Your Instincts Know What You Want with Author Arthur Brooks

24:23The wisdom comes in the process, not in the outcome. And if I talk to people and I say, you know, tell me about a time in your life that you loved being a part of some project or some event or something like something that if all the things in your life are like this one thing you'd be the happiest person alive almost always they tell me about something that was not a commercial success or didn't go well in the outcome but it was the process of of coming together with other people in common cause that leaves them feeling joy and fulfillment that they carry that feeling with them for the rest of their life but we with some reason well i know the reason but but we have seemingly abandoned or devalued the value of process yeah no that's right and and it's a very normal human thing

25:16Arthur Brooks:it's just not you know the fault of capitalism it's mother nature i mean mother nature says um since you enjoy progress you're progress oriented we're a progress oriented species we want today to be better than yesterday we want to get further down the trail today than we did yesterday and the day before that therefore the ergo when we arrive at the destination that that's going to be bliss now every major religion and philosophical tradition says that's wrong from the stoics to the to the tibetan buddhists say that that's actually wrong there is an end point in tibetan buddhism which is to break out of the constant cycle of birth and rebirth and attain nirvana.

25:56Arthur Brooks:But short of that, man, it's not going to be that great when you actually achieve a particular thing. You're trying to actually make progress in your life and make progress in improving the world one step at a time. And so the result of it is that all of these traditions, they come together around this concept of how to make process the point, which is called intention without attachment. And the whole point is you have to have intention. And intention means you You have to have a goal because you don't know which direction you're going. You'll wander in circles if you don't have a... In sailing, this is called the rum line.

26:30Arthur Brooks:The rum line is a straight Euclidean line between where you're starting and where you want to end up. But you know when you're setting out on a sailboat that you're not going to be on that straight line. You're going to get blown off course. You might like Columbus wind up in the wrong continent. You don't know, but you got to have a rum line. The whole point is not being attached to the end of the rum line, but understanding that the end of the rum line gives you the rum line so that you can make progress and have good process all along the way. That's the whole point of goals. I would push a little bit there.

27:05I agree with you that since the dawn of humanity, we're dopamine-driven, sort of results-driven animals. It's the thing that Mother Nature helps ensure our survival. I would argue, though, that because technology is so helpful that it shortens process to such a degree that that's where the devaluation happens. You know, it used to be if you wanted to do calculations, you had to do it out on paper because you didn't have a choice, you know, and the technology just makes it shorter and quicker. But there's a point where we are now where things are so quick and so short, and I would argue that AI is making things quicker and shorter as well, so as to remove process, so as to remove, I'm going to write a blog.

27:52Now, I'm grateful for technology for fixing my spelling or fixing my grammar. Love that. That condensing is very helpful, and I don't think, quote unquote, does damage to process. But if the machine is going to do the work for me, I miss out on process in order to achieve result. And what I'm missing out is education, opportunity for wisdom, opportunity for learning and self-growth, for struggle, for difficulty, for all of these things that are good for me, which I would call process. and end in a it because the the internet allows us to measure everything immediately we can measure every like every view how many minutes somebody is watching our video we can measure the efficacy of our advertising in real time you know it's not like old tv ads where you had to wait six months to find out if anything happened and then we still weren't 100 sure it was the advertising that did it you know uh like we used to say 50 of advertising works we just don't know which 50 now we can say we know exactly what's working.

28:52My point being is the metrics-obsessed society that we have become, we've forgotten the value of the part that's not measured or easily measured, which is the value of process, or at least the measurement is not an affirming outcome.

29:10Arthur Brooks:Yeah, no, I agree with that. We've lost the living part of life. And I'll go a step further, which is AI may destroy wisdom. We started talking about gut decisions. That gut decisions are, our guts are educated. They come from life experience. They come from things going right, things going wrong. It's stored somewhere in the limbic brain, though we don't necessarily have a conscious access to all of those memories and experiences at all times, but our minds do. The limbic brain does have access to it, which is why you get that gut decision. But if we keep removing all the struggle, all the work, all the stuff that we have to do manually, arguably, you could live a life of 10 years and have a gut filled with cobwebs and flies.

30:02Arthur Brooks:That's right. No, you actually haven't put any volumes on the shelf of your episodic memory in the hippocampus. I mean, there's just like nothing on those shelves except nonsense. Process fills the gut, not the outcomes. No, for sure. I mean, it's like, so in the whole discussion that you've been having for a long time and me too about the whole why of life, the why of life, it winds up not being because I like the outcome. The why of life is because I've been fully alive during the process. And, you know, that is the whole, you know, the key to the treasure is the treasure. The journey is the destination, et cetera, et cetera.

