came on the show, we talked about that. That made a big assumption, which is, you're not perfect in terms of meaning of life, but you have a good concept of it. That's not an assumption I can make with people in their mid twenties. What you find is that the inflection point in generalized anxiety and clinical depression for people in their teens and twenties exactly follows the answer to the question, "I feel like my life is meaningless," and it tracks with data showing that when people stop looking for the meaning of their life. Also, of course, it's contemporaneous with the onset, with the sort of the critical mass

• 1:50:06Arthur Brooks?

  of people living online. So that's, all these things are going together. So when I'm talking about people in crisis in the second half of their life, or, you know, burning out, or having a midlife crisis, super strivers not knowing what they're gonna do, that's a different problem, because that's predicated on the idea that you have an underlying sense of life's meaning that you can tap into and live in a different way. I can't make that assumption with people in their twenties today. So I have to go back to first principles. That's why what I'm writing about right now is the meaning of your life and how to find it. You know, one of the big things that you actually need to do to understand about your brain, the practices you need to actually start adopting, so that you will open yourself up to questions of meaning and come to some sort of an understanding about it.

• 1:50:50Rich Roll?

  I think that there's a paralysis that ensues with young people when you throw words around like purpose and meaning. It's just sort of like, I'm supposed to know my purpose, and what does that mean? So I either feel... Bad about myself or guilty or less than, or I'm just sort of confused. I don't know what that even means at that stage of life.

• 1:51:10Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, for sure. And so that's why it is so big that for the longest time I would just talk about it in those terms and it is quite paralyzing. So I'm writing a book about it right now that talks about actually, what are the steps to go and find it? Which starts off with confronting the fact that there is a problem, understanding neurophysiologically what the problem is, talking about the things you need to stop doing in your life, and then the practices that you need to actually admit the sources, purpose and meaning in your life. And it's not straightforward because you know, back in the Pleistocene, they didn't have these problems. And even our grandfathers didn't have this problem because just daily life made it organic.

• 1:51:54Arthur Brooks?

  Some of it is still pretty straightforward. You know, when I only have 10 minutes with young people, I'll talk about, taking a little test, a little two-question exam of whether or not you have a crisis in your life, and if you do, what to go in search of. Two questions, for example, I'll ask my students, or my adult kids for that matter.

• 1:52:16Arthur Brooks?

  Why do you believe you're alive? And for what would you give your life? Because you find that people who have the greatest tangible sense, understanding of meaning of life, they have a sense of understanding about the why of their life and for what they'd give their life. It's like being alive and not being alive. This is one of the reasons that people who've been in combat roles in the military have such a strong sense of life's meaning, because they've had to confront that without ever even asking those questions. For what would you give your life? Well, the Marines.

• 1:52:50Rich Roll?

  But it's self-selecting in some regard, right? Because those are the kind of people that would go into the military. They already have a conviction around that.

• 1:52:56Arthur Brooks?

  Maybe, although, you know, being the father of two Marines, I can tell you that a lot of them, they go into the Marines because they want adventure and they come out having found meaning. Because they've they've addressed these particular questions. So when I talk to my students, they're on average 28 years old, they're MBA students at Harvard, I say, one of your projects is going to be to be thinking very, very deeply about your theory about why you're alive, which means how were you created and for what purpose? That means writing a mission statement. And what would you die happily for right now? Happily?

• 1:53:29Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's a rough question for anybody, but for a young person, you know, that's, that's a very confronting question.

• 1:53:35Arthur Brooks?

  They find it super exciting to take it on. They find it super exciting because they don't have to do it right now. It's like, this is the project. And they're finally like, oh, I don't have to go find the meaning of my life. I have to try to understand the answers to those questions, which is a lot more tangible than what they've been dealing with. Why am I alive? And so what do I read? I'll read this and read this and read this and talk to this person and, you know, start going and start a contemplative practice. And you can start doing stuff to try to get the information that will give you some illumination around the, around at least an understanding of those questions. And that's, that's progress. That's, that feels, that feels less diffuse. It feels less unanswerable.

• 1:54:20Rich Roll?

  Still, still a steep mountain to climb.

