Arthur Brooks on Reinvention, Religion, and the Science of Happiness

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Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercadis Center at George Mason University,

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercadis.org. For a full transcript of every conversation and hands with helpful links, visit conversationwithtiler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm delighted to be chatting with Arthur C. Brooks. I've known him for a long time. Arthur's life trajectory is a little

difficult to describe. He recently said to me, "Well, he changes careers every 10 years. He was a professional French horn player in the world of classical music, a well-sighted economist, often in the area of cultural economics. He has been president of the American Enterprise Institute, has done things with Oprah, has done yet more, now is a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and he has a recent track on the notions of happiness and the meaning of

life, and he has an important new book out called the meaning of life finding purpose in an age of emptiness. Arthur, welcome. Thank you. It's nice to talk to you on your show. Now you've mentioned in one of your books. And I quote, "We Brooks is die fairly young." Unquote. How does that influence

“your quest for happiness? One of the biggest mistakes that I think that we make in the new”

science of longevity is the notion that if we could actually take the death date out of our lives that we would live happier better lives. And I think that's wrong because you and I as economists understand the importance of scarcity. How scarcity actually gives you the ability to savor things. The scarcity is actually central to savoring as a matter of fact. One of the things that's pretty interesting in the literature that I've seen as a behavioral economist, I read mostly

psychology, of course, is that you tend to look at the lifespan of the same gender parent and then make discounting decisions in your own life on the basis of that. My dad, as an academic, he just like me. He retired at 62, got sick pretty quickly after that, stopped working because he couldn't and then died at 66. So I feel like the clock is ticking and the result is that my work, I'm savoring it in a different way. I'm making sure that I'm doing things, I'm answering

“questions that I think are important. And the result is that I like it better now that I ever did.”

But maybe it's better when savoring is an illusion that you're actually going to live to 94 and not die when your dad did. If there's something to the notion that the real meaning of life is to have a fairly mentally thin existence, not too much introspection, Allah, Mark and Dreson and people who have high meanings of life, they're facing death or they're in Ukraine, they're confronting the Russian monster and so on, isn't meaning for life in a way quite overrated?

Well, it's possibly the case, but it really depends on why we would think it's overrated in the first place.

Most of the reason that people would object to a deeply philosophical life is because that requires a lot of suffering. That kind of introspection actually leads to plenty of pain, but they're in lies the contradiction of happiness itself. Happiness requires a lot of unhappiness. Now the definition of happiness is really the right place to start. Happiness isn't a feeling at all. Happiness has feelings associated with it like the smell of the turkey is associated with

your Thanksgiving dinner, but the smell of the turkey isn't the same thing as the turkey dinner. The turkey dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat, which are the macro nutrients. And similarly,

“you can define, and I think the most compelling definition of happiness is the combination of”

enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. So meaning that we're talking about here is just one macro nutrient. The thing that a lot of people like to focus on when meaning becomes painful is enjoyment. And I get that. I get that. They feel like they're a lot happier under the circumstances, but that's an ever-nessent macro nutrient. The one that's longest term actually requires that we

Well, but if happiness is not so special, and if the meaning of life is not so special,

what is the value you use? All of a sudden, to trade off these other values against each other, right? Yeah. What's your unit of account, so to speak? Yeah, I know. And that's a real problem because it turns out that, I mean, you have a unit of account with between protein, carbohydrates, and fat per gram. They're five, five, and nine calories respectively. And so there is a way that we can baseline against them. The trouble is that there's been no really good way,

except self-evaluation of well-being, to understand how enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, how they actually compare with one another. They're highly complex ideas. They're not complicated

“ideas. They're not accounting ideas. And so the result of it is there's a lot that you have to go on”

with respect to intuition and your own experience. What do you think of the pretty common view

at often comes from twin studies? That well over 50% of happiness is simply genetic, assuming you're not living in a war zone or dying of terminal cancer. Yeah. You grow up a certain way, you were born a certain way, and there you go, you play your cards. Yeah, I think that those studies are very robust. Like an intelligent, in Minnesota, identical twins surveys have shown pretty well based on personality research when identical twins were raised in separate homes, which is

about a good structure close to a randomized treatment control experiment that you can get to without a diabolical Harvard experiment to separate babies from their parents. And what they find is that between 40 and 80% of all personality characteristics are genetic, which is to say, Tyler, that your mother really did make you unhappy, I suppose. And that's might seem like, you know, it sort of obviates or initiates this whole idea that happiness is something worth pursuing,

but actually it doesn't because the same studies show that about 50% of your tendency toward alcohol abuse is also genetic. But Tyler, if you said, hey, Arthur, I got a big problem. Both my parents were drunk, and all four of my grandparents were bootleggers, and, and I guess I'm doomed to alcoholism. I'd say, Tyler, I have a new wisdom technology for turning the genetic proclivity from 50% to 0% is called not drinking. In other words, when you understand your genetic

tendency, you can tailor your habits, and that's a beautiful thing. Now, one side note, 50% approximately between 42% or 58% depending on the studies that you're looking at is genetic. Another 25% is circumstantial, which is the war zone effect, et cetera, or, you know, falling in love whatever it happens to be. That's ever nested as well. That's temporary because our moods and our circumstances, they necessarily change. The last 25% are habits, which allow us to tailor our

“circumstances. In other words, they get better luck and to manage our genetics. And that's why”

habits, even though they're only 25% directly, more or less, that's what they matter the most. But not drinking seems much easier to engineer than being happy, right? You can just become a Mormon, and you'll have a lot of pierce who don't drink. But I don't see many people who become much happier past a certain age. What's the marginal value of books on happiness? Is it measured by their price? Well, it depends on who wrote the books, Tyler. Say your books. What is your

new book sell for? It's on the meaning of life. Is there a good question? Who knows? That's actually a good question. Somewhere between 16 and 30 dollars depending on where you're buying it. I suppose the real question is, and this is something I'm really interested in, is the extent to which habits can actually change your well-being. And there's a reason, by the way, that there've been a

million books on happiness and happiness still tends to be elusive. And I take your point,

it's very well taken, and I try to approach it without a lot of hubris. Here's the problem, as I've seen it. You and I, we're not just economists. We are really our experts, and we try to be experts and how to learn stuff. That's one of the great things about your work. You're interested in your curious, and you're interested in how people are interested in point of fact. Here's actually how you learn something and make it permanently part of your repertoire.

