Why Crazy Activism is Taking Over the West — Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks

19:04Arthur Brooks:Aquinas talked about in his Summa Theology in 1265, he wrote about the idols that beguile us. And it was ever thus. The four idols that beguile us, he said. And each one of us has a particular idol that if we know what it is, we have power. But if we don't know what it is, we'll always, in retrospect, be the cause of our regret. The four idols are money, power, pleasure, and fame. And each one of us. I mean, like, they're all nice. They're all great. And I play as... I teach MBA students at Harvard, and I have a game called What's My Idol? They don't know. Right. They don't know. But if you know you have unbelievable power, why?

19:41Arthur Brooks:Because you know it will beguile you, and it will distract you from what you truly want, faith, family, friendship, satisfying, meaningful work, which are the kind of the four virtuous parts of the happiness 401k plan, if you want. But if you know, it's really important. So I play this game, you know, so that we can uncover their own idol. And they're usually wrong. They think it's one thing and it isn't. And I have a series of questions that I go through to figure out which it is. Hey, do you want to play? Yeah, let's play.

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21:35Arthur Brooks:Which one do you want to play first? Me. Okay. Yeah, okay. Let's hear it for our first contestant. So here's how What's My Idol works. In social science, I never give you a survey and say, pick one. I eliminate the things that it's not. It's a much, much more accurate way of getting at the whole idea. I've just realized this is going out on the internet. This is going out on the internet. Be loud, be proud. Don't worry, I'll do it too if you want. I'll tell you what my idol is at the end of the day. So of the four, and I'll repeat them. tell me, I want you to tell me the one that you're least beguiled by, that you're least attracted to, but that doesn't mean you don't have it at all.

22:14Arthur Brooks:So for example, if you say, I don't care about money, that doesn't mean you have no money. You're not in poverty. What that means is that you go to the population average. And if it's your idol, that's torture. Being normal is the worst if it's your idol. Okay. So here are the four. Money, wealth, resources, power, which is influence over to the people. It's not evil. It's not Hugo Chavez. It's something that can be very, very good, but people are beguiled by it. Pleasure, which either means feeling good or comfort or security.

22:45Francis Foster:Right?

22:45Arthur Brooks:So if you check your stock portfolio every day, you've got a pleasure, you've got a pleasure idol. Right. Or if you have a hard time getting out of bed, not just if you get high a lot. Okay. And last is, and last is fame. And fame doesn't necessarily mean internet fame. It might be prestige. It might be... It's like status. ...well-regarded and for the right people. You know what I mean? It's like for professors, it's like most professors don't want to be Taylor Swift. What most professors want is to walk into the room at that conference and everybody says, that's Professor Kissing. It's like he wrote that paper on the seven-dimensional disappearing manifold.

23:26Arthur Brooks:Yeah, I definitely don't want that.

23:28Francis Foster:Or something super academic, right?

23:29Arthur Brooks:But you do want prestige in your field, right? Okay. So fame can mean all sorts of things. Now, you're thinking about these things, Francis. You've got to get rid of one. Which one do you get rid of first? Okay, so we've got fame. Money, power, pleasure, and fame. Money, power, pleasure, fame. Or honor. You know, honor, which is, that's the old word. That's the word that Aquinas uses, is honor. Instead of? Instead of fame.

23:55Francis Foster:Okay.

23:56Arthur Brooks:But that has kind of a connotation. I have two of my kids are Marines. They serve with honor. That's not what I mean. Right, right, right. I'd say power. Power. Tell me why. And by the way, I believe you, but tell me why. Tell me. Look, I kind of see it through kind of an addict's lens, and I'll tell you why. It's because whenever I've been gambling with friends,

24:19Francis Foster:I'm like, this does nothing for me. That little, in my brain, I'm like, yeah, more, more, more. I get nothing from it. So power, I'm like, I don't... What's important to me is that I am satisfied with what I'm doing. That's what matters to me. Like, have I done my best? Have I produced work that I'm genuinely proud of? At the end of the day, do I look back and go, that was a good day? It matters to me what my friends and family think. But everybody else, I don't really care that much about.

24:50Arthur Brooks:You don't want to order people around? No. Snap your fingers and people do what you want? No. You don't want to be a CEO? No. So let me make a supposition about you. Do you have libertarian political tendencies? Yeah, I kind of want to be left alone. Do you hate it when people tell you what to do? I fucking hate it. Yep, there you go. And when people who hate actually seeing, having other people have power over them, don't like power. Here's the thing. When you see somebody who has a particular idol, they admire somebody who has the same idol, but more of it. So if you see a politician who admires dictators, Look out.

25:25Arthur Brooks:That person wants to be a dictator. Look at who you admire. If you admire rich people, if you admire famous people, that's your idol, almost certainly. You despise powerful people who wield it arbitrarily, right? Yeah. I mean, you're from Venezuela, for Pete's sake. I mean, you've actually seen the fruits of that. So I totally believe you. Now, you've just gotten rid of an idol that's not an idol, so there's no virtue. Okay, you've got three left. Money, pleasure and fame you got to get rid of one more and this is going to get harder now because these are all kind of nice right

26:04Arthur Brooks:fame sorry i don't believe you you have a famous podcast no but you know i no i'll tell you why i i know enough about myself that i know pleasure i know pleasure You know where you're driving with this, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, now the reason I say this is because, I mean, it might perfectly well be the case that it doesn't matter to you at all when people recognize you in the airport, which I'm sure they do. Yeah. Because you've got millions and millions and millions of viewers and they go into, oh, I love trigonometry and it feels kind of good. Yeah. But you don't care. It's not that I don't care.

26:42I'm glad that it provides them with value and I'm glad that I'm doing something that makes people feel good and it teaches them and it educates them and all the rest of it. but it's third in that list. I wouldn't pretend it doesn't matter because it does, but if I'm being honest, it's third.

26:58Arthur Brooks:What you're saying is that the other two are more important to you. And I know what you're going to get rid of next, which is money. And that's because what's left is pleasure. Yes. Tell me about the pleasure idol.

27:08Francis Foster:I could have told you this from the moment we started.

27:11Arthur Brooks:Francis, are you a porn addict? I'm kidding.