• 1:54:23Arthur Brooks?

  Totally. Meaning is a hard mountain. Meaning is brutal, man. Meaning is brutal. I mean, it's like, again, this is the same thing. It's like, we can conceive of our death, but we can't conceive of our non-existence. There's that your prefrontal cortex is not ideally designed to confront questions that have understanding but no answers. This is what the contemplative traditions, they'll say, you know, to the junior monk, okay, for the next 40 years, chop wood and carry water while you think about these koans.

• 1:54:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:53Arthur Brooks?

  You know, because it's not, because it's not straightforward.

• 1:54:58Rich Roll?

  As somebody who is in higher education, but also came late to a life of academic kind of interest, right? How do you think about the state of education? And what changes would you make? Knowing what you know about happiness and meaning and all these things, right? That are so important and so vital, yet aren't really part and parcel of any kind of curriculum. And when we have these young, very plastic minds in the traditional education system that was established decades and decades ago in a very different world, like, what changes would you make that you think would create better, more fulfilled humans?

• 1:55:41Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah. It's what would create more fulfilled humans versus what would create more competent professionals is a different thing. And so there's basically two parallel crises that we've got in higher ed today. One is that it's become VOTAC. You know, that higher ed has become vocational and technical. And I'm all about VOTAC, by the way. I think it's awesome and it's really good.

• 1:56:01Rich Roll?

  There should be two different kind of tracks, right? Like, here's a path to a vocation. And here's kind of like the deeper question, you know, how to be a happy person and like, you know, be functional in our world.

• 1:56:14Arthur Brooks?

  A really good citizen, you know, somebody who could really be a leader as opposed to, you know, you're gonna, here's how you fix a diesel engine. I think we need people who can fix diesel engines for sure. And it's a very fulfilling thing to do. But the whole idea that we've reduced a lot of higher ed to, will they get a job and will they make money? Is a big problem. The parallel track is people go to college to become indoctrinated and propagandized about a certain way of thinking as a decent person. What to think is not what you should be getting in college. How to think is what should be going on in college. And so those two things have kind of enveloped the culture of higher education in a very deleterious way, particularly over the past 15 years, which is that you've got this activism and cancel culture.

• 1:56:59Arthur Brooks?

  And here's what you need to think, which has been hugely problematic for mental health in particular, where you go to college and you realize you just didn't know your whole life, what a victim you really are, and how crummy your life actually is, and how terrible all those people who don't think like you are. And you're being activated to be angry and aggrieved and a victim. That's A lot of what's going on in college today, and that's a big problem. The other side is, I'm going to college because I'm going to study this because that's the way I'm going to get a job, and I'm all about getting the job, et cetera, et cetera. The college experience is supposed to be between those, and that's a lot of what's been lost. Let's talk to people about how to think, what humanity is all about, what are the

• 1:57:43Arthur Brooks?

  biggest questions, what is the greatest that has been thought and said, to quote Matthew Arnold, about the real essence of culture itself? What will actually make you into the kind of person who can lead others to a life of greater happiness? How can you become a more tolerant individual in a pluralistic society based on enlightenment values? Crazy! That's like, old school, man! But that's what we need to get back to, and to militate against the two temptations of activism and utilitarianism.

• 1:58:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, on top of that is layered all manner of social expectations around career trajectories and upward mobility also, right? So it's sort of like, you're 18 and you have to already know what it is that you want to be pursuing and what you want to be studying, as if this is like a sort of proxy for the rest of your life.

• 1:58:37Arthur Brooks?

  Which is a recipe for unhappiness, quite frankly. There's really interesting research, well, it goes back to the 1990s, from a social psychologist at USC named John Driver. He did work on professional trajectories that people have, and he says there's four. There's four kinds of people psychologically. The first type is the type that all colleges think we are, which is called the linear career trajectories. So you came out of Stanford, went to law school, became a lawyer, and you'd change jobs every time you got a better lawyer gig that gave you money, more money, more power, more admiration of other people, and just linear. That's what college treats people as in this utilitarian way.

• 1:59:19Arthur Brooks?