Number one, you understand it. Number two, you practice it. And then number three, you share it. So it's an interesting thing. My father used to say this. My father was a PhD by the statistician, a lifelong mathematics and statistic professor. And I one time I saw him giving a graduate seminar in advanced calculus, a 90 minute lecture with no notes. And it was like watching Yasha hyphids playing the violin. It was like a virtuous performance. And I was of the

age, I was already in my 20s. It's why I admired my dad by that point. And I said, after what I said,

“dad, had you do it? I mean, how do you know that's so well? How was that part of your very being?”

And he was joyful while he was doing it, too, by the way, because he was in a state of flow. And he said, simple, I learned it. I've taught it a hundred times. In other words, I'm practicing it in my research, and I'm sharing it constantly because I'm a teacher. That's the same way to be a great golfer. And that's the same way, actually, if you want happiness to not be an impermanent,

psychology is biology. You need to change certain ways that you live. And then you need to share

“with other people. And I've found that that's what actually makes the idea sticky.”

What do you think of the view that books on happiness or the meaning of life? There are kind of placebo. They don't help directly, but you feel you've done something to become happier. And the placebo is somewhat effective. Yeah, I think that there's probably something to that, although there's some pretty interesting new research that shows that the placebo effect is actually not real. Have you seen some of that new research? Yes, but I don't believe it. And no

sea boasts also seem to work too many situations. But I take your broader point. I take your broader point. And I think that the reason for that is that when people read most of the self-improvement literature, not just happiness literature, what happens is that they get a flush of epiphany,

a new way of thinking. And that feels really good. That feels really inspirational. The problem is

it doesn't take root. It's like the seeds that are thrown on a path in the biblical parable. They don't go through the algorithm that I just talked about. And so not all of these things can be compared. I would not have gotten into this line of research, and this line of teaching. If I thought that it was just going to add another book to a long line of self-improvement books to make people feel good, but don't ultimately change their lives. But say a person reads

a new and different book on happiness once a year at the beginning of the year. No, under the placebo view, that's a fine thing to do. It'll get you a bit happier each year. Under your view, it seems there's something wrong. And isn't the placebo view

“doing a bit better there? That you should read a book on happiness every year, a different one.”

It'll revitalize you a bit. And whether or not it's new, only matters a little. Yeah, it might remind you of some things that you knew to be the truth that you had fallen away from. And so one of the things that I like to do is I like to read a good book by one of the church fathers, for example. They're more or less saying the same thing. And it reminds me of something that I learned as a boy. And that I've forgotten as an adult and it might actually

remind me to come back to many of these practices and many of these views. But I think that there are real insights. There's real value that can come from science-based knowledge about how to live a better life. I think that you and I are both dedicated to science in the public interest and also science in the private interest as well. And I think there is some good to be gotten through many of these ideas. Not all. And once again, not all happiness literature is created equal.

What's the best observational predictor of which people give the best happiness advice or meaning of life advice for that matter? So give me an example. So I understand your question. Well, someone might say if someone's a rabbi, they'll give you very good happiness advice. May or may not be true. But it's a claim you could then pursue. If someone is old, if someone has a PhD and so on, like who gives the best happiness advice in general?

Oh, yeah. So I understand what you're saying. So you're pretty much hit it on the head. So the habits of the happiest people. I mean, I teach in a business school. And one of the things we like to do with case studies is end to case study by saying, what do the most successful CEOs do every day? And what do the most failing CEOs fail to do every day? Or what are the bad practices that they have? So what do the happiest people? Which is to say the people who are

most abundant in their self-evaluation or either or third person evaluation of enjoyment satisfaction

and meeting? What do they do every day? And the answer is they pay attention, fundamentally,

to four big things. Their faith or life philosophy. They think deeply about the why questions. And it also they stand in awe of something bigger themselves or the stuck in looking in the mirror. They have strong family relationships. They have close friendships. They have real friends, not just deal friends. And they're certainly not isolated and lonely and spending all day on the internet. And last but not least, they're doing something productive, where they feel like they're earning

their success through their merit and hard work and they're serving other people.

“That's what it comes down to. But does it only the fourth of those applies to Elon Musk?”

He's our most successful CEO ever? Yeah, I think that you're doing something where you're serving others and earning your success every day, Tyler. And I believe I am as well. And I believe that my postman is and I believe that my plumber is. And that's really important. And that's by the way. This is one of the reasons that I'm such an enthusiast for the free enterprise system, because it allows us to find the places where

our skills and our talents can actually find each other. It's the ultimate ike guy way of organizing an economy. What's the deepest theory you have as to our younger people so often reject happiness advice? Even when it comes from happy people. Yeah, one of the reasons is because it's inconvenient. It's one of the same reasons that people will not take all kinds of good advice. I mean, you can go to somebody who's drinking too much and say, hey, you know, it's funny, you know, alcoholics,

you know, you'll say the only group of people where you can say, hey, you got there's a door number one and door number two. Behind door number one, there's prison, there's death. There is institutionalization, door number two is freedom and happiness and good relationships. And an alcoholic will say,

way and they're path dependent and they might be addicted and they don't have very much experience. So it's not just young people. It's all kinds of people who they reject what is manifestly good advice all the time because good advice is often incredibly inconvenient. So it's a discount rate issue. Could be a discount rate issue. It could be a rationality issue. It could be an addiction issue, which might be rational, it might not depending on your views

on Gary Becker, et cetera. But the truth of the matter is there's all kinds of friction in the model that we have in the way that we take or don't take advice. But there's plenty of young people who are not addicts in major ways and it seems they still don't listen very carefully. Yeah. And you know, they would just be happier. I don't think it takes four years of sacrifice to be happier given some of the other things you say and they still don't do it. So what's

“your deepest account of why they don't do it? Part of it is that I think that people are quite”

resistant to take advice from the people who are most likely to give it to them. And that's the credibility to the source and the relationship to the source. So people ask me all the time Tyler, how do I get my teenage kids to take your advice on device use? Which is classically one of the best ways that you can help teenagers to live happier better lives, to be less lonely, to be less depressed, to be less anxious is actually not going to throw their phones into

the ocean but at least to have serious protocols around their device use where they have more time in person and outside and all the stuff that John Hight talks about them. But we've all talked about where the data I think are manifestly clear and they say they're not going to listen to me on this. And so this is one of the ways that I recommend to parents that number they're going to have to do two things. So that teenagers are more likely to take the advice.