27:16Arthur Brooks:That's right. The last episode of Triggerdometry. Yeah. I just, I have, there is a family history, obviously my family, with alcoholism. Alcoholism, yep. I know that I have those tendencies, which is why I don't drink. It's why I have to be very regimented with my life. I meditate every morning. Right. I plan and I structure my day because I know that if I don't have those guardrails, I can easily veer off. I have depressive tendencies and when I indulge those depressive tendencies it either goes it goes very quickly down a dark path and you try to alleviate those tendencies with immediate pleasures which ultimately make the problem worse like every comedian I got diagnosed with ADHD and I know that I have those trying to ameliorate those best set of behaviors whatever you want to call them and ameliorate it with substances and various different behaviors that I know are deeply destructive.

28:21Arthur Brooks:Yeah, I completely believe you. And I completely believe that. And it's interesting because I've actually studied how humor works. And humor is all based on surprise. And so you're usually really good at being surprised or you're good at surprising people. So humor works on a part of the limbic system called the parahippocampal gyrus. And you flick it and it creates surprise which you resolve by laughing. And so, you know, any stupid dad joke does this. And the reason that little kids laugh, your four-year-old laughs, or when your four-year-old was two and you did this, it flicked the parahippocampal gyrus of your baby.

28:57Arthur Brooks:And so they laugh like crazy. And now, you know, even now I'll tell you a stupid joke. I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers. That's an Emo Phillips joke. That's dumb, for sure. I mean, that's my father's favorite joke. So that's, but here's the interesting thing. Most people are either good at flicking that thing to change the mood because they're depressed, which is most comedians, or they're really good at having it flicked by somebody else, which means they actually enjoy humor. Those are the two aspects of humor. You're unusual because you laugh a lot.

29:34Arthur Brooks:Most comedians don't laugh that much because they're only good at one part of that. They're really good at changing the tenor. It's called emotional substitution. And so you find out when you're a depressed kid, that you're funny and you say a funny thing and everybody laughs and it makes things better inside your brain. Right? So it's a strange thing, right? But you actually, you enjoy jokes too. I love jokes. Yeah. I mean, good jokes. Not the one I just, I like him on Phillips. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's anyway. So that's, that's, sorry. I didn't mean to take us off that path. What were we talking?

30:04Arthur Brooks:Pleasure is his idol. Pleasure is my idol. Pleasure is your idol and pleasure is your idol. And I actually believe that. And so you have to be very, very careful about the fact that you'll self-administer pleasure for mood management because it's an ineffective mood management technique. Yeah. It's why I, one of the things that I spend my money on is like personal training because I know that I'm physically lazy. And if I go to the gym, I'm just going to mess about, which is why I need a very angry South African man to basically shout at me and get me to list heavy things three to four times a week.

30:37Lift, lift, lift, lift. Yeah, I like it. But I just know that if I do that, that again, I see my life essentially and my behavior and the way I plan my life as a series of guardrails. If I don't have the guardrails in place, we go somewhere very dark, very quickly.

30:56Arthur Brooks:Right, right, right. You ready? Yeah. All right. This is going to be difficult.

31:00Francis Foster:I can't eliminate any of them. You can't.

31:03Arthur Brooks:Well, having a balanced portfolio of idols is actually pretty healthy insofar as that you're probably not managed by any of them really vigorously.

31:13Francis Foster:Give them to me again.

31:14Arthur Brooks:Money, power, pleasure, and fame. You've got to get rid of one of them first. And that means going to the population mean. Which one do you get rid of first?

31:22Francis Foster:Going to the population means if I eliminate money, I make what an average person makes.

31:26Arthur Brooks:You're the most average Brit ever. Which, by the way, is getting worse and worse. Yeah, tell me about it.

31:32Francis Foster:I can't believe I'm saying this, but power and fame, I'd definitely eliminate.

31:36Arthur Brooks:You would. Yeah. You would. You know, I mean, you're pretty libertarian too. I'm very libertarian.

31:40Francis Foster:I fucking hate people telling me what to do, but I am CEO of trigonometry and I do run it, right? Because it must be done.

31:46Arthur Brooks:Because it must be done.

31:47Francis Foster:I'd rather not do it.

31:48Arthur Brooks:But if people start calling you boss, it's going to make you uncomfortable and feel passively aggressive. I told everyone to stop it.

31:52Francis Foster:Yeah, it's king. Yeah, yeah.

31:54Arthur Brooks:So you're a hierarchical organization that has the, that's flatter than it could be because you don't like it when people call you by your last name. No. That stuff really bums you out. And fame, it doesn't draw you in at all. I don't like fame. If literally nobody recognized you on the street. I'd prefer that. You would prefer that.

32:13Francis Foster:So to me, fame is an unpleasant byproduct of what we do. Yeah, really? Yeah. Like when people come up to me in the street and they want to chat, I sort of want to chat to them to give them what they want. But for me, it's awkward and a bit of a distraction. It's not oxygen for you? No, not at all. Having said that, I don't want people to walk away from this thinking like I'm being superior in somewhere, whatever. Like I enjoy having that conversation. But if I could just walk around and people didn't recognize me, that would definitely be my purpose.

32:49Arthur Brooks:Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Introvert. You are an introvert, which means that when you do something big like ARK, that you're drained of energy. Absolutely.

32:56Francis Foster:I need to rest for a week.

32:57Arthur Brooks:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So an extrovert would be wired after that. That's really how you find out because introverts can be very public, but they don't get energy from being public.

33:06Francis Foster:I get tired from being with lots of other people.

33:09Arthur Brooks:Okay, so you like solitude. I love solitude. You like being alone or being alone just with your family? Yeah, massively. Alone.

33:19Francis Foster:I've got two young kids, you can tell.

33:23Arthur Brooks:So there were just two left, which is money and pleasure. pleasure.

33:27Francis Foster:Well, I really value comfort. Right. And the thing with money is, it's like, I'm not someone who wants to make lots of money for the sake of making money, but I do need a lot of money to, to do the things in my life that I want. I don't, I, maybe that doesn't make any sense.

33:45Arthur Brooks:It makes a lot of sense because you just said it's pleasure, not money. You need the money to give you, to give you the comfort that you want.

33:51Francis Foster:Yeah.

33:51Arthur Brooks:That's really what it comes down to.

33:52Francis Foster:And for me, comfort is peace is what I mean. Like I want to be left alone in a comfortable space. That's kind of what I'm into.

