Arthur Brooks || Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

for satisfaction ultimately leads us unfulfilled. To find true purpose, Arthur argues, we must break our addiction to success and confront life's hard truths. In this episode, we also touch on the topics of motivation, relationships, aging, transcendence, and love. I always enjoy talking to Arthur Brooks, and I think you will enjoy this conversation as well. So, without further ado, I bring you Arthur Brooks. Arthur, how's it going? Man? Doing great? How are you? I'm doing good. I'm doing

really good. They tore up my studio here, so it looks like I'm inside in North Korean prison. But aside from that, all this well, I was gonna say, are you in a North Korea prison? I was like, sometimes it's I call it, you know, my winter break. That's like okay, well, it's okay. How's it going. How are you you know? I'm good, I'm good. I loved your book. It was so thanks. It's so necessary for so many people, especially right now during COVID. Did you when you started

writing that book, was there the pandemic? No? No, no. I actually started thinking about the research project eight years ago, and then I started to write up on the book about two and a half years ago, right around the time I was leaving AI. And of course I had no idea that the pandemic was going to happen. But then what happened was that when the pandemic hit, I had time just to finish it up. And the first part is finishing up. The second part is cutting it back,

you know, so it's a it's a manageable book. So it's seventy thousand words as opposed to one hundred and fifty thousand words, because you know, for this kind of book, you have to have people who don't necessarily love reading non you know, serious nonfiction. You want them to be able to read it and digest it and think about it. So it has to be a little bit shorter, but this was a pandemic project, but it predated that in a big way. But mostly because of my own life,

you know, I know, I know. Well, tell me a little and the listeners a little bit about the plane ride that kind of changed your life. It's pretty poignant. Yeah, so this I didn't realize we're recording. We started, we started start. This is this podcast is so this story, the story for me started about eight years ago. I was still the president of a think tank in Washington, d C. I was president of think Tanks started in nineteen thirty eight. It's one of the most prominent thing

tanks in the country. And what a privilege to run it, to be sure, but wow, what a hamster wheel of a job. I mean it was. I was had to raise fifty million dollars a year. I was giving one hundred and seventy five speeches a year. So my job was like running for the Senate and never getting a like it. Basically it was wow. I mean, I was on the airplane all the time, and it was kind of one adventure in corporate thrill and political you know,

crisis after another. Was extremely exciting. But it was it was success to success to success kind of. I was on what you and I a social scientists called the hedonic treadmill. You know, it's just what social scientists think of. It's what we call the hamster wheel, right. It's like you're running, run and run and run a run, you ever, And I was kind of getting a little bit worried. I have to say, I was in my late forties at that point. I had looked back on my bucket

list which I had been putting together. Now I realized that was a mistake, but at the time it seemed like a good thing to do. And the boocket list that I put together at forty, I realized that hit everything on it. But I wasn't very happy. I wasn't very satisfied. And more than that, I was really really worried because I knew I wouldn't be able to keep this party going. And once the party stopped, or was it going to be, you know, what was going to be of my life? You know? And so I was

kind of in a panic. And this was at this point this reflecting experience happened to me. I was on an airplane at night, coming from LA to Dulles to Washington Dulles and it was night time, about eleven o'clock at night, and it was dark and I couldn't see, but I could hear people around me, and I heard a couple behind me having a conversation. And I wasn't eavesdropping,

but it was you'll see, you know why. I was listening very carefully, and I could tell it was a man and a woman, and I could tell that they were elderly by the sound of their voices, and I just sort of imagined that this was a married couple

because of the intimacy of their conversation. I couldn't quite make out the man's words, but I heard his wife answer him, Oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead, like whoa, And then I hear mumble mumble, mumble moment, and she says, it's not true that nobody appreciates who or cares about you anymore. It's not true that you're nobody. And it goes on like these were twenty minutes, and I'm starting to get this picture of

the guy in my head. He's probably somebody really disappointed with his life who was unable to achieve the things that he wanted to achieve. And we land at Dallas Airport half an hour. An hour later and the light school on. Everybody stands up, and I'm kind of curious. You know, I'm a social scientist. I want to put a face to the behavior that and I look at him and I'm expecting to see, you know, this kind