Number one is you got a model to behave. You're not talk about it. You know, you know, you're both dads. You know, you're both raised kids. And you know, what do you do?

“I'd be able to tell them answers. It doesn't matter what they, what matters is what they”

see you doing. The number one predictor of your kids using their phones around the

table is you using your phone around the dinner table. The second is appealing to an

outside authority is sometimes really is really useful. One of the reasons I write my books is because I want people to recommend them to people that they love and to say I just read this book by some nerd at Harvard named Arthur, what a nerdy name. And I thought it was maybe interesting but I'm not sure would you read it tell you what you think and have it become a matter of family discussion and that becomes a better way to do it as well. It's supposed to wagging your

finger at your kids and saying do this thing. I think that's generally pretty ineffective. We're just curiosity fitting to your frameworks. So say it's late at night. A basketball game just finished and I decide to go to ESPN to check the score. I'm pretty sure it doesn't make me happier. There's even something zero some about it. Your team might lose. It's unlikely it adds to the

“meaning of my life. But I can say I just want to know is that something you should want to talk”

me out of. Or is just wanting to do things a sufficient reason to turn away from these goals of happiness and meaning of life. And if it is, can't we multiply that example many times and get people pretty far away from happiness and meaning of life and maybe that's why the young people don't listen so much? Well, I think that the reason that curiosity is important because curiosity is

ultimately a basic. I should say interest is a basic positive emotion that leads to happiness.

It also leads to longer better lives. And there's two streams of research that support this. The first is the work on the science of emotion, including the neuroscience of emotion. Now, this is not the area that I was trained in. I was trained as a traditional, you know, behavioral caught in a social scientist. When I came back to academia seven years ago, I really substantially had to retrain in neuroscience because this is the direction that the fields are going.

The interesting work on curiosity and interest is just one of the seven basic emotions. And it's a positive emotion at that. Human beings in the place to sing, in the late place to sing 250,000 years ago, when the modern brain was more or less what it is today, the members of the species, homosapiens, living in bands of 30 to 50 kin-based hierarchical individuals, the ones that had the most kids were the ones who learned the most. And so the

result of it is that there was a lot of positivity. There was a lot of cognitive and emotional reward that came from learning new things. How does that reach us today? You want to know the score. You want to learn a new thing. You want to learn a new skill. You love that. And so that's

part of an important life. Now, the second part of the research that reinforces this is the

research from the Harvard study of adult development that my colleagues have been conducting for 85 years of it Harvard that has been following the same cohort of people since the late 1930s. The original cohort had JFK and it been Bradley and the Boston Strangler and a bunch of people that didn't make it through to the end of the study. But the people who were still alive, one of the things that they all have in common is that their lifelong learners and they love to learn.

So this is a strategy. So curiosity is not an idle thing. It might kill the cat under the wrong circumstances. And we even in the Catholic faith, we have a word for idle curiosity

that word, Tyler? Sure. Yeah. "Cancupacence" is not what I'm talking about. But the desire to learn something. That's a natural human thing. That's a that's an evolved thing and it's a good thing, too. What's the optimal degree of self-deception? That's a good question. How much should you actually be honest with yourself? And of course, there's the Kantian view where a manual Kant said zero percent self-deception is the right amount. That's almost certainly wrong. You know,

one of the things that I'm really interested in is this new field of applied philosophy. If you heard about this for you, you study a philosopher and you try to live according to their precepts strictly for two, one or two or three weeks at a time. It's not possible, usually. It's pretty hard. I tried to live like a Kantian until exactly zero lies and it's a miracle that my marriage survived.

“That's all I can say. And I'm not a Kantian. It turns out. But the truth is that the ultimate”

Kantian idea of pure honesty is to not lie to yourself. And the truth is that there's a lot of

self-protection that goes into it. Of course, a little of that can go a long way. The whole idea of convincing yourself of something that's fundamentally untrue is harmful. And so the best way to live, I think, to find the right balance of this, is it came about from the teachings of William James, who really is the first social psychologist, the father of modern psychology. He wrote the principles of psychology, and he separated the psyche into the I self into the me self.

The me self looks in the mirror. The I self looks outward. And we have to do both. The essence of consciousness is this ability to be two people and know that we are two people. This is why homo sapiens were there abundant prefrontal cortex, 30% of your brain by weight are so dominant as a species that we can be two people in this particular way. But he says you have to get the balance

“right if you want to live a good life. And most of that is not even bothering to deceive yourself”

because you spend more time looking outward and understanding the world as opposed to thinking about

yourself in the first place. In the Soviet Union, it was sometimes the case. If people had terminal

diseases, they wouldn't tell them until they had to. What do you think of that? You know, that's a, I don't think much of that as a matter of fact. And part of the reason for that is that the question is not whether or not you're going to be in the optimal state of positive affect. The reason for that is because a life well-lived truly of meaning is one that actually faces one of the most meaningful aspects of life itself. It's a difficult thing to talk and write about

as a matter of fact, which is suffering. Now, you know, the work of Richard Davidson at UW-Madison, and he does work on where happiness and unhappiness are processed in the brain. What he's found is that that unhappiness is largely a right hemispheric phenomenon, and he does this by looking at the musculature of the face when people are having a happy and sad emotion. And this is not a coincidence because the work of the in McGill Christ, who he's work I know you know really well on hemispheric

lateralization, says that meaning is a right hemispheric experience as well. And it's no coincidence, therefore, that's suffering in life leads to an understanding of life's meaning and that deepens life's sense of richness. Now, a little suffering can go a long way, but that's one of the reasons that when you work with the Tibetan Buddhists, which is, you know, a big area of my work over the past 12 years, has been with the Dalai Lama's community among the Tibetan Buddhists in