33:58Arthur Brooks:Yeah, you want to eliminate sources of discomfort. Yes. That's what it comes down to. Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually one of the things that we find a lot of people, they don't, you know, they want, they don't want noisy neighbors. For example, they don't want to wait in a queue to go to the doctor. I don't want to wait in a queue to go to the doctor. They don't want to be in traffic.

34:16Francis Foster:I do not want to be in traffic.

34:17Arthur Brooks:Those things cost money. Right. And so that's a pleasure. Right. That's a pleasure idol. And what that means is that it's very, very easy to kind of fall into patterns. And again, there's nothing wrong with these things. These things are not evil. There's nothing wrong with pleasure. It's just the misuse of pleasure. It's just the elevation of pleasure. When you're doing this at the expense of your family, when it's like, I want peace, get the kids out of here. Then you'll actually sacrifice your relationships. You'll do things that you ultimately regret as a result of that. And so knowing that is super important.

34:44Arthur Brooks:For most of my students, they think they have a money idol. I mean, they're MBA students at the Harvard Business School. Well, they're American. but it's not that they have a they actually have an honor idol they have a they're not even a fame idol it's a it's to be beloved they want to be adored and the reason is because my students and by the way me too is my problem too they're really really really good at something when their kids like really good at something when their kids and they learn that they only get love and attention from their parents when they do that thing and their little synaptically plastic brains is really important as a dad.

35:21Arthur Brooks:I'm a dad. I'm a grandfather. My kids, my grandkids are the same age as your kids. That they only get attention when they do that thing, which makes them conclude in their synaptic plasticity that love is earned. And then I go through life trying to get that feeling. I want that feeling by doing the thing. And they become sort of human doings as opposed to human beings. And what they want is they want adoration and they want to earn it. They want to earn, they'll earn their spouse's love. They'll earn their friend's love. they'll try to earn God's love. They'll go through their lives trying to earn love.

35:52Arthur Brooks:And that's really, that's an honor idol. That's an idol of the adoration that you're trying to earn. And love can't be earned. Love is a free gift freely given. It's a grace. And so this is one of the most important things we have to get strivers, super successful accomplishment people off of that idol because they'll never be happy. They'll never have a happy marriage. They'll never have true friendships. They'll never have an ordered relationship with the divine, as long as they're trying to earn love. A lot of comedians have that. I can see that. The moment you started talking about that, I was like, yeah, that's a bit of you, mate.

36:28Arthur Brooks:I know a lot of comedians. I work with a lot of comedians. And part of it is because I learned from them. I think I'm the only social scientist that's ever done Mike Birbiglia's show. Oh, really? Yeah. Working it out. That's a great show. I listen to that show sometimes because I'm working things out all the time. I'm always on tour. It's just doing public speaking. And so, and I went on to talk about how I work out my material on a, on a, on a comedian podcast, but it's true. It's true. They want to be loved. Like laugh at my joke. I just want you to laugh at my joke. It's just, that's points on the board.

36:59Arthur Brooks:It makes me feel like I'm worth something for Pete's sake and deep in my heart. I don't feel like I'm worth anything. And I feel worthless until somebody's loving me.

37:08Francis Foster:That's really interesting. You call it joke coke. Yeah. Yeah. Joke coke. Yeah, totally. It's interesting. It's why I never really enjoyed being a comedian. I like making jokes as part of my speeches or doing this, but the life of a comedian, like, it's very hard. It's a hard life. Yeah. The travel, all of it. And I was very happy to not do it anymore when COVID came along and, you know, everything shifted. Really? Yeah. Oh, super.

37:33Arthur Brooks:I hated being taken off the road. I hated it. Really? I loved being on tour. I started going on tour when I was 19 because I was a professional classical musician all the way through my 20s. and I started going on chamber music tours. I toured for a couple of years with Charlie Bird, who is a bossa nova guitar player. And I love tour. I love the touring life. It's just the best. And it's not a well-balanced, healthy life, which means that married life and family life actually saved me. But left to my devices, I would be out seven days a week. Right, right, right.

38:02Francis Foster:I want to come back to something you said. And obviously the meaning issue is something we've talked about a lot. And the activism issue is something we've talked about a lot.

38:12Arthur Brooks:I know on this show really well, too.

38:14Francis Foster:Well, thank you. Because we're really trying to get to the bottom of it. I think it's very easy and tempting for people who, you know, who maybe got their life together a little bit and they're successful in some ways to just look at people who are, you know, throwing soup on paintings to save the planet or whatever. And, you know, it's kind of silly and you make fun of it. But I think I've always seen that within that is the drive to have meaning. And it's the drive to be significant as well. And it's the drive to live in a significant time. I think there's a huge appeal to the idea that we are living in some kind of time that is immediately before an imminent catastrophe.

38:55Francis Foster:And if I just go out and I have the right placard at the right protest, then we'll save the planet. Otherwise, everything's going to go haywire. and what I wanted to ask you is why is it that people pursue forms of activism that are not actually effective because if you wanted meaning like I get a lot of meaning from doing trigonometry because I feel like we're contributing to the cultural discussions and shaping them in a way that we think is true and matters a lot and from the feedback we get from people I hear that it makes a meaningful impact on their lives. And that to me is meaning. That's real meaning.

39:35But if I was engaged in something

39:38Francis Foster:that was not producing any outcome and was in fact not geared to producing any outcome, was simply attending protests for the sake of feeling like I am with other people who are achieving effectively nothing, I wouldn't find that meaningful. Why do people pursue forms of activism that don't actually achieve anything at all? We get asked this all the time. Which VPN do you use at Trigonometry? The answer is simply CyberGhost VPN. CyberGhost isn't some fringe tool. It has 38 million users and over 20 ,000 five-star reviews on Trustpilot, which frankly is rare for any tech product, let alone a VPN.

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41:29Arthur Brooks:Well, one answer, which is an incomplete answer, is that it's performative. But it's not performative to others. It's performative to yourself. The meaning comes from showing that you care about something enough to be angry about it, to put yourself into a hot, hedonic state, to feel intense levels of negative emotionality. It just shows that you can actually feel something, for Pete's sake. You're looking, you're doing this show. Really, really good. Really good. But you're not in a hot, hedonic state. On the contrary, it'd be terrible if you're just yelling the whole time. I mean, there are people who try to do that in media, but there would be a less effective medium if you were doing that.