of a sort of a disconsolate littlement. It was one of the most famous men in the world, somebody that everybody listening to us knows. And you know, discretion prevents me from from, you know, saying who it is. It would be improper. I'll take it to my grave. But a boy did have a big impact on me because as we were going up the aisle, people were recognizing him, and the pilot as we were leaving the plane stopped him. He was right behind me and said, sir, you've been

my hero since I was a little boy. And I whip around and look at him at that moment, and he's beaming with pride. Scott, and I thought to myself, so which is it? Which is it me? Which is this one or that one? Yeah, it's a half hour apart. And I thought to myself, okay, now, Number one. The idea that if you do enough, you succeed enough, if you strive enough, if you are triumphant enough in this life, if you can pocket you can bank those successes and

go on to be satisfied permanently. That's wrong. I mean, that's evolutionarily wrong. There's lots of reasons why that's wrong. But this is proof that actually it's not just wrong, it's the opposite of the truth. See this guy, his successes were in the rear view mirror, and that made it all the worse. So this is and I'm feeling intellectually stimulated by this, but moren't anything else, I'd be selfish at this point, I'm thinking, so what about me? What about me? I'm no hero on the plane, I'm

not some big famous celebrity. But I've tried to do a lot with my life. I mean, I've really worked hard, and I want to just I want to suck every drop of juice out of this life, to do everything that I can. But I know the party's going to stop.

And then what am I going to be telling Esther, my long suffering wife on a plane when I'm eighty something years old, that I wish I were dead because all of the successes and victories in the rearview mirror, or or maybe should I get in front of the fact that things are going to change and some things are going to decline, and I'd better start looking for what success means in the second half of life right now.

And I got started on a research project, and I'm telling you it was hard because for a social scientists were like you and me, it's like taking out your own appendix if you're a surgeon, just like analyzing your own life. So I didn't tell anybody about it for a really, really long time. But I think I cracked

the code. I think I actually figured it out. I think I figured out the second half problem on the basis of brain science and social science and putting it together with what the philosophers and great wisdom literatures and spiritual leaders have said. And I have a blueprint for the rest of my life that I'm offering up in

this book to everybody else as well. Yeah, the book reads really naturally and organically, and it flows like every single sentence falls into the next sentence, and every chapter falls into the next chapter. I'm sure that you. I'm sure the first draft wasn't like that. No one's first draft is like that never is. But when it's a personal you know how it is when you're looking at a really person. This is a diary. I mean, this is and and again, you know I've we've all written books.

I mean, and this is different. I mean, this one was when I didn't know if I was going to publish this, because you know, there's a lot of personal stuff in there too. Yeah yeah, but it's you know, even your press stuff. It's not like it's that bad. It's not like you're telling us any really dark truths about your Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, so you don't have to worry about it about that. It could have been a lot worse. Yeah, that'll that'll be for the that

will be for the memoir. You're you're fine. I didn't I didn't write anything. I didn't want my kids to read this exactly exactly. You're good. You were good, you say quote, Was there any way to get off the hamster wheel of success and accept inevitable professional decline with grace? Maybe even turn it into opportunity? You know, the book goes much deeper than just talking about turning into opportunity.

It's almost like it's there's a very existential, spiritual part that it kind of shifts into as you as you read on, you know, and it gets to a point which is very constant with you, Yeah, and your values and what I know about you and and you know is this shift it sort of starts shifting into the higher realm of love, into the higher realm of finding meaning in the moments of your life. Well, you know,

