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

14:36Arthur Brooks: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 they're the only group of people where you can say, hey, you got there's 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, I got to get back to you on that. You know, and the reason is because they're living in a particular way and they're path dependent and they might be addicted and they don't have very much experience.

15:15Arthur Brooks: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.

15:42Tyler Cowen:But there's plenty of young people who are not addicts in major ways. And it seems they still don't listen very carefully.

15:49Arthur Brooks:Yeah.

15:50Tyler Cowen: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?

16:01Arthur Brooks: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 to actually have, they're not going to throw their phones into the ocean, but at least to have serious protocols around their device used where they have more time in person and outside and all the stuff that John Haidt talks about, but we've all talked about where the data, I think, are manifestly clear.

16:38Arthur Brooks: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 have to do two things so that teenagers are more likely to take the advice. Number one is you've got to model the behavior and not talk about it. You and I are both dads. You and I are both raised kids. And, you know, what do you do? I mean, what should you tell them? The answer is it doesn't matter. What matters is what they see you doing. The number one predictor of your kids using their phones around the dinner table is you using your phone around the dinner table.

17:05Arthur Brooks:The second is appealing to an outside authority is sometimes 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 and tell me what you think and have it become a matter of family discussion? And that becomes a better way to do it as well. As opposed to wagging your finger at your kid and saying, do this thing. I think that's generally pretty ineffective.

17:35Tyler Cowen:Where does curiosity fit into your framework? 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-sum 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?

17:56Arthur Brooks:No, no.

17:57Tyler Cowen: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?

18:12Arthur Brooks: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 behavioral economist, 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.

18:46Arthur Brooks:The interesting work on curiosity and interest is it's one of the seven basic emotions, and it's a positive emotion at that. Human beings in the Pleistocene, in the late Pleistocene, 250 ,000 years ago, when the modern brain was more or less what it is today, the members of the species, homo sapiens, 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?

19:19Arthur Brooks: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 up at Harvard. that has been following the same cohort of people since the late 1930s. The original cohort had JFK in it and Ben 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 are still alive, one of the things that they all have in common is that they're lifelong learners and they love to learn.

19:55Arthur Brooks: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 or for the kind of curiosity that hurts your soul. It's called concupiscence. Have you ever heard that word, Tyler? Sure, sure. Yeah. Concupiscence is not what I'm talking about, but the desire to learn something. That's a natural human thing. That's an evolved thing, and it's a good thing, too.

20:22Tyler Cowen:What's the optimal degree of self-deception?

20:24Arthur Brooks:That's a good question. How much should you actually be honest with yourself? And of course, there's the Kantian view, where Immanuel Kant said 0 % 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. Have you heard about this, where you study a philosopher and you try to live according to their precepts strictly for 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 and tell exactly zero lies, and it's a miracle that my marriage survived.

20:55Arthur Brooks: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 and to the me-self.

21:30Arthur Brooks: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 with their 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.

22:04Tyler Cowen: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?

22:12Arthur Brooks:You know, 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.

22:49Arthur Brooks: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 Ian McGilchrist, whose 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 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 and among the Tibetan Buddhists in Dharamsala, 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.

23:38Arthur Brooks: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 that's manageable.

23:52Tyler Cowen:But why not cram all that contemplation of death into your last three months rather than your last 18 months? Do intertemporal substitution, right? Accelerate it. Ben Sasse probably is facing a pretty short timeline, but he's done a remarkable job, even publicly, of coming to terms with what's happening. Isn't that better than, you know, two years of the same?

24:13Arthur Brooks:Well, that's an empirical question, actually, at the end of the day. That's the kind of thing that you could, I could 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 has not stood up extremely well to the subsequent research, but it's a great book nonetheless and is worth reading. She was a Swiss physician psychiatrist, and she talked about the stages of grief that people go through.