  There are also, there's the expert career trajectory, which your dad had, or your grandfather had, which is you, you know, you had stability in your life. You didn't live to work, you worked to live, and you had a home life, and you did a good job, but you got a 3% raise every year, and you just kind of stayed with the same thing for a long time. That was my dad, too. There's the transitory career trajectory, which is, I, I, I don't work to live at all. I only work, and I wouldn't if I didn't have to. I only do it because I gotta pay the rent. So now I'm gonna be a barista in Portland, Maine, and I think I'll probably, you know, drive a moving truck out of Tucson for a while, and, oh, I fell in love with a girl in San Diego, so I moved there. That's what your parents are, are worried about. That's what everybody's parents are worried their kids are gonna be. But the big majority

• 2:00:02Arthur Brooks?

  of creatives who are watching us, and you, and me, are called the spiral career trajectory, where every seven to 12 years, you get a new career of your own imagining, that's based on all the things that you've learned, and all the creativity you want to bring to bear, and all the things written on your soul that you want to do next. And life's an adventure, man. Your career is part of your life, and it's a big adventure. And, and one of the things that we're not good at in higher ed is preparing people for the spiral career trajectories that characterize the people that are most inflecting in our society. These are the people, and they're not gonna be happy if they're set up as linears, they're gonna feel like losers, and they're gonna feel like, ah, I couldn't hold a job for

• 2:00:44Arthur Brooks?

  more than 10 years, and how come I, how come I burned out so early? And, yeah, it's true, you know, I gave up a really lucrative career as a, as a lawyer, so I could become ultra marathon runner. There's a lot of money in that, you know? And the truth is, that's the way it had to happen, because that's the way you were designed, and that's how you're gonna create your maximum value. And a broad panoply of, of, of intellectual experiences and inputs in college will prepare you to do that in a wonderful way that will be empowering for you and inspirational to others.

• 2:01:15Rich Roll?

  When you think of all of your career changes and, you know, kind of reimaginings, like it feels amongst our generation to be somewhat radical, but when I think of the younger generation, no, this is just normal. Like when you're thinking about how you're going to speak to them, you're speaking their language with respect to this. Like that's, that's natural. The like, yeah, I'm going to go, I'm going to work here for a while. I'm going to go down to Costa Rica and work on a mango farm or whatever. And then it's like, it's no big deal, right? Like this is, life is an adventure. It doesn't have to be the pejorative of the barista, you know, the bouncing around and kind of reacting to your life, but intentionally kind of curating your life around experiences in that way feels like the vernacular of-

• 2:02:00Arthur Brooks?

  Kind of, kind of. That's a little bit more of this transitory experience though, where people who are sort of checking out, they're rebelling against what they thought was the ultra-careerism of their parents' generation, where they're going to be anti-careerism, which is a, that reaction is problematic on its face too, because that's not really a spiral. That's not this idea of, I'm going to dedicate myself to real excellence and then learn a new thing.

• 2:02:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I guess what I'm saying, what I'm getting at is more of conscious intentionality around how you're pursuing your life through experiences that are, that are creating growth and meaning. And then when that, when you've kind of exasperated that, it's like, okay, on to the next thing. Like I've learned what I needed to learn and like, and like, you know, I don't, you know, like my mental health isn't doing so well with this boss. And so I, I have enough kind of self-respect to like step outside of this and go pursue it elsewhere.

• 2:02:56Arthur Brooks?

  And enough perspective to be able to do it. And, you know, and again, not everybody can do that because that's, that's a relatively privileged thing to be able to do.

• 2:03:03Rich Roll?

  Of course, for sure.

• 2:03:04Arthur Brooks?

  But, but there, to the extent that we can in college, give people the wherewithal to think not just about, I'm going to quit because I don't like my boss, but I'm going to have a series of experiences where I create value in different areas of life. I'm going to have a full life, a life, I'm going to be fully alive and I'm going to, I'm going to do something that really benefits humanity in all sorts of different ways. I mean, these are the people that really do change life on earth the most. And, and that's what you need, a college, a fully, you know, variegated intellectual experience at the higher ed level. That's what colleges are supposed to do. It's not for everybody, but for people who do it, I mean, man, they should be learning a lot about a lot of different things and having their mind blown in different ways. So they can think, so they can learn how to think.