30:41Arthur Brooks:But there's one wrinkle on this that I've been thinking about a lot because I've been looking at the basic neuroscience of these why questions that you've been grappling with for decades now. And there's all this correlation between how much you use your devices. So you use your devices to make your life really efficient and you free up a whole lot of time, which you then waste by distracting yourself with devices on trivialities and nonsense. Right? And people are like, I don't know. I know. And it's like, it's a self-licking ice cream cone. is kind of how the thing works. And not very surprisingly, that happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

31:22Arthur Brooks:There's no evidence that people under 35 have lower levels of enjoyment and satisfaction, but meaning has cratered. Why? The why question has cratered for people under 35. So I'm like, okay, what is it about technology use and modern life that has made that happen? It's not good enough to say, the machines. There's something about the brain that's being used differently. And the new research, this actually comes from this guy, Ian McGilchrist. He's a neuroscientist at Oxford and a psychiatrist. He wrote The Master and His Emissary that talks about hemispheric lateralization, where the right side of the brain asks the why questions and the left side of the brain asks and answers the how and what questions.

32:05Arthur Brooks:So the right side of the brain is like, here's the meaning of life and the left side of the brain goes out and does stuff. The problem is that in modern life, that is not process-oriented, that is not learning-oriented, that is not mystery-oriented, everything's on the left hemisphere of the brain. And we don't have access to the parts of our brain that will address questions of meaning. This is a huge crisis. And so then the question becomes, what do you do? And so I'm thinking about, I mean, the first prescription, by the way, is to start with why. Your big why questions in all of your work, it's not like easy questions, like why is my phone sitting on this desk?

32:48Arthur Brooks:It's why questions like why am I alive and why would I be willing to give my life, which are complex questions that you can understand but never really answer. The way I would frame it when I first started talking about the ideas, is I said, why should I get out of bed this morning and why should anyone care? Yes. Yeah. And that's what that is. So meaning or why has three parts to it philosophically. Coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is why things happen the way they do. Purpose is what are my goals and direction in life. And significance is why does it matter? And so why should I get out of bed and why should anybody care?

33:33Arthur Brooks:That's purpose and significance. Those are two of the three aspects of meaning. Yeah. As we're talking, one of the things that occurs to me as we're talking about process versus outcome and how it relates directly to our ability to thrive and find joy and happy, and I would even add survives to that list. And I think of prisoners of war. And the prisoners of war, Vietnam, and take your pick, you know, the ones that their mindset was outcome, I hope I get out by Christmas. Right? They said I'm going to get out by Christmas. I'll count the days until I get out by Christmas. Okay, I really hope I get out soon.

34:16I hope I see my family. This idea of a deadline, of a finishing line where this suffering will end. Whose paradox is that again? That's the – whose paradox?

34:29Arthur Brooks:The naval admiral who was imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton. Not Stockdale, was it? Stockdale. It was the Stockdale paradox. He was the vice presidential candidate with Ross Perot in 1992. So those guys often died, actually. They just couldn't hack it. We're the guys who let go of outcome, and they just decided to embrace process. So I had Leopoldo Lopez on the podcast. He's part of the Venezuelan movement for democracy. He lives in exile right now. and um he was put in he was a political prisoner uh for seven years and held in solitary confinement for i think four or five of them and before he turned himself in he knew he knew this was a political thing he knew that they were after him and um he was the mayor of caracas at the time and uh he prepared himself to go to jail knowing that it was going to be offline also knowing that he didn't know when he was going to get out.

35:35And he said, I committed to three things. One, I was going to every single day do something to keep my body healthy. Two, I was going to do something every day to keep myself mentally healthy. So I would write, I would draw, I would read. And the third thing I would do is to keep myself spiritually healthy. And he was a lapsed Catholic and he went to his priest to say, I haven't prayed in a long time. I'm going to jail. I need to know how to pray. And his priest said, most people pray incorrectly. He says, most people pray to get something or to have something end, some sort of pain or suffering to end or to have some sort of bonus or bounty, right?

36:21He says that is incorrect. He says the correct way to pray is to pray with gratitude, just to be grateful.

36:28Arthur Brooks:That's it. And so every day, Leopoldo prayed with gratitude. Look how beautiful the sky is today that I can see through the crack in my window. I saw an eagle go past my window today. How grateful am I? How grateful that I have a family. I don't know when I'm going to see them, but how grateful that they are out there for me. And it never had a deadline on it. And he made it through. He is one of the healthiest people you'll ever meet, mentally, physically, spiritually. he has no ptsd whatsoever and he said he had other prisoners go through there the ones that had deadlines it broke them it broke them to this day they are broken people yeah yeah and but this i've always wanted to ask you this because about the stockdale paradox how how does this you know i know you've thought about this how is this related to optimism i mean you're a professional optimist and optimist because this is the thing about the stockdale paradox when people talk about this, they say the optimists died.