24:42Arthur Brooks: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 then they get to the last stage, which is acceptance. Now, a lot of research since then has said, okay, how long is each stage? And what do people actually experience in each stage? And here's the, to cut to the chase, here's what the research basically says. People get to acceptance pretty fast and they're happier during the acceptance phase than they were before they were told they were going to die. Now, this is important, right? This is an important thing because what that says is, I mean, if you're taking it at its face, and again, I mean, the data, the research is the research and it could be updated and everything's contested.

25:23Arthur Brooks:But what this suggests is that if you're doing it right, the more time you have, the more meaningful 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 advance notice as opposed to three, and here's what I really want, somewhere between five and 20 years, which is what I actually have.

25:44Tyler Cowen:Speaking of Buddhism, why is the footprint of Buddhism shrinking around the world, right? There's fewer Buddhists every year.

25:51Arthur Brooks:It's a good question, except that there's fewer of almost, I mean, most serious practitioners of almost every substantial faith. But it's quite a sharp decline, right?

25:59Tyler Cowen:Especially Korea, Japan, China.

26:01Arthur Brooks: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 who entered the Catholic Church, 840 left. That's a pretty sharp decline. And I think this has a lot to do with the general urbanization, technologization, and the secularization of especially younger cohorts today. hey, if I were a Buddhist leader, if I were a religious leader, 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.

26:30Tyler Cowen:Why, for you, Catholicism rather than Orthodox Christianity?

26:34Arthur Brooks:Yeah, it's a good question, except that, I mean, there's 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 in Mexico. And I went through the conversion. I was an evangelical Protestant at the time. It 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.

27:06Tyler Cowen:There's an Orthodox Christian church in every major American city. There's multiple of them, right? And 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?

27:22Arthur Brooks:Yeah, my brother is actually Orthodox, and my brother's 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 its ubiquitousness. The fact 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.

28:04Tyler Cowen:I once suggested to Peter Thiel that he should be Catholic, and his response was something like, the Popes are too left-wing. What do you think? Why are they so left-wing?

28:14Arthur Brooks:Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the truth is that everybody's too much something for me. Whatever 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 laity and despite all the clergy and despite all the hierarchy in the Catholic Church. And popes aren't perfect. I certainly don't agree with them 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've got to live in the world.

28:41Tyler Cowen: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.

28:52Arthur Brooks: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 been. 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 hypomanic 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.

29:34Arthur Brooks: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 my wife's an immigrant. Her, right? Not them. I'm also a foreign adoptive father. And, you know, 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.

30:00Tyler Cowen: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?

30:08Arthur Brooks:No. I mean, I think that there's a difference in the ability of different populations to assimilate and different cultures in their 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 there's been greater, lesser degrees of success around the world.

30:27Tyler Cowen: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, I'm more Trumpy too? Or how have you dealt with that emotionally and intellectually? Yeah, yeah.

30:48Arthur Brooks:I'll answer, but you're going to have to answer after me. Sure. Will 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 a bit of 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 it 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.

31:21Arthur Brooks: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.

31:56Arthur Brooks:And if you liked it 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 if 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. I have very many traditional views that don't seem to be in favor at this point.

32:24Arthur Brooks: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.

32:34Tyler Cowen: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 turn to worse ideas and we're suffering under that. And then it spreads 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.

33:12Tyler Cowen: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.

33:38Arthur Brooks: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.

33:46Tyler Cowen:Exactly. But on much of the rest, we agree. And in terms of what we want, I think we agree.

33:50Arthur Brooks:I think that's right. So I guess we don't have to figure out who's right. We just have to wait.

33:55Tyler Cowen:How will artificial intelligence influence politics in the political spectrum?

33:59Arthur Brooks:Easy question, 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 Ian McGilchrist, 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.

34:40Arthur Brooks:That's a lot of what my new book is about is how to get back to the right side of your brain, as 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 ChatGPT 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 ChatGPT, 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 completely unsatisfied as a result of that.

35:14Arthur Brooks:So the answer to the basic happiness question, 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, oh, the Industrial Revolution is going to permanently ruin society because it's urbanizing and people don't know each other and the traditional folkways are going away.