42:09Arthur Brooks:But there are a lot of people who just can't feel anything. They're not feeling anything. They're completely numb. And so what they get involved in forms of very, very performative activism because it puts, it makes them feel alive, maybe for the first time in a long time. And it's really an extraordinary thing. I mean, they're spending their time scrolling and, you know, dating online. And it's just incredibly numbing behaviors. They kind of wiped out all sense of boredom, but their lives are grindingly boring. And so the result of it is they want to feel something, maybe for the first time in a long time is what it comes down to.

42:41Arthur Brooks:The second problem is that a lot of young people today have been effectively conscripted into a culture war by baby boomers and they've been made to understand that their identity is in a form of grievance. And this is very common. This is the best way to manipulate people is to help them give, is to create a victim identity. That's identity politics. But the most single toxic kind of identity that you can have is that I'm a victim. This is what - Why is it toxic? It's toxic because you're looking in the mirror and saying, I'm aggrieved. I don't know who I am if I'm not feeling bad. And this is the exact antithesis of Christianity or any good, serious, nutritious religion, which is to look in the mirror and say, I'm a beloved child of God.

43:27Arthur Brooks:What's my identity? Child of God. It's profoundly positive. But if you look in the mirror and you say, I'm the victim of discrimination. I'm somebody who's actually suffered marginalization. I'm somebody who's on the short end of the stick. That's terrible as an identity. That's the recipe for anxiety and depression, which, of course, it has produced.

43:46Francis Foster:and what if, what would you say to people who will say to you, well, I have been a victim of this or my people have been a victim of this for a long time or now, you know, you get the same on other parts of the political spectrum. We have been a victim of DEI or whatever and these are all things that are historically accurate.

44:03Arthur Brooks:I mean, the woke right is doing exactly the same thing today. I don't know, do we use, on trigonometry, do we talk about that? Do we use this term of art? I was one of the people that pioneered it. You did, you coined this, didn't you?

44:13Francis Foster:Yeah, he's got me lots of love and gratitude on the internet. Yeah, he's coming for a drink now with Tuck.

44:20Arthur Brooks:Means you're onto something, Constantine, you're onto something. But the truth is that you will find, again, this is not the exclusive ecosystem of the left. The left got really, really good at this, of conscripting people into the culture war with victim identity. But the right has picked this up like crazy because it's incredibly powerful. And why should, I mean, you should acknowledge the fact that there are injustices in the world. that's the right thing to do. But you don't identify yourself with injustice per se. That's the perfect recipe for misery, to do something like that. On the contrary, you should be joyful if there's something that you can actually do.

44:57Arthur Brooks:I mean, the message of most religions is notwithstanding all the hard things in your life, you're beloved. Notwithstanding that you can have a good life. You know, that's the whole idea that the good life is open to absolutely everybody, as opposed to, I know you grew up in some, you know, you grew up in a first world country with all kinds of prosperity, but you're still a nigga. Yeah, I mean, that's a hell of a way to live. But of course, that makes you, that makes you really a putty in the hands of the dark triad activist boomer. You know, the person who's a narcissist, the person who's Machiavellian, the person who has psychopathic tendencies, which, by the way, the research is very clear, describes most real activist leaders today in the political environment.

45:46Arthur Brooks:They have these tendencies. That's 7 % of the population is dark triad, but they're disproportionately represented in the activist community, and they want soldiers. How do you get that? By freaking them out, by making them think that the world is actually against them, as opposed to helping them understand how they can take control, how they can have agency, how life can be joyful, how life can be good, which is the responsible thing for all of us to do with young people today. Do you think part of the problem as well, Arthur, is they say comparison is a thief of joy, and with social media we live in a perpetual state of comparison?

46:20Arthur Brooks:Yeah, no, that's absolutely the case. That quote is frequently attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt, of all people. And whether he said it on the Internet.

46:33Arthur Brooks:So it may or may not be his, but it's certainly manifestly true. And I've got data and all kinds of experiments from the literature that show that's exactly the case. As much as if you take photographs on your vacation, you will enjoy the vacation 16 % less and about 25 % less if you post them to the internet. So for example, that's just, all that is a sort of empirical verification of the fact that when you're doing something and you're living for other people, when you're trying to hold yourself up to the standards of others. When you're not fully present in the joy that is your life, you're not going to enjoy your life is what it comes down to.

47:06Arthur Brooks:But sure, I mean, you're going to, but fundamentally the problem isn't social comparison. Fundamentally the problem is that our brains are broken. Our brains are broken. We're being shoved 205 times a day on average, which is the number of times that the average American looks at her or his phone into the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere is mystery and meaning and significance and purpose and love and hope. That's the right side of the brain. But no, no, you're over there in the world of information you didn't ask for, for things that actually promise you everything and deliver nothing.

47:39Arthur Brooks:And it was the complicated problems of engineering and analysis, as opposed to the complex issues of meaning and mystery. And if you're just never there, well, guess what? You're going to be sad and angry. And that sadness and anger, particularly when you've got young men who are more prone to extremes of emotion, that tends to lead towards extremism, doesn't it? It can, absolutely. Although I would contest that it's mostly men, on the contrary. What we find is that, and this comes from the work of John Haidt, who's just the best on this, and Gene Twenge and a lot of other people, Brad Wilcox down at the University of Virginia, who show that there's incredible problems of depression and anxiety, of mood disorders, of diagnosed mental illness, particularly for progressive women under 30.

48:26Arthur Brooks:Progressive women under 30 have a 56 % chance of having been formally diagnosed with at least one mental illness. Why? Well, because of this, because this is how it's manifest. You know, when depression is largely, it's largely shown among women with sadness and men with anger.

48:44Francis Foster:That's how you see it.

48:45Arthur Brooks:A lot of women don't understand that about their husbands. Like my husband's so grumpy all of a sudden. He's depressed. Well, you're not crying. Of course not. That's not how men do it. Men do it in a different way. So you're going to see this manifest in different ways and in classic mood disorders with sadness, especially sadness, you know, depression, rumination with women and with unhealthy, disordered forms of anger for men. And the worrying thing is, is the way we're going in society where if you look at it, men are less and less likely to get married, less and less likely to be in relationships, less and less likely to have deep friendships, which are incredibly important for men, you do worry where this is going to go because we're less and less happy.