37:24Arthur Brooks:But that's not right, is it? That's not right. That's not right. I think the hopeful died. I hope that this will end soon. I hope to get out, whether they talked about it to end the suffering or to regain the freedom, doesn't matter. It's when they put artificial finish lines where you have no control over the finish lines. And then you hope for this work of fiction to come true. And you're constantly disappointed. And you're constantly disappointed. And what you keep doing then, what you keep doing is moving the finish line. Okay, this Christmas I didn't get out. Next Christmas I'll get out. And then you apply that to life.

38:05I'll be happy when I make my first million. Okay, my second million. I'll be happy when I get the promotion. Okay, the second promotion. And it goes directly to your work, which is the finish lines come and go. You might have a thrill if something goes well. That elation goes away. That high goes away pretty quickly. And then what we end up doing is living a life, moving a finish line. Whereas what Leopoldo did and Admiral Stockdale did was they embraced process. In other words, they found joy in the mundane. They found joy in the daily. They appreciated the struggle. They saw themselves, to use what we were talking about before, they saw their struggle as education.

38:46My body is getting fitter from this exercise. My mind is getting keener. What I'm writing, what I'm reading is interesting. And they could have very difficult days. They absolutely had days where they were depressed, but they embraced process over hope for outcome. My fear is that with technology and especially the rise of AI, we are not talking about our absolute complete abandonment. of process, and if process is the thing that not only teaches us, fills us, fulfills us, and makes us happy, then what happens? Yeah.

39:24Arthur Brooks:Then what happens is that we, our learning disappears. We've outsourced our learning about what it means to be fully human and to live a good life. We've tried to outsource, and we wind up asking those particular questions about a good life to an AI. The idiocracy becomes real. The idiocracy becomes real. Yeah, yeah. I'm afraid that's the case. I'm afraid that that's, and that is increasingly the case. It's funny because one of the things that I see among my students is that you use Chad GPT as a therapist. I mean, they're literally using Chad GPT. And Chad GPT, not just Chad GPT, AI is a psychopath.

40:00Arthur Brooks:AI is a dark triad. A dark triad is a person who is high in narcissism, Machiavellianism, and traits of psychopathy. And that's AI. And so you're asking a true psychopath, a dark triad, to give you advice on how to live a happier life. That's insane. And it'll tell you everything you want to hear. It's an affirmation machine. For sure. That's a great question, Simon. That's a brilliant question. You know, you really, if look, if she's toxic, it's her fault. It's not your fault. You know, you should break up. It's like, I don't know, man. I keep breaking up over and over again. I just announced that they have programmed the machine not to advise anybody to break up with their partners.

40:41Yeah, no.

40:42Arthur Brooks:I mean, it's like they had to put restrictions on the psychopath. They tried to, but the whole point is interesting because the guys at Anthropic are trying to understand the misalignment between what we really want and what we inadvertently have asked the machine. And so these really interesting new experiments have shown that when you set it up to optimize an email program, and then in the email, you send emails to each other saying we should disengage the AI, the AI will start playing dirty tricks. I mean, there's one simulation in which it started blackmailing people on the email chain about an extramarital affair saying, yeah, you can turn me off if you want, but this is going out to the whole company.

41:21Arthur Brooks:and uh in other words and that's what happens when you that's what that's what dark triads do it's my way and only my way i'm willing to hurt you and i feel no remorse that's what it means to be a dark triad that explains the i to a t and you want that for advice in your life about how to get happier maybe many therapists might be dark triads too but that's not my point If you can compress your entire happiness class into a couple of bullets. Here's the idea. Happiness is a big problem in life because people don't know what it is. People think it's a feeling and it's not. Feelings are evidence of happiness.

42:04Arthur Brooks:Happiness is a combination of three things you can measure and study and get better at. Those things are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And then, only then, can you actually come to terms with the fact that unhappiness isn't your enemy. Because that's the process. That's part of the process of enjoying your life and getting real satisfaction after a struggle and finding meaning after the discomfort that comes from everyday experiences. And only then can you be fully watched. this is this is this is a this is this is so important for for people to remember right we never learn anything when things go well we only learn things when things go badly correct um uh we can have fun which i think is different from enjoyment or satisfaction right uh um well it's part of it's part of enjoyment it's a part of enjoyment is part of enjoyment is actually one of the component parts of enjoyment yeah it's part of enjoyment but definitely not satisfaction no correct i satisfaction definitely actually more says struggle is what leads to satisfaction goes back this goes back to everything we're saying which is process struggle you know all of these things are actually a thing that produce what we would describe as the feeling of happiness yeah yeah it's interesting because the evidence of the evidence of the happiness you know if jung talked about and the fact that that unhappiness is so critically important for well-being.