Darmsala, that they talk about this idea that suffering is an important part of life and that

“the key to understanding suffering is by understanding the formula that it equals pain multiplied”

by the resistance to the pain. The result is that lying to yourself to lower the pain is usually not the optimal approach to the best life, but rather understanding how non-resistance to the pain can lead to plenty high pain, but suffering is manageable. But why not cram all that contemplation of death into your last three months, rather than your last 18 months, do intertemperal substitution, right? Accelerate it. Ben Sass probably is facing a pretty short timeline, but he's done a remarkable

job, even publicly, of coming to terms of what's happening, isn't that better than, you know, two years of the same? Well, that's an empirical question, actually, at the end of the day, that's the kind of thing that you can either gather data on and some people in point of fact have. So we all remember Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of death and dying. The stages of grief, you know, where she talks about people, I mean, she had a comprehensive study in the 1960s and 1970s

and wrote a fabulously best-selling book that is not stood up extremely well to the subsequent research, but it's a great book nonetheless in this worth reading. She was a Swiss physician psychiatrist. And she talked about the stages of grief that people go through, and there's a lot of misery that when people find out they're going to die, you know, they're bargaining and they're angry and they're denial and, and then they get to the last stage, which is acceptance. Now, a lot of

research since then is okay, how long is each stage? And what do people actually experience in each stage?

And here's the touch of the chase, here's one of the research basically said, "People get to

acceptance pretty fast and they're happier during the acceptance phase than they were before

because what that says is, I mean, if you're taking it at his face and again, I mean, the data and the research of the research and it could be updated and everything's contested. But what this suggests is that if you're doing it right, the more time you have, the more meaning

“full your life is going to be and the more you'll actually savor it. So the truth is, Tyler,”

I would prefer to have 18 months of advanced notices opposed to three, and here's what I really

want somewhere between five and 20 years, which is what I actually have. Speaking of Buddhism, why is the footprint of Buddhism shrinking around the world? Right, this fewer Buddhists every year. It's a good question, except that there's fewer of almost, I mean, most serious practitioners of almost every substantial phase. I mean, but it's quite a sharp decline, right, especially Korea, Japan, China. Yeah, and I think that probably we Catholics are giving the Buddhists a

run for their money, according to Pew this year for every 100 people enter the Catholic Church 840 left. That's pretty sharp decline. And I think this is, it says a lot to do with the general urbanization, technologyization, and the secularization of especially younger cohorts today. If I were a Buddhist leader, I mean, if I were a religious leader, I'm as opposed to just a

religious person. I'd be thinking about the opportunity for religious revival, and I think quite

“frankly, we're due for one. Why, for you, Catholicism, rather than orthodox Christianity?”

Yeah, it's a good question, except that I've been in some practical reasons for that. I did convert. I converted when I was started when I was 15 after having a mystical experience at the shrine of Guadalupe and Mexico, and I went through the conversion. I was an evangelical Protestant at the time. I came from a very religious family. So probably religion is not a foregone conclusion, but near to, and then I don't feel like I chose Catholicism. I feel like it sort of

chose me. Now, there's a practical consideration as well, which is the Catholic Church is kind of like Starbucks. It's ubiquitous and has a uniform high quality product. It is an orthodox Christian church in every major American city. There's multiple of them, right? No, that's true. They're quite popular with Younger Men. If Younger Men need role models, you would be the perfect role model. Just intellectually, ideologically, is there some preference

for Catholicism? Yeah, my brother is actually orthodox, and my brother is a very rigorous orthodox as well, and I admire it a lot. I admire the orthodox, a great deal. But for me, the Catholic Church is something that is part of religion as heartbeat, as diet, as exercise, as ubiquitous, as getting up and putting on my shirt. The great thing about being part of the universal Catholic Church is literally as ubiquitousness. The fact that I go to Mass every single morning,

and I travel 48 weeks a year, and the fact is there's one every place is what it comes down to. Now, that said, I don't think I'm better than everybody else, but I do want it to be part of the rhythm of my life in this particular way, and I've come to love the Catholic Church as much as any institution in my life. I want suggested to Peter Tiel that he should be Catholic, and his response was something like the Pope's or two left wing. What do you think?

“Why are they so left wing? Yeah, well, you know, the truth is that”

everybody's too much something for me. Whenever it happens to be in the Catholic Church, here's evidence of its unerring truth. It's still around despite all the people in it, despite all the lady, and despite all the clergy, and despite all the hierarchy in the Catholic Church. And

Pope's art perfect. I certainly don't agree with him on all sorts of things, but the truth is,

you know, I would never find that in any institution that I love or any institution that I follow. I got to live in the world. In politics today, how have your views on immigration evolved over say the last 10 years? Many people on the right have become much more anti-immigration, especially for Western Europe. Have you changed at all? I have not. I'm not trying to say that I'm right. I'm not trying to say that I'm never mistaken, or that I don't change my views on that.