49:30And as a result, young men and young women, they're veering away from each other as well.

49:36Arthur Brooks:Right. No, that's right. And, you know, effectively what the great awokening has done, but what that really is, is it is the manifestation of modern technology has done is it's driven us away from the thing that's best for us in the right hemispheres of our brain, which is romantic love. This is the ultimate mystery of life. It's a problem that can't be solved. So are you married, Francis? No. You're not married. So I'll talk to you as a married man. I've been married 35 years. There's lots of complicated left hemisphere problems in my life, like my car. My car is the classic left hemisphere problem, complicated problem.

50:12Arthur Brooks:I can solve it, but I don't, I haven't. I don't have the slightest idea how it works. I'm incompetent, but I could solve it. Right. My marriage is a complex problem in the right hemisphere of my brain. I will never solve my marriage. It's so complex. Right. I mean, that's because it's dynamic. You know, you want a cat because you have right hemispheric needs. You don't want a mechanical cat, which would be a left hemispheric simulation for it. We're living in the world of simulations, which don't satisfy us is what it comes about. Furthermore, when we're living over there, we're going to drive people apart from even being able to comprehend that mystery.

50:46Arthur Brooks:I talk to men in their 20s all the time who've never been on a date. I mean, in my 20s, that was the point. And that was the point. I mean, I wanted a career and I wanted to make money. I wanted to be successful. I wanted love. I wanted to find the love of my life. When I was 23 years old, it's like, yep, I'm looking for my wife. I was like that as well. And you're 20 years younger than me.

51:10Francis Foster:I've been married 23 years.

51:12Arthur Brooks:I got married at 20.

51:13Francis Foster:met at 18, married at 20.

51:15Arthur Brooks:Nice. I admire that a lot. I met my wife when I was 24, and I couldn't close the deal for two years because she didn't believe in marriage. She, I mean, she was in Barcelona. Okay. Like Denmark on the Mediterranean. And you know, they're all very modern. You know, hard read, you know, atheists, et cetera, et cetera. But I had to set about, this is a big, big, big project. Now, of course, she leads me in paths of righteousness. I mean, she's a true believer in all these things, but she leads me. But the whole point is that, you know, this is the mystery of life. And if we've eradicated that, we've broken the brains of young people because of how technology has changed our lives, how culture, the culture that everything has a complicated solution, the culture of technology and engineering, where there's an app for that, all that does is it ruins mystery.

52:07Arthur Brooks:And the ultimate mystery, of course, is love. And so if you're freaking people out in activism, turning the genders against each other systematically, if you're making it harder for people to meet, if you're taking out all the joy from the way that they meet because they're meeting on apps, for example, if you're making it such that they don't even know how to date in real life, guess what you're going to get? A baby bust. You're going to get a love depression, which is exactly what we have.

52:35Francis Foster:Well, technology seems like such a huge part of it. And I think because people feel that we, people feel may not be true that they can't control that part. We focus so much on culture and politics and all this other stuff where it seems to me quite obvious that, for example, the pill and other elements of the sexual revolution drive so much of the stuff that people think is cultural. And likewise, uh, I think Francis was saying before we started happiness peaked in 1992. Yeah. Well, yeah, the internet comes along, right? Is that, is that fair?

53:03Arthur Brooks:That's fair. But really, it's true that there's been a climatic change in happiness since about 1990. But then you have the storms, the hurricanes, the weather of happiness has been a lot more severe. And that's been since 2008, largely.

53:19Francis Foster:Right. Social media.

53:20Arthur Brooks:Yeah. And at the beginning of that, when I saw the biggest downdraft in happiness in my data, I thought it was the financial crisis. Nuh-uh. That was the introduction of the smartphone. That's what that was. and then the introduction of apps on the smartphone, and then the introduction of dating apps. I'm not against dating apps. That's the way that the world is going to work. I do scientific advice to dating apps, as a matter of fact, because I want them to be better because they're not going to go away. And the way that you do that is by adding the human element into the algorithm, adding the right hemisphere into the left hemisphere, and then you can actually make them productive.

53:51Arthur Brooks:We learn how to use the machines. By the way, we're going to figure this out. People are really ingenious, and we're going to figure this out. I know the end of the story. We're fine. The problem is we lose a lot of people in the meantime. And that's what I want to avoid.

54:03Francis Foster:And the other thing I have noticed in the time that we've been doing the show, I think we started Trigonometry in 2018. By this point, you know, Joe Rogan and other people were already really big. But there was, it felt like a bit of a renaissance. Because for the first time, you were hearing long-form conversations, often about difficult issues. They were conducted with mutual respect and all the rest of it. And I very naively thought, you know, this is it now. We found the magic formula for discussion. And now I see that that very thing is becoming what we saw in the mainstream media, which is typically for a podcast, the thing that will be most consumed is a short clip that totally misrepresents the conversation that goes viral because somebody said something out of context that can be made to look offensive and triggering and whatever.

54:54Francis Foster:so we keep reverting to this very bad mean why is that well because people want they they want the

55:02Arthur Brooks:immediate the emotional hit I mean but because something that actually gets you into this hedonic state it gives you a lot of dopamine I mean the idea that somebody said something that triggers you there's something that that offends you that actually gives you the sense that you're right and they're wrong and that's really really satisfying that's yeah it feels good to be right and to hear somebody that you don't like saying something you think is wrong. That's why you'll pass it on. That's why you kind of know it's out of context, but that's no fun. And so you'll actually pass that on. It's satisfying.

55:35Arthur Brooks:That's why it's more satisfying that putting something into context and getting the nuance is the least satisfying thing ever. Right. Yeah. That's a drag, man.

55:45Francis Foster:Yeah. What do we do about that?

55:46Arthur Brooks:Well, I mean, what we do about that is adhering to truth, is being serious about truth. And, you know, there's always been this problem. I mean, there's nothing new under the sun. I mean, people have misrepresented each other and lied about each other. You know, calumny is nothing new. I mean, if you go back to the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, and, you know, there were pamphlets that were coming out from John Adams that were, you know, defaming Thomas Jefferson. And Thomas Jefferson was sniping at John Adams, and they were saying lies about each other. And there were people that were lying about, we look back in the glory days, everybody loved George Washington.