35:55Arthur Brooks: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 largesse that it created through capitalism.

36:12Tyler Cowen: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-c conservatism?

36:21Arthur Brooks: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.

36:36Tyler Cowen: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?

36:47Arthur Brooks: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.

36:56Tyler Cowen: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 cannot 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.

37:10Arthur Brooks:I think that's a pragmatic view.

37:12Tyler Cowen:Now, your 2007 book, Who Really Cares? It had a data-backed 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?

37:27Arthur Brooks: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 on the left-hand side, 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 and highly significant is religion, is religious activity. And those things, when you're looking at a crosstab, they tended, and still do to a large extent, not as much as they did before, to be correlated between politics and religion.

38:03Arthur Brooks:The reason the 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 it's 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 of that phenomenon. And that's what I actually think we're probably seeing today. Nonetheless, I would suspect I haven't rewritten that book. I haven't rerun all those data because I'm doing something different at this point.

38:33Arthur Brooks: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 as small a number of dimensions as possible,

38:45Tyler Cowen: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?

38:54Arthur Brooks: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.

39:21Arthur Brooks: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 other is 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. 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 the priority of our capitalist system should be to create equal opportunity.

39:52Arthur Brooks:No, not just equal opportunity. The greatest opportunity possible for people at the margins of society. society. Now, she probably has more faith than me in the ability of government to actually achieve that, and I have more faith in 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 that we love each other.

40:16Tyler Cowen:Put aside Zelensky, because I know you honored him when you were running AEI. Who's a political leader you admire today?

40:23Arthur Brooks:Yeah, I'll say something controversial. Sure. And you could ask me an even more targeted question. Tell me an American president in your lifetime that you authentically admire. Is there one, Tyler?

40:33Tyler Cowen: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.

40:54Arthur Brooks:Yeah.

40:54Tyler Cowen:That would be my answer.

40:56Arthur Brooks:Yeah, yeah. That's a good answer. And agree with versus admire, that's an important distinction that you just made, and I appreciate that an awful lot. My favorite president in my lifetime is George W. Bush.

41:06Tyler Cowen:He's the one I would like the most, actually.

41:08Arthur Brooks:But he's my favorite president. Why? Because all the mistakes he made, I probably would have made two. And this is actually how you see somebody that you really admire. You don't look at what they've done that's successful. Look at the things that they did that were unsuccessful and say, honestly, would I have 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 what they did subsequent to the errors as well to see whether or not they learned and whether they're a person of integrity, which I think W. manifestly is.

41:37Arthur Brooks:This is somebody in public life that I have a great deal of admiration and love for is George W. Bush.

41:42Tyler Cowen: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 spot.

41:49Arthur Brooks:Because of the Gulf War, I understand.

41:51Tyler Cowen:But not just in general. A number of things went wrong.

41:54Arthur Brooks:Right. No, that's for sure. And all I can say is if I had been president, probably the same things would have gone wrong.

41:59Tyler Cowen:Who's the greatest French horn player ever, besides you?

42:02Arthur Brooks:Yeah, no, that's Dennis Brain, of course. Dennis Brain, who was the wunderkind 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, did the first major recordings of the Mozart concertos, of both Strauss concertos, 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.

42:34Tyler Cowen:Do you like the Ligeti Horn Trio?

42:35Arthur Brooks:Yes, I do. I love it. I think it's great. I love the Ligeti Horn Trio. And the best concert arrangement actually is that where the Ligeti Horn Trio is the first half and the Brahms Horn Trio is the second half.

42:45Tyler Cowen: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.

42:50Arthur Brooks:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

42:51Tyler Cowen:Usually you get better, right? You're not that old in your 20s.

42:55Arthur Brooks:Classical musicians, they tend to peak about age 36, according to the literature. That's when most of them will look back on their 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 micro tears in the muscle in the upper lip, which now can be repaired.

43:24Arthur Brooks:That was not a medical technology that was on offer in those days. So that's one explanation. The second is, quite frankly, Tyler, I was 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.