• 2:03:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, the final thing I want to kind of quickly cover before I release you, you back to your life.

• 2:03:57Arthur Brooks?

  This is awesome.

• 2:03:57Rich Roll?

  It's related to this. So, all right. On some level, like higher education is about risk mitigation, right? And I've heard you talk about like, your life is a startup, right? And you have to pursue it entrepreneurially. And in order to do that well, like you have to like sort of embrace risk.

• 2:04:14Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:15Rich Roll?

  So that's almost, you know, orthogonal to this idea of, oh, you go to a college and like you're on a track and there's a certain like expectation, whether it's an illusion or not, of some level of security that is mitigating the risk of a very scary world that awaits you.

• 2:04:31Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, it can be. It depends on what your perspective is going into the college experience. If you're going to, and this is one, this is another big mistake that we're making in higher ed is making life safe. On the contrary, college should be dangerous. I don't mean dangerous like you're going to get drunk and fall out of a dorm window. That there's a lot of that too.

• 2:04:51Rich Roll?

  Changing your ideas and your world, stress testing your.

• 2:04:54Arthur Brooks?

  This is not a safe space. You should go into college and be like, holy cow, I don't know what I'm going to hear in that class. I don't know what nut job is going to stand up and give me this radical opinion and I'm going to go, that's awesome. Come sit next to me because I totally disagree. That's what it's supposed to be is intellectually dangerous. That's what it's supposed to be about. So you come out with this courage. You come out with this sense of fortitude. You come out with this sense of strength, of intellectual strength that you've got. Where you can hear things that you disagree with, you can engage in a world that's full of dissension. And that's not what we're finding. You know, people are going to college and getting safe spaces and trigger warnings and, and, and they're hearing that certain points of view are completely off limits.

• 2:05:38Arthur Brooks?

  And that's, that's just dumb because it makes people weaker. And that actually leads to the risk aversion that you're talking about. We should have risk seekers going to college for precisely the reason that they don't know what they're going to get.

• 2:05:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm hearing all of that and I'm agreeing with you and I also have an awareness like we're two older white guys talking about this.

• 2:05:59Arthur Brooks?

  I know.

• 2:06:00Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:06:01Arthur Brooks?

  I know. I know, I know, I know that's the case. But we're not two older white guys talking about this. We're two human beings talking about this. And there's a lot that could stress test our basic paradigms and we need that just as much as anybody else needs it. We need to live in the idea space. So when I talk about a university that's intellectually dangerous, I don't mean within the parameters of my point of view. I say all of it, man. All of it, including the stuff that says that I'm the bad guy or whatever, whether I agree with it or not. People need to be challenged is the bottom line.

• 2:06:36Rich Roll?

  I mean, I think for everybody's well-being, you know, we need, to sort of Susan David's thesis, like emotional resilience is a function of, you know, putting ourselves in uncomfortable situations and part of that is having our ideas challenged and, you know, even if the result of that experience is to strengthen what you already believed, you know, I think this is a critical aspect of like maturing in a healthy way.

• 2:07:01Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, I have this great colleague at the Kennedy School, however, his name is Tarek Masood. He's a Egyptian guy and he's a big thinker. Man, he's fantastic intellectually. He's the editor of the Journal of Democracy. And he says that the university should be like a gym. It's like a gym. You don't go to the gym to, you know, feel no pain. You don't go to the gym to not be stretched. You go to the gym because something is uncomfortable, so you will get stronger. That's the whole point. And everybody should be able to go to the gym. There should be a gym for everybody. That's his whole point. And I think that's right. I think that's right. And when we don't do that, then people get weaker. And when people get weaker, more flaccid intellectually, we have problems downstream

• 2:07:43Arthur Brooks?

  that we're seeing in our society today, which is a complete lack of ability to listen with warm-heartedness to people of different points of view. It's the polarization and the populism that we have on both sides for the political spectrum. We have the fact that, you know, that this, the ideologies, the polarized ideologies on the campus are centrally responsible for the increase in mental illness that we see for young people, of their anxiety, of their depression. Those are things that actually come from this environment where you're convinced of grievance and victimization and those are signs of intellectual weakness. And I think that we're responsible at higher ed.