56:26Arthur Brooks:No. I mean, if you look at the second term of George Washington, he literally wouldn't read the newspapers because they were so calumnious about him. They were lying about him and saying terrible things about him. The newspapers in those days were all completely aligned with one particular political party. And so, and the ones that were against him in New York or whatever. And so there's nothing new on this side. This is the way that this works. And what we're dedicated to is the long game of truth and love and beauty and all of these good things. But that's always the long game. You'll always lose the short game to the quick hit and to the negative emotion.

57:04Arthur Brooks:But the long game has got to belong to us, ultimately. Because if it doesn't, then there is no hope. This is a question I really wanted to ask, which is, does taking risk make us happier? So the answer is maybe. Well, it depends on what happens, I imagine. Well, no, it doesn't actually depend on the outcome so much as with the nature of the risk. So entrepreneurs take a lot of risk, but so do compulsive gamblers, right? And so risk per se isn't good, but risk in search of an explosive reward and done prudently and managed in the right way can be the most rewarding thing possible. Now, we could go and talk about Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or Henry Ford, who took incredible risks in search of these entrepreneurial results that were outsized and the wonderful things they were able to do.

58:00Arthur Brooks:But that's actually not the best example. The best example of the biggest entrepreneurial risk that leads to the biggest rewards falling in love. That is the ultimate enterprise. A family, a marriage, babies, that's an enterprise. That's a way bigger deal than Apple Computer. That's a way bigger deal. And it's a little explosion, boom, boom, boom, boom, happening all over the place. Less than it was, which is problematic. But that's risk in the enterprise of life. And I talk to my students about this all the time. I say, you want to be an entrepreneur? Yeah, good. Go raise$25 million in venture and throw it behind your crazy scheme on the internet.

58:38Arthur Brooks:I don't care. you want to be a real entrepreneur give your heart away go give your heart away tell that girl that you're secretly in love with her and let her stomp all over it maybe or maybe say i like you too that's risk that really really matters and when you take risk with a sense of prudential judgment which is to say that you're doing and by the way prudence in the classical sense is not not taking risk it's taking the right amount of risk sometimes risking your life is the prudent thing to do, right? Joseph Pieper talks about that in The Four Cardinal Virtues. He writes about prudence in the best way.

59:13Arthur Brooks:So taking prudent risk in search of explosive returns or things that really matter, then risk is the best thing ever. Because the enemy, I think, of happiness, and correct me if I'm wrong, is a desire to seek comfort. Yeah. Well, I mean, an enemy of happiness is actually never living in an entrepreneurial way. Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the things. And this is one of the biggest problems. You could live in this kind of cocoon of, and really what the cocoon is, is, is the matrix. That movie that came out 27 years ago. Isn't that shocking? But what that is, is that nobody, people lived in a pleasant simulation because they were being controlled by an artificial intelligence that fed off human energy.

59:57Arthur Brooks:Francis, we're literally in the matrix. It's actually happening to us right now. And the way that you keep people pacified is by the pleasant simulation, the kind of the curve fit of a right hemispheric life that's actually a left hemispheric experience. And in so doing, that comfort, it's a comfortable thing that's actually awful. That's a dystopian nightmare is the way that that works out. And the way that you break out is by taking all kinds of IRL risks, especially with your heart.

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1:01:47Francis Foster:and metaphorically speaking i think that i i the matrix was a very formative film in my life as i was probably 18 19 at the time something like that um i think the metaphorically it's interesting because when neo leaves the matrix life is shitty yeah and i think there's life but it's life and i think there's so much to that because it's only when you abandon these superficial comforts and actually take the risk. Like it's not that pleasant all the time.

1:02:17Arthur Brooks:No.

1:02:17Francis Foster:But it's meaningful.

1:02:18Arthur Brooks:And it's not just the risk. It's actually saying, I want the suffering.

1:02:23Francis Foster:Yeah.

1:02:24Arthur Brooks:I want it. Bring it on. You know, the glory of God is a man fully alive. That's St. Irenaeus in the third century, second century. The glory of God is a person fully alive. What's a person fully alive? That's a person in pain. You know, that you sell it. You sell it. Well, you can tell he's a Catholic. Yeah, no, but you're going to a Catholic church, you're literally worshiping a guy represented in the front of the church who's being tortured to death. Yeah. That's, I don't want that, but I need that. I need that. I need that suffering. I need that full experience. I want the, I want to bite out of life.

1:03:00Arthur Brooks:I want to be fully alive. And this is one of the reasons that suffering, which is a largely right hemispheric experience, makes people understand the meaning of their lives. If I go back through your life, if I were your therapist, which I don't do clinical work, if we went back year after year after year and I would say, tell me the formative moments, you wouldn't say, oh yeah, that beach vacation in Ibiza. No. You'd tell me about when that person passed away, when that woman that you loved wasn't there, when something that you wanted didn't happen, and then you understood who you were because you survived, and you understood something through your suffering, that's critically, critically important.

1:03:41Arthur Brooks:And there's no suffering in the matrix. I make my students say, my suffering is sacred. And they have this little mantra that I give them to wake up each morning, whether they're on their knees or not, and to say, I'm truly grateful for the things that are going to happen this day. You know, the Psalm, this is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it. But I will also rejoice and be glad in the suffering I'm going to face this day and the setbacks I'm going to face this day. Bring it on. That's a life fully alive. Yeah. I love what the French call heartbreak. They call it le de l 'eau exquisite, which means the exquisite pain.

1:04:19Arthur Brooks:And there's something to that, isn't there? There's something to that. People are not afraid of breaking up because of the pain it's going to bring, but because they're afraid of the pain per se. I didn't say that right. You know, pain isn't a problem. Our fear of pain is the problem. And by the way, we're evolved for that. I mean, social pain and rejection, it actually implicates a little part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, about the size of the end of your index finger. And we have it so that we're averse to losing something or someone that we love. Because if we didn't, you know, 250 ,000 years ago in the middle Pleistocene, you'd wind up walking the savannah and dying alone.