43:40Tyler Cowen:Well, first tell us your spiral theory of careers, and then we'll get to you becoming an economist.

43:45Arthur Brooks: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 principal components analysis, where the data speak. Nonetheless, the four types are what's called the expert career. That was my dad's academic career. where he 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 what he wanted was lifestyle and stability.

44:22Arthur Brooks:That's also the post office. The second type of career is the transitory career where 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, and then you're driving a moving van, and then you fall in love and go move to a surf shack in 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, which is the linear career, where you only change every three to seven years depending on if you can get something better in your silo.

44:54Arthur Brooks:The linear career means you go up and up and up and up and up. What I am is called the spiral, which is a series of mini 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 your career is an adventure where you're impelled to go learn a big new thing.

45:16Tyler Cowen:So how is it you switched from French horn playing to economics?

45:21Arthur Brooks:Pure serendipity, as a matter of fact. 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 at 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'd had one semester of college at that point.

45:53Arthur Brooks: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 I went out on 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.

46:37Arthur Brooks: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 Horde. 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.

47:01Tyler Cowen:And later on, did you just get bored with economics?

47:04Arthur Brooks:No, I never got bored with economics, but I was actually teaching non-profit economics. And I studied a non-profit studies program at Syracuse, at the public policy school at Syracuse, at the 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 can actually do this. This is pretty hard work. And I started getting really interested. And along came an opportunity to run a nonprofit. The American Enterprise Institute in Washington offered me the presidency through a series of failed searches, by the way.

47:38Arthur Brooks:It's not that I looked like such a great candidate. It's just that they needed a president bad. It's very hard to find a chief executive of a think tank. And so 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 gave me a trial interim period. And then I went and I tried that. 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 AEI at the time as an economist. And I love AEI. I love the idea of the free enterprise system in service of humanity, in service of the poor, which is really the moral basis.

48:15Arthur Brooks:and what AEI is all about. So I felt very, very good about that mission, and I did it for almost 11 years.

48:20Tyler Cowen: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?

48:32Arthur Brooks:That's a good question. What I think that AI won't do very well, I think AI at 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.

49:11Arthur Brooks:and that's what we're going to have to specialize in. You, me, and everybody else in the space.

49:15Tyler Cowen:So what happens to staff numbers? To staff members on the Hill? No, staff numbers in a think tank.

49:20Arthur Brooks: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 there used to be. Certainly less need for people to run down studies. You know, I use consensus.ai, 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 gopher I've ever had in my entire career. There's going to be simply less need for that. Will there be more need for more creative jobs? Time will tell.

49:50Tyler Cowen:And what's the future of classical music?

49:53Arthur Brooks: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 an important thing to keep in mind because it's still going to be an incredibly esoteric interest. You and I love classical music, but we're part of the 2 % of the population that's interested in it at all, which is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned. But the truth of the matter is that having it recreated by an artificial intelligence, it won't be the same for the 2 % that actually like it in the first place. And there will be no live concerts, which we like as well.

50:31Arthur Brooks: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.

50:44Tyler Cowen:In the United States, should the federal government subsidize it?

50:47Arthur Brooks: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 onto the scene and I realized as an economist that I was a free market economist, I was a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies. That's just how I was. That's how I 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 cultural economics work for the Association for Cultural Economics International.

51:15Arthur Brooks:And the result was, it was you, me, and a couple other cats out there that were real free marketeers in the space. And I was railing against the idea of federal subsidies to the arts, largely because of what I read from you.

51:28Tyler Cowen:Let's say you had to live in the Spanish speaking world and Catalonia I'm including as part of this.

51:34Arthur Brooks:I don't know. That's a controversial statement, Tyler.

51:36Tyler Cowen:But just, it's in Spain, right?

51:37Arthur Brooks:It's in Spain, sort of.

51:39Tyler Cowen:Would you still pick the city of Barcelona? Or Madrid has taken the lead? Or Mexico City? Is the dark horse there? Or where do you go?