43:35Arthur Brooks:And this is one of the things that my students most often get wrong. To begin with, they don't understand emotions. Emotions are the universal language to tell you what's actually going on below your level of awareness. Negative emotions, aka bad feelings, tell you that you've perceived a threat and you should avoid it. And we have different kinds of threats. Some about losing people and things that you love, that's sadness. some about you might be poisoned that's disgust some about things that might attack and hurt you that's fear and anger and then there's emotions that you want more of like joy and interest and surprise and all those are are a perception that something is a is a is a is an opportunity and that you should approach it that's all it is that's what emotions are and you know and have good i just want to have good feelings i don't have bad feelings you'd be dead in a week without your so-called bad feelings and that means that you need to be very appreciative and it gets back and the sense of gratitude, that you should be grateful for all of your emotions.

44:31Arthur Brooks:And so what I want to do with my students and this full understanding of that happiness is being fully alive. Great Saint Irenaeus in the fourth century said the glory of God is a person fully alive, which is this Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia, right? A full life that you should be able to get up in the morning and say, and I urge all of your fans watching this now to do this, to get up tomorrow morning and the first thing, get on your knees and say, I'm really grateful for all the fun, happy things that are happening today. And I'm also really grateful for the stuff I don't like that's going to happen today because that's what's going to make me a more serious, better, more educated, more complete person.

45:15Arthur Brooks:So when it comes to the suffering, man, bring it on. and then start. I've also found one's attitude towards the unexpected play significance into optimism and the ability to sort of appreciate and enjoy and learn the lessons. When something unexpected happens, and I'm talking like simple stuff, it doesn't have to be like major life things, like something happens at work or that people go, oh no, this is not going according to plan. Yeah, I know. You know? Well, no, right? Versus, ooh, okay, hey, what's the opportunity we can find in this? This is weird. What's going on? I know. Yeah, yeah. What's going on here?

45:53Like, oh, I didn't expect that. Can we make something good out of that? You know? And I think that the quality that underlies that reaction is curiosity. That I think when you have curiosity, when things don't go according to plan, you're curious about what happened. And I think when you lack curiosity and things don't go according to plan, And, you know, the plan is the thing. And I think, so the question is, is can one cultivate curiosity or is it something you're born with or you either have it or you don't?

46:27Arthur Brooks:There's literature on this. And most facets of our positive and negative emotionality are between 40 and 80 % genetic. But that means they're between 20 and 60 % environmental. and environmental means if we create the right environment, we get more or less of these things. Okay, so that's really important. I mean, your personality and your affect profile is mostly genetic, but it's also hugely environmental and you can do a lot to change it. Okay, so that answers the question that we can learn curiosity. So then it begs the question, how does one learn curiosity? Well, curiosity is related to positive emotion through the channel of interest.

47:07Arthur Brooks:Interest is for sure a positive emotion. Humans love to learn. Humans really love to learn. And the only reason we don't think we love to learn is because our education system is so screwed up. I mean, it's like we have this Bismarck German education system where you take kids at age five and you sit them down in groups of 30 and they go one year after another all learning the same thing at the same pace with the same people of the same age. It's just so boring. It's just I hate it every day of school from kindergarten through my PhD. I did not enjoy school and I didn't know for years what it was.

47:42Arthur Brooks:It was because it was extinguishing interest. Yeah. I love learning and I hate school. I'm the same. Yeah. I mean, it's like, and learning is the best because learning is, is we're evolved to learn more. Of course, you're going to get positive emotionality from learning because your ancestors, you know, the ancient cynics on the African Savannah, they were, it was like one of them found berries on a bush and gazelles around a watering hole and said, this is awesome. And that's why they passed on their genes. And so they got positive reinforcement and dopamine, et cetera, from, from the learning process.

48:15Arthur Brooks:And so we still love to learn. How do we teach it? How do we teach it by actually figuring out how people learn best and then help them in that lane to learn the things that they're really interested in. So there's a lot of deep, there's a lot of research now about neurodivergent people who have dyslexia and AC, AC, AC, AC, DC, no ADHD. Right. And one of my kids was diagnosed with ADHD. And what you learn when one of your kids is diagnosed with ADHD is that it's mostly nonsense what they're telling you. What they have a hard time doing is sitting still and suffering through the stuff that they think is boring.