1:05:01Arthur Brooks:because you'd be rejected from your tribe because you wouldn't be afraid of rejection. You wouldn't be afraid of loss. It's maladapted today to a certain extent, but also when you learn to live with the hyperactivation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, then you get that meaning. You say, okay, this is why I'm still alive. This is how I'm actually surviving. That's, by the way, why you listen to sad music when you're heartbroken because it puts into perspective that aliveness that's in you right now. It helps you understand the emotions that you're actually feeling. You're saying, I want to understand this emotion.

1:05:34Arthur Brooks:I want meaning. That's the reason you're listening to Taylor Swift over and over and over again. Right, right? How did you know? Only when I work out.

1:05:46Francis Foster:It's interesting you say that, particularly about suffering, because I think as Buddhists, you say life is suffering.

1:05:51Arthur Brooks:Yeah, that's the first noble truth of Buddhism.

1:05:53Francis Foster:And also in The Matrix, interestingly, I don't know if you remember the scene where Agent Smith is talking about the history of The Matrix to Morpheus. when he's got them captured and in handcuffs. And he says, we made a bunch of versions of the matrix and they all failed because there was not enough suffering. And what you just did is you explained how suffering is part of what makes life meaningful. And that's a very powerful framing of it because I think it's fair to say suffering is inevitable.

1:06:22Arthur Brooks:It is. Well, actually what's inevitable is pain. So suffering equals pain times resistance to pain. So that's sort of the right formula. So suffering is, you know, mental suffering, etc., etc., equals pain, which has both sensory and affective components. The sensory pain has to do with inflammation and nerve endings. It's processed in one part of the cortex. Affective pain is part of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that I just talked about a minute ago. That's the I hate it part. You get affective pain after you touch a hot stove and you feel the sensory part and then you feel the affective part.

1:06:59Arthur Brooks:I don't want to do that anymore. I hate that. When you have mental pain, it's only the affective portion, which is, by the way, the reason that acetaminophen, you call it paracetamol over here, Tylenol, it affects affective pain. It doesn't make you feel less pain. It makes you care less. That's how Tylenol works. That's why a blend, when you have physical pain of both Advil and Tylenol, works so well together because you're working on the both sides of the pain mechanism. is that's that's so it's important to keep that in mind so that's pain and pain is super important it's how you learn it's how you learn not to do things etc and it's inevitable but when you multiply it by resistance then you understand that suffering is not inevitable and that's how meaning comes into the picture if you have high high high pain but low low low resistance you can actually have very manageable suffering.

1:07:55Arthur Brooks:And that's how, how in non-resistance, how the Buddhists understand suffering versus pain itself.

1:08:02Francis Foster:That's so interesting. I had an experience where the place I was living, there was, there was a lot of noise coming in and I, I was really angry about it the whole time is why your resistance was sky high. My resistance was sky high. And the moment I just accepted that it's happening and started just managing around it, you know, going, just doing what I could, and I couldn't eliminate the problem, but what I could do is just accept it. My level of suffering went way down, not to zero, but close. Almost to zero.

1:08:33Arthur Brooks:That is Catholicism. It is. It's like, not my will be done, but thine, said the master in the Garden of Gethsemane. That's what he said, right? And that was to say, this is going to hurt. Our Lord did not say this is going to suck, but he was thinking that. And he said, but thy will be done, not mine, is the act of non-resistance, which is the lesson for us. I mean, so the first noble truth of Buddhism, and I've worked a lot with the Dalai Lama over the past 13 years. I go to Dharamsala every year to do conferences and projects with this holiness. It's been very helpful to me. The first noble truth of Buddhism is dukkha, which technically means the sticky craving from inadequate things.

1:09:14Arthur Brooks:It's sort of dissatisfaction is really the first noble truth of Buddhism. It comes from attachment. Attachment is a form of resistance to not getting what you want. The second noble truth of Buddhism is the attachment per se, is that explanation. The third noble truth of Buddhism is that the solution is detachment, non-resistance. And the way to get that is the fourth noble truth of Buddhism, which is where it gets complicated, the Eightfold Path. So it's like, yes, yes, yes, and you get the Eightfold Path, and you're like, that's a lot of work. What is that? Well, the Eightfold Path is the way that the Buddhists teach you to live such that you can live in non-resistance.

1:09:50Arthur Brooks:That you can live to non-resistance to ego, to non-resistance to suffering, to, sorry, to pain. Non-resistance to the things in life such that you can be integrated into a life that has inevitable pain, but not inevitable suffering.

1:10:04Francis Foster:This is what seemed to me like a contradiction with me that I've always wanted to ask someone who's as smart and knowledgeable as you about it. It's like, I just gave you the example where my suffering went to zero because I let go. But then also, isn't having ambition to do things and create things and to build things and have conversations. Isn't that ego in that?

1:10:29Arthur Brooks:Yes. Yes. And so here's the thing. This is the balance. If I were a Buddhist, which I'm not, I might say you should always have complete non-resistance and disregard pain. I'm not a Buddhist. I'm a capitalist. It's not American, right? I think there are lots of cases when you should actually try to lower the pain. Yeah. I mean, I take a Tylenol. I wake up, my back hurts a lot. I got back issues. And I take Advil because I want an anti-inflammatory. By the way, I also am very familiar with the clinical research on back pain, which shows that you should alleviate the pain, manage it a little bit, but you shouldn't take a narcotic analgesic because that's eliminating the pain.

1:11:09Arthur Brooks:I should manage the pain and then have non-resistance to the fundamental presence of it in my life, which will actually co-occur with my life every day for the rest of my life. It's okay. It's okay to say, I'm a guy with back pain. I can manage it a little bit because Advil's pretty good, but I can also live a really, really good life. And I can focus on the things that I like. And so what I'm doing is I'm combining the lowering of pain with non-resistance in a way where the suffering is where I needed to be in my life. If I'm running a company and I see some problem that I can avoid, I have a problematic loudmouth employee who's lighting me up on the Slack channel, I'll fire them.

1:11:48Arthur Brooks:I'm getting rid of pain. I'm not going to have non-resistance to that because it's not right for me to practice non-resistance in the lives of other people, right? There's all kinds of cases where judgment requires that you understand which lever you're going to try to work. But if you only think there's one lever, which we are telling young people that there's only one lever, that pain, that depression, that sadness, that melancholy, that anxiety, that loneliness is evidence that you're broken. No, it's evidence you're alive. It's evidence that you're, I tell my students, look, you're studying at Harvard University.