But I am just unalterably pro-immigration. I always have, and I think it's the vitality of American life is the fact that there are people who are Americans by choice, as opposed to just by birth. I also believe strongly in the whole idea of the hypomatic edge from John Gardner's research that suggests that there's a genetic mutation that's manifest in the ultimate entrepreneurial act, which is immigration itself. Now that said, I mean, that doesn't mean that I think we should have

open borders or radical policies where there is no control on immigration for anybody at any time. But I'm pro-immigration because I'm pro-America quite frankly. Now, I'm a biased suspect. I have to plead guilty, the fact that David Brooks one time told me he said, "You're so pro-immigrant, you marry them because of my wife's indomigrant." "Her, right? Not them." I'm also a foreign adoptive father, and the truth of the matter is that if you look at my family, it looks like you

plucked 11 random individuals out of the population around the world and put them in one house. So, but say you look at Northern England, some parts of which are pretty intensely Islamic. Has it gone as well? I mean, have you updated your views? No, I mean, what I think that there's a

willingness and ability to assimilate new people. And so I think we need proper public policies

that help people to assimilate and insist that they do so. And and there's been greater lesser degrees of success around the world. Now, I think it's fair to say what we call the right wing in America. It's become much, much more Trumpy. Does this shift you to the left or make you question what the right wing was to begin with? Or do you just feel lost and confused? Or do you say that's great on more Trumpy, too? Or how have you dealt with that emotionally and

intellectually? Yeah, I'll answer, but you're going to have to answer after me. Sure, you. Okay, and part of it is because sometimes when I don't know what I think, I just read your blog. So,

“the truth is that it's been a disconcerting time, but as my Spanish wife one-time pointed out,”

who is an American citizen and deeply loves this country. American society is largely driven by cultural fads and moral panics. And the problem with that is that obscures our attention to gradual cultural decline. That's her view. And I have to say that I find that view very compelling. We have all kinds of cultural and political fads and all kinds of moral panics. Now, cultural fads are the things that we're all doing, and we don't quite know why, but other

smart people are doing them so we do. And panics, grievance panics are based on the idea that we should all be angry and afraid about something, even though we weren't 10 minutes ago. And this is, you know, you and I live on college campuses, so we can't actually avoid this. Politics actually exists according to fads and panics as well. And that means that if you think you know the Republican Party, you don't because it's going to change. And the same thing is true for the

Democratic Party. However, when you're out of an equilibrium that you should assume that the

“equilibrium at some point will return. And if you liked that the old way, you should keep it the”

old way. It's kind of like the old Obama promise. If you like your insurance or you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your Republicanism, you should be able to keep your Republicanism. And don't worry about it. People actually don't agree with you. This is America for Pete's sake. So I don't like the populism. I don't think the populism is right. I'm an old school free enterprise guy. That's what really animates me in this particular way. And I have very many

traditional views that don't seem to be in favor at this point. But I also have a lot of confidence that this is the mainstream view and it's actually going to return. And I have not just confidence I have hope that actually I can do something to urge it along. Now you. I would say it's mostly unfortunate. I consider myself a classical liberal. I think there's been negative emotional contagion from a number of very bad events, some of which were partly random. Say that 9/11 actually happened

that COVID came along when it did. And if a bunch of bad things happened, the great financial crisis, that's less random, people turned to worst ideas. And we're suffering under that and then it's reds and then negative ideas lead to further negative ideas and people become less happy and that

leads to worse policy. And we're stuck in this rut. Now I never expected classical liberalism

or classical liberal republicanism to be that dominant anyway. So I'm not that surprised. I see it as a return to some features of say late 19th century America that I feel never went away.

“I've never liked them. But I think it's maybe what we really are and there was this odd bubble.”

You can debate when the years run, but something like 1980 through 2016 that seemed quite normal, but that was an illusion. And now we're back to the real state of things. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. So you're saying I think that Trumpism is an equilibrium and Reaganism was a disequilibrium and I'm saying the opposite. Exactly. But on much of the rest, we agree. And in terms of what we want, I think we agree.

Oh, God's right. So I guess we don't have to figure out who's right. We just have to wait. How will artificial intelligence influence politics in the political spectrum? Easy question. All right. It's a good question. I agree. And one of the questions I get mostly, as you can imagine, because of my work, is how is it going to affect happiness? And I've been thinking about that an awful lot. We discussed a minute ago,

the hemispheric lateralization theory of immagylchrist that the right side of the brain is the mystery and meaning and why questions of life. And the left hemisphere of the brain largely adjudicates the what and how to and engineering and technological questions of life.

The problem is that in modern society, we've been kicking everybody into the left hemisphere

of the brain and walling off the right hemisphere because people spend all day on their screens. And the hustle and grind engineered Silicon Valley culture that we live in has eliminated a lot of the mystery and meaning from life. And the incentive to actually ask those questions. That's a lot of what my new book is about is how to get back to the right side of your brain is a matter of fact. Now, AI is a magnificent extension of the left hemisphere of your brain.

It's a how to and what engine. But it's not a why engine. Any real why question that matters. You can't put into Chad GBT and get something meaningful to you to say, why am I alive? For what would I be willing to give my life? You put that into Chad GBT. It'll start by buttering you up and telling you what a smart question it is. Then it'll tell you how five different people have answered that question and you're left

which is an adjunct, which is next to the political questions I think, is that if you use it

for left brain things to free up your time and then go over to the right brain side of your life with your love and your faith and your relationships and beauty and suffering, then your life's going to get better. And it's a very real possibility, Tyler, that this is what's going to happen in economics and politics today. You know, if we went back 150 years or a little bit more, people would say all the industrial revolution is going to permanently

ruin society. But because it's urbanizing and people don't know each other and the traditional folk ways are going away and it had some rough transitions to be sure by bringing in market economics and division of labor and specialization, et cetera. But the end of the day was a middle class in the weekend. That's not the fruit of labor unions. That's the fruit of the industrial revolution

and the amazing largest that it created through capitalism. But that took a long time, right? There's

maybe 70 years of the interim. And what's our interim going to look like? Will it be more nostalgia and more small sea conservatism? Yes, yes, I think it will be and I think this will be speeded up but I think within 20 years that we will have something like the post industrial equivalent of the fruit that was wrought by the industrial revolution that that's what we'll see from what's going on today. And do you think the classical liberal view on AI should be that we don't much

regulate it or that we regulate it like a national security object the way we might regulate atomic bombs? I don't know. I'm wrestling with that and I don't know the answer. Can you give me your opinion please? Because otherwise I'm going to have to just go to your blog and look at it and form my own opinion on the basis of that. I think for now we don't know how to regulate it and it's changing more quickly than Congress can act intelligently and maybe Congress can not at the moment act

intelligently at all. So I'll say hold off but leave open the option because we might need to

“in some important ways. I think that's pragmatic view. Now you're 2007 but who really cares?”