• 2:08:21Rich Roll?

  When is this book going to be done and out there?

• 2:08:25Arthur Brooks?

  March of 26, God willing. You know how books are.

• 2:08:28Rich Roll?

  I know. I'm in it myself.

• 2:08:30Arthur Brooks?

  It's called The Meaning of Your Life and How to Find It. And I'm in the, you know, when you're writing a book, you remember in the 60s, there was that famous book called On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kubler Ross?

• 2:08:41Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 2:08:41Arthur Brooks?

  The Swiss psychiatrist who talks about the stages of death and dying. Those are the same stages as writing a book. Right? There's like shock and then there's denial and then there's rage. And then there's bargaining and then there's finally there's, there's acceptance.

• 2:08:58Rich Roll?

  Which phase are you in?

• 2:08:59Arthur Brooks?

  I'm still in rage and denial.

• 2:09:02Rich Roll?

  I'm squarely in that camp right now.

• 2:09:07Rich Roll?

  It's deeply painful and you know, you're, I'm like, why did I sign up to do this again?

• 2:09:11Arthur Brooks?

  I know.

• 2:09:12Rich Roll?

  Remind me.

• 2:09:12Arthur Brooks?

  It seems so good.

• 2:09:14Rich Roll?

  It's always good when it's done and somehow it always does get done.

• 2:09:16Arthur Brooks?

  You like having written books?

• 2:09:18Rich Roll?

  I like, yeah, I like, I like having written them and then getting to, you know, go out and talk about them.

• 2:09:24Arthur Brooks?

  I know.

• 2:09:25Rich Roll?

  The writing part.

• 2:09:25Arthur Brooks?

  I know. It's funny because books, it's, you know, books are still a cultural phenomenon and your, your, your, your life will be kind of these are the, it's like your children. They're punctuated around particular offspring and you think that's so anachronistic. If you think about it, you write a book, it's a huge bestseller. You have 500,000 people buy your book. It's a blockbuster. That's like an average week of your podcast.

• 2:09:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you, you killed yourself for multiple years to make it happen. But there is a, there is a staying power, you know, it's that, that is indelible, I think with books and, and, and people are reading books more than ever right now. You know, I think they're, I think they're, you know, not just relevant, they're crucial and important.

• 2:10:10Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah. Again, no, no, it's, um, it's an incredible phenomenon that that actually doesn't change. And what a privilege it is to be able to do them.

• 2:10:18Rich Roll?

  Well, you're always welcome here anytime you want to come by and, and share your thoughts. I really enjoyed this today.

• 2:10:25Arthur Brooks?

  I just love this conversation with you. I wish I saw you more. I wish you lived on the same coast, but. Doing your show is an opportunity to see my friend.

• 2:10:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, excellent, man. Well, I love you, Arthur, and you've changed my life in many positive ways. And you're a mentor from afar and up close. And I really appreciate the work that you do and cherish the time that we spend together.

• 2:10:46Arthur Brooks?

  Thank you, Rich. I love you, too.

• 2:10:48Rich Roll?

  You have a newsletter, right?

• 2:10:50Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:50Rich Roll?

  Now they have the Art and Science of Happiness.

• 2:10:52Arthur Brooks?

  Yeah, it comes out every Monday morning at 9:00 a.m.

• 2:10:54Rich Roll?

  People can sign up for that at arthurbrooks.com.

• 2:10:56Arthur Brooks?

  500 words of ideas on how to live a happier life.

• 2:11:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool. And everybody else, check out Arthur's books if you haven't already, and his column in The Atlantic.

• 2:11:08Arthur Brooks?

  Thank you.

• 2:11:08Rich Roll?

  Cheers, man. Thank you.

• 2:11:10Arthur Brooks?

  Thank you, Rich.

• 2:11:23Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a

• 2:12:04Rich Roll?

  review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg.

• 2:12:47Rich Roll?

  Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.