1:12:20Arthur Brooks:If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy. The truth is that's a really good and normal thing. And so don't go to somebody who says, oh, oh, you're sad and anxious. We've got to fix that. No, you've got to manage that. You've got to live with that. You have to understand the balance between pain and non-resistance to pain such that the suffering is what it's supposed to be. And how much does gratitude play into this? I saw this amazing interview with a football manager called Luis Enrique, and he was talking about his 12-year-old daughter who died. And they were saying to him, how do you cope?

1:12:52And he said, the only way I learned how to cope was to be grateful that I had 12 years with this person.

1:12:57Arthur Brooks:Yeah. And just saying it, and I've never had kids. and all that, I'm welling up and I'm thinking that is the ultimate way to cope with probably the most tragic loss a human being can suffer. Yeah, for sure. That is the hardest thing, by the way. That is the hardest thing. And people do deal with it with gratitude. The ultimate long-term way to deal with that grief, grief is the unremitting sadness, unremitting sadness. It's remitting ultimately. The way that people will accelerate their healing is by helping people who are fresher in their grief. And so the best way, if you lose a child, for you to heal faster and better is for you to find somebody else who's more recently lost a child and help that person, which is one of the laws of love, that you will actually heal more when you give more.

1:13:47Arthur Brooks:That your injury is actually, it actually has a purpose because you can share what has happened in your life with somebody else and help that person heal in their fresher wounds. It sounds like a karmic truth, but I think it's a fundamental truth, a beautiful truth about humanity is the way that this works. Now, as a way to deal with the fact that we have this horrible tragedy, gratitude is great. And there's a reason for that. I mean, we have a negativity bias. Homo sapiens have a negativity bias. You know, you don't want to be focusing on grateful you are to find those berries on that bush 250 ,000 years ago while there's a saber-tooth tiger sneaking up behind you.

1:14:32Arthur Brooks:You need to be focused on the saber-tooth tiger, not on the good things, bad things. You know, if you're sitting at a party and somebody's smiling sweetly at you from across the room, that's nice. But if somebody's frowning angrily at you, take note. That might be a big problem once you get outside on the street. And so we do. We notice all the terrible things that are happening to us, and that's amplified in the environment of grief. So what do we do? We have to manually turn up the part that's less natural, which is positive affect about naturally good things. And it's funny how we do this, and religious people sort of do this naturally.

1:15:08Arthur Brooks:We almost lost one of our children many years ago in 1999. Our oldest was one, and he fell out of a third-story window. And it was horrible. It was horrible. And he was going to die. He was going to die. And so we're at the hospital, my wife and I, and we start praying. We're praying. We're praying. We're praying. What do we pray? Keep him alive, obviously. But then we were praying, thank you for giving us our son. That's what we pray. Naturally, not on purpose. Why? Because that's what we've been trained as Christian people, is to thank God for the good things, and not just curse God. See, this is funny.

1:15:41Arthur Brooks:So this is the book of Job. Job 127, 128, 127 or 128. See how illiterate I am in this. That Job's all, you know, God and Satan are throwing dice. And Satan says, you know your boy Job? I bet I can get him. And God says, no, you can't. He says, watch. And so he goes and kills all Job's kids and he takes all his animals and he takes everything away from Job. You know what Job says? Before the whole story starts, he said, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, but then the real part becomes that nobody remembers. Blessed be the name of the Lord. That's the end of that scripture. See, that's what a supernatural view of life can bring you.

1:16:32Arthur Brooks:That's why it's so critically important. Now, it goes on to three of Job's buddies show up, and the entire book of Job, which is tiresome, or they're trying to tell him, like, here's how it happened. You must have done a bad thing. You probably sinned a lot, you know, and there's this sort of rabbinical exegesis on why, it's sort of like Kushner's why bad things happen to good people, but, you know, boring. Then in the 38th chapter of Job, Job gets to talk to God about suffering, because God comes in a whirlwind. It's one of the times in the Old Testament where somebody actually talks to God. He comes in the whirlwind.

1:17:05Arthur Brooks:And Job puts God in the dock. He's like, I'm your boy. You said I was a righteous man. And you did all this stuff to me. Explain yourself, sir. And God said, this is the funniest part of the Old Testament of the Bible. It's actually, it's genius comedy. God says, oh, yeah, I'll tell you. I mean, you're so smart. You deserve an explanation, of course. but since you're so smart, first you tell me, why did I create the heaven and the earth? You're so smart, tell me. And then I'll tell you why you suffered. You're so smart, tell me why I put the stars in the sky and the fishes in the ocean. You're so smart, I'm sure you know, but tell me why, and then I'll tell you why you suffered.

1:17:47Arthur Brooks:Here's the point, it's a mystery. It's part of the mystery of life itself, and life itself is a miracle. And if we want, do you want part of the miracle or do you want the whole miracle? That requires that we embrace the mystery, that we love the mystery itself, and they're the bad parts. And that's the struggle. You get about 90 years to figure that one out.

1:18:12Francis Foster:Arthur, what a pleasure. I feel like we've only just scratched the surface, so perhaps we'll carry on the conversation another time.

1:18:17Arthur Brooks:We're going to end it after Job. Yeah, well, we depress people. That's what we do.

1:18:23Francis Foster:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not this one, actually. I thought it was a very unusual and special episode of our show. So thank you. Thank you for making it. Thank you for what you're doing.

1:18:30Arthur Brooks:And you've really enriched my life a lot with this show.

1:18:33Francis Foster:Well, this was amazing for us. Thank you. The last question, as you know, is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

1:18:40Arthur Brooks:We touched on it. We touched on it here. But I think that the story of our civilization today is the lack of romantic love. I think that the lack of relationships, this is not a sentimental issue. This is an existential issue that we're actually getting in here. And I think that we need to have a better scientific understanding of what exactly is happening and what's going to happen. This is not just demography. This is the question of whether life is actually worth living going forward, not whether life is going to be worth, not whether life is going to continue going forward. So that's what I think we should talk about more, which is the deep physics of romantic love.

1:19:22Francis Foster:Arthur Brooks, thank you for being here. Thank you, guys. Don't forget to click the link in the description of this episode to grab the special CyberGhost VPN discount. It's completely risk-free, so check it out today.

1:19:53We'll be right back.