It had a data back to thesis that was correct at the time that political conservatives are more generous than political Democrats or liberals is not exactly the word left wingers. Do you think that's still true? It is although some of the distinction is disappearing. Now the reason for that is that if you run a regression analysis and you have how much people give in the left hand side and on the right hand side a whole bunch of covariates that include political ideology and religious

behavior and income and other demographics what you will find is that what the big coefficient that really matters in highly significant is religion is religious activity and those things when you're looking at a cross tab they tended and still do to a large extent not as much as they did before to be correlated between politics and religion. The reason that conservatives gave more in 2006, 2007, 2008, etc was because they tended to be more religious. That was the reason. That's what it

came down to. They also were a little bit more community-oriented but largely because of religion. Now to the extent that we have a whole wing of so-called conservatives that are getting more and

“more and more secular you're going to see less than that phenomenon and that's what I actually”

think we're probably seeing today. Nonetheless I would suspect that I haven't rewritten that book I haven't re-run all those data because I'm doing something different at this point. I still think that we would see the correlation significant in the same direction. If we had to compare your political views to those of Oprah Winfrey and you tried to boil down the difference to a small number of dimensions as possible what accounts for the difference because you and she get on great

you respect each other admire each other you've worked together right? Why haven't you converted her or she converted you? Well I think that we probably haven't tried to convert each other because when we talk to each other we're talking about things that are more important to us like our religious faith because of our desire to actually lift people up in these bonds of happiness and love we haven't really talked very much about politics and we haven't it's not because we've

been avoiding it it's the same thing when I talk to my brother my older brother whom I love we differ completely on politics because you know we were raised in Seattle and he stayed and you know

I went to AEI and we had different lives for sure but we never really talk about politics because

there's so many more important things than politics so the reason that we haven't converted each others probably because we haven't tried what do we both care an awful lot about we really do care about a just society and how to get it we probably differ in the extent to which government

“can instantiate that can actually achieve that but I think we're pretty close to each other on”

market economics as a matter of fact she's one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time and we both agree that that the priority of our capitalist system should be to create equal opportunity and no not just equal opportunity the greatest opportunity possible for people at the margins of society now she probably has more faith than me in the ability of government to actually achieve that and I have more faith than trying to bring as much market impulse as possible as much freedom

to the poor as we possibly can but we have the same in moral goals which is one of the reasons

who's a political leader you admire today yeah I'll say something controversial sure and

“and you could ask me maybe more targeted question tell me an American president in your lifetime”

that you authentically admire is there one Tyler well I was born in 1962 so I would say Reagan and the first Bush would be the leaders in that I admire Obama in some ways but don't really like too many things he either did do or didn't do but I at least see he was trying to be an admirable example of something yeah and I give him credit for that yeah that would be my answer yeah yeah it's a good answer and and agree with versus admire that's an important distinction

that you just made and I appreciate that not a lot my favorite president of my lifetime is George will be Bush and how do you know when I would like the most actually yeah but he's my favorite president why because all the mistakes he made I probably would have made too and this is actually how you see somebody that you you really admire you don't look at what they've done the successful look at the things that they did there were unsuccessful say

honestly what I've made the same mistake and if the answer is yes then that's somebody who's

“in a way admirable in their view of course you have to look at when they did subsequent to the”

errors as well to see whether or not they learned and whether they're person of integrity which I think double you manifestly is this is somebody in public life that I have a great deal of admiration in love for sure so be Bush I like how he's done his so-called retirement but he's a bit too much of a tragic figure for me to put him into that. Because of the Gulf War I understand but not just in general the a number of things went wrong but no that's for sure and and all I can say is

if I had been president probably the same things would have gone wrong. Who's the greatest trench horn player ever besides you? Yeah no that's Dennis Brain of course that Dennis Brain who was the Wunderkin who picked up the French horn at age two two and by a very young man

was the principal hornist in the royal Philharmonic orchestra was did the first major recordings

of the Mozart Concerto's of both Strauss Concerto's died tragically at the age of 36 coming back from the Edinburgh music festival at night driving his high-powered sports car ran it into the base of a bridge and died in a fiery accident leaving the world without the world's greatest French horn player. Do you like the Legetti horn trio? Yes I do. I love it. I love the Legetti horn trio and the best concert arrangement actually is that where the Legetti horn trio is the first half

and the Brahms horn trio is the second half. That's right. Now why did you start getting worse in

“your 20s as a horn player? Because you were still playing all the time. Yeah yeah you're better right?”

You're not that old in your 20s. Classical musicians they tend to peak about age 36 according to the literature. That's when most of them will look back on the career and say that's when I was doing my best playing. My best playing was about when I was about 20 as a matter of fact is what I found and in retrospect I think there's a plausible physical explanation. We now know with brass players that those who don't take care of themselves they don't warm up properly. They abuse actually

they play too long. It's a highly physically taxing thing to do. They get microtares in the muscle and upper lip which now can be repaired. That was not a medical technology that was on offer in those days. So that's one explanation. The second is quite frankly Tyler is probably burning out and I was getting ready for my next spiral which by the time I was in my late 20s was going to turn out to be an economist. The world's most noble profession. Well first tell us

your spiral theory of careers and then we'll get to you becoming an economist. Oh if only it were my theory it's from Michael Driver the great social psychologist from USC writing in the 1990s and he found based on his research that there are four kinds of careers based on psychological types. Of course there's more. This is based on a statistical method that you and I don't like very much called factor analysis or principle components analysis where the data speak nonetheless.