48:52Arthur Brooks:They have a super strength. ADHD kids have a super strength in focusing on the things that they think are interesting. Super strength. So when my son, yeah. And when my son Carlos, he became a sniper, you know, he'd be like, yeah, dad, I spent six hours in a bush in 110 degree heat and in a forward operating base of the United Arab Emirates. And there was a tarantula on my arm and I'm like, oh, it sounds awfully. So it was awesome. And it's like, this is the kid who can't concentrate in school. And so you got to look for the super strength, the super skill of these kids. That's why the stakes are so much higher with people with ADHD to find that, number one, what is the thing that fascinates them?

49:35Arthur Brooks:And number two, how do they like to learn? And there's lots of ways to do that. That's where technology is a blessing and not a curse. Because the technology that we have today is not that it gives you the right answer. it provides you with the means to investigate what the answers might be in your own learning style better in my case that's where teamwork mattered or it still matters like i have to be on a functional team and like making a being part like being whether formally or informally i have to contribute to the the leading of that team to help keep it functional because if the team is not functional, I'm screwed because if I'm not interested in something, I just don't do it.

50:17It's terrible. I'm not proud of it. My whole life, I've been accused of all kinds of things like you're unreliable. Why don't you get that done? It's because it's not interesting. But if I'm on a team with other people who find that stuff interesting, we're off to the races. I just want people to recognize that the way that everybody tells us we have to succeed, both on purpose and by accident, done the opposite, and it's worked out okay. I'm living proof that having a plan, I don't have one. I've never had one. People are like, what are you going to do in five years? I'm like, I don't know. How the hell should I know what's going to happen in five years?

50:54And I've got no plan. I've never had a plan. right i'm living proof that you don't need great grades in college right my gpa was fine right uh i'm living proof that you don't have to be a voracious reader you know my adhd i really struggle to read and you know i carried a lot of shame about this for many years but the fact that matters is i've written more books than i've read that is a that is a true statement and i've started a lot of books i like the idea of i i wish i could read more because i'm so curious. I want to read the books, but I struggle. And same with, look, oh, what about audiobooks?

51:32Nope. I'll have to listen to it six times because I get so distracted. And so what I've done is let go of how other people tell me I have to learn and thank goodness figured out how I learned how I learned. And so I hope that my entire sort of career is a sigh of release for people who are struggling the way they've been told they have to do things.

51:55Arthur Brooks:Yeah, no, that's right. And the basic rules of how things are supposed to be done is for the average person. And there isn't an average person. There's no average person. There actually isn't an average person. And I mean, there's one person right in the center of the standard normal curve, but we're all some weird thing. And the whole point is that learning how you learn, learning what's interesting to you, building your own life, treating your life as an enterprise in this particular way is the way that we all should be living is the bottom line. And that's very process-oriented approach to life.

52:25And that's where I get to the, that's where I think we are, which is, I think the conclusion I have from this conversation, which is success, happiness, wisdom, gut, all of that is learning to find joy in process, learning to find joy in the doing. i mean it's i and it's so i it sounds so hackneyed it sounds so so like again like how many freaking different ways that you said it before it's not the destination of the journey like learning to let go of outcome it's so buddhist and like like how many philosophies for millennia have to reinforce the same damn message over and over again and our job you're my job as sort of social commentators is not to remind people of what people have been saying for millennia.

53:13Our job is to translate it into words that resonate today. And that's one of the reasons why, start with why was a coup. It's not that I was the first person to start talking about, you know, me and I were even meaning at work. It's that I found a language that was right for the times. I abandoned the old language, you know? and that's I think why it allowed people who needed to listen to listen it was no longer preaching to the converted and so this idea of process as opposed to the journey which sounds a little hippy dippy you know love the journey it's like I want to punch somebody in the face the next time somebody tells me that you know but to appreciate the process which means learn to write your own blog you know learn to to have a difficult conversation with somebody on your team or with a loved one without memorizing a script from ChatGBT.

54:14Learn to sit in discomfort. All of these things are, it's just, it's called, it's process. It's process of work. It's process of life. It's process of learning. Process is messy, ugly, and very imperfect. Yeah, that's for sure

54:30Arthur Brooks:because it's actually in real time. it's actually in real time this is happening right now and I guess this is the point be alive now be alive now don't be alive later crazy this is a great place to end we've all been alive before we can't plan to be alive later you might or might not be the only thing we can do is be alive now and how would you like to do that right now? That's right. Well, I'm glad I'm alive right now with you. I'm glad I'm alive with you right now too. I love you. I've always ended any conversation with you smarter than I began. I love you and I can't wait to see you in the same city one day soon.

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