51:48Arthur Brooks:I love Barcelona. Barcelona is where my heart is and 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.

52:16Arthur Brooks:But, you know, these things are predictable. 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.

52:27Tyler Cowen:It's much more touristy and it's economically stagnated. So I might have once said Barcelona, but now it's clearly Madrid for me.

52:34Arthur Brooks: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's 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 anyplace else. And by the way, Roman ruins. What's not to like?

52:57Tyler Cowen:What's something about Catalonia that you might understand and maybe American outsiders do not?

53:03Arthur Brooks:Yeah, the Catalan language is a very distinct thing that people don't understand when they first moved 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 artsiness that doesn't exist in other places. Incredibly winsome, incredibly interesting. And by the way, the Catalan language itself is just extremely beautiful.

53:28Tyler Cowen:Do you still read in Spanish and or Catalan?

53:31Arthur Brooks:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I lecture in both, as a matter of fact. So when I go to Barcelona, which is every year, a couple of times ordinarily, I will usually give talks and lectures at the university and in public in both Spanish and Catalan.

53:43Tyler Cowen:And how would you describe the extra something you get from both reading in those languages and lecturing in them and speaking them?

53:50Arthur Brooks:Yeah, that's actually, there's research on this, of course. And that's the research Raymond Cattell and subsequent researchers on crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is one of the reasons that people are better teachers when they get older. People have 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. And I had looked at that literature.

54:19Arthur Brooks: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. I said, huh, what if that's true? So I had never taught in Catalan. I just sort of spoke in street Catalan up at that point because when I lived there and with my wife, et cetera, we speak 50-50, Spanish and English at home with some Catalan thrown in. And so I decided that I was going to give a series of speeches in Barcelona in Catalan. And I studied up and I did that.

54:53Arthur Brooks:And it dramatically improved my ability to speak Catalan. My Catalan is much better at 61 than it was at 41 or 31, as a matter of fact. And that's made my life better.

55:04Tyler Cowen:Now, you love 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?

55:12Arthur Brooks: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, that's all I was going to say. It's all I could do to get her to do eight days of the Camino with me. To do the next several thousand days walking around the world, there's just no way. And all I can say is I would be a bachelor. And that's not in my goal set.

55:34Tyler Cowen:Your current age is best suited for peak performance at doing what?

55:39Arthur Brooks:In terms of teaching?

55:40Tyler Cowen:No, anything. It's not French horn. It's not baseball. but it's fill in the blank.

55:45Arthur Brooks:It's absolutely teaching. It absolutely is. And that's actually, according to the research and 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 hesitated, because I'm on the road 48 weeks a year as it is. I'm traveling every single week for my work.

56:22Arthur Brooks: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 as 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 corny metaphysical answer like heaven.

56:55Tyler Cowen:But there's plenty of places your work is unlikely to bring you, right? Right. There are a specific kind of place. They might tend to be poorer or less politically free. Are you curious in general to sample more from that part of the world? Yeah, I would.

57:08Arthur Brooks:And I've not spent time in sub-Saharan 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 Ahana Buddhism 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.

57:33Tyler Cowen:Last two questions. First, how do you feel you will approach and deal with your own death? I hope with courage.

57:42Arthur Brooks: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 fear of suffering. What I hope is that my death will be an inspiration to other people to live well.

57:58Tyler Cowen: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?

58:12Arthur Brooks:I'm thinking circus juggler 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 at age 61, what will it 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 Josef Pieper, the great mid-20th century German philosopher who wrote Leisure, the Basis of Culture. He defined leisure not as a sedia, 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.

58:53Arthur Brooks:And so that's what I'm thinking about is actually 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.

59:04Tyler Cowen:Arthur Brooks, thank you very much.

59:06Arthur Brooks:Thank you, Tyler. This is wonderful. And thank you for your work, which has really meant a lot to me.

59:10Tyler Cowen:Same here.

59:14Tyler Cowen: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 at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.