The four types are what's called the expert career. That was my dad's academic career. We taught for 40 years at the same institution. Got a 2% raise every year. Got his tenure in the mail

without applying for it and never thought of actually leaving because he what he wanted was lifestyle

stability. That's also the post office. The second type of careers. The transitory career where you don't you don't live to work. You work to live. The only reason that you work at all is to support a lifestyle. So you're a barista in Bangor for a little while then you're driving a moving van and then you fall in love and go move to a surf shack and San Diego or whatever and your parents are very worried about you. The third type is what we believe at the Harvard Business

School characterizes everybody. It was the linear career where you only change every three to seven years depending on if you can get something better in your silo. The linear career means you go up and up and up and up and up. What I am is called the spiral which is of series of many careers of your own design that lasts between seven and 12 years. Sometimes it's for profit, sometimes it's non-profit, sometimes it's making more money, sometimes it's making less money. But it's

your career is an adventure where you're impaled to go learn a big new thing. So how is it you switched

I went back to get my bachelor's degree because my wife, we were living in Barcelona, we got

“married in Barcelona, we were living in Barcelona. My wife had dropped out of high school at 16 to”

sing with a rock band and the age of 27 started studying for high school again and said, I got to tell you, this is the most interesting stuff I've ever studied and she was taking a class in calculus. I said, really? So she started teaching me calculus. I signed up for some correspondent school classes for my bachelor's degree. I had one semester of college at that point.

I went to college at 18, got one semester of credit during the first year and then was offered

the opportunity to pursue my excellence elsewhere, which means I got fired by the school, and it went out of the road as a classical French horn player. So when I went back to college by correspondence, I had to take a whole bunch of general education. I assumed that I would study musicology or composition. And when I took economics, I was completely transformed. It changed my life. It gave me almost like a crystal ball into how the world works. Now of course, that's hubris,

and I was in my 20s, and one of the most dangerous kinds of human beings that homo sapiens are most dangerous, not when they have a gun, but when they have one semester of micro, as you know, because they're trying to explain everything. I mean, we know those people, because I've subsequently taught that again and again and again, but I'm telling you, it really changed my life. I became obsessed with how models could help me understand human behavior, and then from there,

it was I just couldn't stop. By the age of 31, I left the French horn. I got a correspondence

school degree, completely at a distance. I never even visited the campus once, and then I started

“my PhD at 31, and I never looked back. And later on, did you just get bored with economics?”

No, I never got bored with economics, but I was actually teaching non-profit economics, and I started a non-profit studies program at Syracuse, at the Public Policy School at Syracuse, at Maxwell School, teaching economics every semester, but I was working with a lot of non-profit executive directors, and I wrote a textbook on fundraising and social entrepreneurship, and I started feeling guilty. I thought, you know, I wonder if I could actually do this. This is pretty hard work.

And I started getting really interested in, and along came an opportunity to run a non-profit, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington offered me the presidency through a series of failed searches, by the way. It's not that I looked like such a great candidate. It's just that they needed a president that is very hard to find a chief executive of a think tank. And so, you know, after a long trial with candidates, they offered it to me. The last words uttered

by the board were, "Ah, what the hell?" And they, you know, gave me a trial interimperiod, and then I went and I tried that. You know, what does it mean to actually put these ideas to work? What does it mean to raise money? And by the way, I was a visiting scholar at the time. It was an economist, and I love AEI. I love the idea of the free enterprise system in service of humanity and service of the poor, which is really the moral basis of what AEI is all about. So I felt very,

very good about that mission, and I did it for almost 11 years. How long from now, do you think it will be before an AI model with good prompting? Will write a better policy study than say the 70th percentile quality study from a good think tank? That's a good question. What I think that AI won't do very well. I think AI, not too distant future, will do a better job at executing policy analysis, but will do a very poor job at asking the right policy questions. And I think that

that's going to be the comparative advantage, is the creativity and the human impulse, the curiosity that humans actually bring to it. And the reason is because all large language models are being trained to what people have already done. Ideas that people have already had. And what we're incredibly good at using the right hemisphere, the why hemisphere of our brain, is asking new why questions, which actually leads us to the creativity that will ask the best policy questions going

“forward, and that's what we're going to have to specialize in. You mean everybody else in the space.”

So what happens to staff numbers? To staff members on the hill? No, staff number is anything tank. No, staff numbers in a think tank. You know, I think that there will probably be less need for people who are doing the basic data analysis than they're used to be. A certainly less need for people to run down studies. You know, I use consensus.au, which is phenomenal. You probably use it too. The best AI search engine for academics with access to the entire body of peer-reviewed

research in the world. It's the best research go for it ever had in my entire career. And there's going to be simply less need for that. Will there be more need for more creative jobs?

Time will tell. And what's the future of classical music? classical music is ultimately something

that's best enjoyed by most people when it's performed by human individuals in the realm of actual creativity. Now, that's important thing to keep in mind because because they're still going to be an incredibly esoteric interest. You and I love classical music, but we're part of the two percent of the population that's interested in it at all, which is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned.

be the same for the two percent that actually like it in the first place. And there will be no

live concerts, which we like as well. I'm actually weirdly bullish on the most anachronistic museum-based form of art that ever existed, which is a bunch of people using 17th century instruments sitting on a stage just like they were in the time of Bach. In the United States, should the federal government subsidize it? No, I don't think it should. And you were ahead of me on this one, man. I was playing in the orchestra when you were railing against federal subsidies to the

arts back in the day. And when I came on to the scene and I realized as an economist that I was a free market economist, that was a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies. That's just how I

“was. That's how it was wired. I had no idea when I was in music, but I studied a little economics,”

and of course, that's when I discovered your work. I didn't know any of your work except for your culturally economics work, for the Association for Cultural Economics International. The result was it was you, me, and a couple other cats out there that were real free marketiers in the space. And I was railing against the idea of federal subsidies to the arts largely because what I read from you. Let's say you had to live in the Spanish-speaking world. And Catalonia, I'm including as part of

this. I don't know, that's a controversial statement. But just it's in Spain, right? It's in Spain, sort of. Would you still pick the city of Barcelona? Or Madrid has taken the lead? Or Mexico City? Is the dark horse there? Where do you go? I love Barcelona. Barcelona is where

my heart is, and it's always will be. Now, part of it is I'm a biased witness. I fell in love and

got married there. You know, my soulmate is from Barcelona. And the truth of the matter is this is tied up not just in Spanish, but the fact that I speak Catalan, it's an important part of my life as

“well, is how this turns out. I also think, frankly, that Barcelona is the most interesting”

city in the world despite all the bad things that have actually happened there. You know, the Marxist mayor that turned it into a, you know, a crime-ridden hellhole in certain neighborhoods. But, you know, these things are predictive. All it's basically the San Francisco of Spain at this point, meaning it's the most interesting, beautiful city that is suffering a lot, and that I hope will come back. I'll still take Barcelona short answer. It's much more touristy,

and it's economically stagnated. So I might have once had Barcelona, but now it's clearly Madrid for me. Madrid is a more vital city for sure. It's more entrepreneurial as well. In my day, I was living in Barcelona in the 80s and 90s, and Madrid was kind of a gray city of government functionaries. And now that's actually kind of where the action is, but still Barcelona man, I mean, it has got the modernist architecture, it's on the sea, it's got the mountains,

it has the natural beauty behind it that you just can't get any place else, and by the way,

“Roman ruins, what's not the like? What's something about Catalonia that you might understand,”

and maybe American outsiders do not? Yeah, the Catalon language is a very distinct thing that people don't understand when they first move to Spain, even those who are expats. It has a distinct culture, distinct literature, distinct art, a distinct poetry, and that gives it a particular flavor, a kind of an idiosyncrasy to it, an art sceneist that doesn't exist in other places, incredibly winsome, incredibly interesting. And by the way, the Catalon language itself

is just extremely beautiful. Do you still read in Spanish and/or Catalon? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I lecture in both as a matter of fact, so when I'm in, when I go to Barcelona, which is every year, a couple of times, we're nearly, I will usually give talks and lectures at the university and in public and in both Spanish and Catalon. And how would you describe the extra something you get from both reading in those languages and lecturing and speaking of? Yeah, that's actually,

there's research on this of course, and that's the research, Raymond Catell, and subsequent researchers on crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is one of the reasons that people are better teachers when they get older, people are better vocabularies when they get older, they're better scrabble players when they get older, and the reason is because of pattern recognition, and you can help that along. You can get better crystallized intelligence, sort of a bigger

library and a better ability to use it as you get older if you study a foreign language. Now, I had looked at that literature. I try to live according to research. I mean, why be a behavioral scientist, if you can't live according to the research. And I saw that people became happier, and they had richer lives, and they actually were better able to learn foreign languages after

50. So, what if that's true? So, I had never taught in Catalon. I just sort of spoke in street

Catellon, up at that point, because when I lived there and with my wife, etc. We speak 50, 50, Spanish, English, and all, with some Catellon thrown in. And so, I decided that I was going to give a series of speeches in Barcelona, in Catalon. And I studied up and I did that, and it dramatically improved my ability to speak Catalon. My Catalon is much better at 61 than it was a 41, or 31, as a matter of fact. And that's made my life better. Now, you live doing the

Camino in Northern Spain. As a result, are you ever tempted to walk the earth as your thing for, say, the next 10 years? Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not tempted to do that, because I'm a married man and I love my wife. Well, she would do it with you. Well, I was, that's all I answer because I was going to say it's all I could do to get her to do

the world, there's just no way. And I like and say, as I would, I would be a bachelor. And that's

not in my, that's not my, in my goal set. Your current age is best suited for peak performance at doing what? In terms of teaching? No, anything. It's not French horn. It's not baseball, but it's feeling a blanking. It's absolutely teaching. It absolutely is. And that's actually according to the research, in according to, not just my personal experience. It's very clear that the best teachers are over 40, ideally over 60, and many even over 70, as a matter of fact. That's

when you actually have the best ability to synthesize information, to recognize patterns and to

express ideas with greatest acuity in the language that non-specialists can understand. Where do

you most want to travel to and why? It's a good question. And part of the reason I hesitate because I'm on the road 48 weeks a year as it is. I'm traveling every single week for my work. And so I don't see travel as an adventure. I don't see it as a task, but I've been on the road starting what is a professional musician when I was 19 years old. I've been months a year on the road. I'm a road warrior that movie, George Clooney movie up in the air. I mean, that's kind of how

“I've always felt about life is going from place to place to place to place. And so the result of”

it is that I don't have ambitions to see a particular place. Most likely I will see it over the

course of my work. And so I'm probably more likely to give you some sort of, you know, corny metaphysical answer like heaven. But there's plenty of places your work is unlikely to bring you, right? Right. There is specific kind of place. I might tend to be poor or less politically free. Are you curious in general? It's a sample more from that part of the world? Or it's good. And I've not spent time in a substance here in Africa. And I feel like I should. I really would like to.

I'd like to spend more time in Southeast Asia than I have because I've experienced a lot of my Hanabudism in the northern tier, including in Tibet, but not in the southern tier of Asia. I would like to spend more time studying with Theravada Buddhists. So there are a number of both cultural and religious things that I would like to understand better than I do.

“Last two questions. First, how do you feel you will approach and deal with your own death?”

I hope with courage. And I have a pretty high confidence that I will, because I don't have a fear of death. I don't even have a great, a great fear of suffering. What I hope is that my death will be an inspiration to other people to live well. Before the last question, just to put in another plug for your book, it is available on Amazon and many other places. It is called the meaning of life, finding purpose in an age of emptiness. Last question. What will you do next?

Thinking circus jugular or firefighter, because I'm coming to my next spiral, my next 10-year mark. It's a good question. And I'm thinking right now it is 61. What will mean to do less? I'm working hard. I'm traveling a lot. And so what I'm thinking about right now for the next spiral, I'm reading the work of Joseph Peeper, the great mid-20th century German philosopher who wrote leisure the basis of culture. He defined leisure not as a CD at, not as sitting on a beach,

but as actually productive activity for which one is not compensated with the worldly rewards. Largely in terms of spiritual, depth in terms of relationship development and with respect to

“deep learning of new skills and new ideas. And so that's what I'm thinking about. It is actually”

what what a proper life that has more leisure in it, what it can possibly mean. Maybe that's the next spiral is actually simply not working so much. Arthur Brooks, thank you very much. Thank you Tyler. This is wonderful. And thank you for your work, which is really mental out to me. Same here. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a

rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TilerCowin and the show is @CowinConvows. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.