Scott that this is You're a Maslovian. Anybody who listens to you know, everybody, by the way, should be subscribe and listening to the Psychology podcast literally the best podcast of this. In this in this whole subject matter area, I learned as much from you as from anything else that I read professionally, because of your guests and also just because of what you bring to this and and so and you're you're a follower of Abraham Maslow in

many ways. I mean you refer to him constantly. And Abraham Maslow would say, look, we start with needs, and we have fears, and life has exigencies. And working our way through these needs and fears and these pressures can lead you up this pyramid, as it were, toward what's

at the top, which is other focusedness and transcendence. And so this is the ultimate fruit the adventure of life, where that adventure has got all these potholes and difficulties and suffering and challenges in it, and that's the reward. If we're going to deal with this, we're going to be fully alive and we're going to get our way through life with full of purpose and meaning. At the

end of the day, the reward is the transcendence. So that's one of the things that you know, that's one of the that's one of the punchlines of you know, what it means to live fully in the second half of life. Hey, Everyonan, I'm excited to announce that the eight week online transcend Course is back. Become certified in learning the latest science of human potential and learn how to live a more fulfilling, meaningful, creative, and self actualized life.

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add on. Save your spot today and get fifty percent off the normal price by going to transcendcourse dot com. Sign up for the early bird today and get fifty percent off at transcendcourse dot com. We have so much fun in this course and I look forward to welcoming you to be a part of the transcender community. Okay, now back to the show. Yeah, it's it's you know, because I had such a deep resonance too, especially those

parts of your book. I clearly just jumped right there, like I skipped like all the you know, get over the diction of success and all. Yeah, yeah, I jumped all the way into walking into transcendence. But I just resonated so much with it. You say, quote, Fulfillment cannot come when the present moment is a little more than a struggle to bear in order to attem the future, because that future is destined to become nothing more than the struggle of the new present, and the glorious end

state never arrives. The focus must be on the walk that his life, with its string of present moments. Those are your words, Yeah, that's as good as like any dolly lama like that. That's beautiful. Thank you, Scott. I'm hoping that people refer to to me at some point as his holiness. By the way, the Dalai Lama blurbed the book, which I saw that it was the most

the calmest blurb ever. Even I have been working together very closely for the past ten years, and he's a mentor and teacher and I love him very very much. And he agreed to, you know, put an endorsement on the front of the book which basically said, Arthur Brooks has written a book helps people help people as the agents. Like that is the calmest blurb ever. That's that's worthy of the greatest Tibetan Buddhist. Yeah, but that was beautiful. Well you wrote back to you for a second. Let's

not let's not diminish what you did. You have this section called walking into Transcendence. I was like, yes, yes, yes, but why is it so maybe maybe that's a good place to start. Now, let's back all the way up. Let's back up. Why is it so hard for so many of us, especially when our forties fifties. I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it. So I really your book came the right time in my life as well. Why is it so hard for us to walk into transcendence in that

kind of second half of our life. Part of the reason is because we've been taught that the harder we struggle, the more that we strive, the faster we run, the more we're going to do, the better it's going to be, and the more satisfied will ultimately become. And a lot of that is a bill of goods. Now, it's not a bill of goods that's just brought to us by you know, the outside world or capitalism or Madison Avenue of the entertainment industry. It's brought to us by our

evolutionary biology. You know, there is a phenomenon that you and I talk about as so called professionals in the field called homeostasis. Homeostasis is the phenomenon that all biological processes and emotional processes want to return to their baseline.

And so when your pulse is above average, it wants it has a tendency to go back to its baseline so you don't die and you'll be ready for the next that of circumstances to exert energy, for example, And when you're emotionally out of the baseline because you're thrilled about some achievement or you're bummed out about some slight or misfortune, that you're going to go back to your baseline as well, so you'll be ready for the next set of circumstances. Now, the result of that is that

you can't attain and keep satisfaction for very long. But mother Nature lies to you. Your dreams are liars when they say that if you just get that one hundred thousandth unique download of the podcast, when you finally get tenure, when you finally get that big grant, when you finally graduate from the Harvard Business School, whatever your thing is, mother Nature is saying, then you'll be happy. Then you'll

be satisfied. The man on the plane should have been over the moon because he had done ten times more than I ever will and most of us all put together will, And yet he wasn't because mother nature sent him back to his baseline and there was nothing behind that, There was no achievement behind that at a particular time. And that's the conundrum that we're talking about. So when you're always racing, racing, racing, you're on the treadmill of of the next thing, the next thing, which by the way,

is classic addictive behavior. You know, what we're talking about is you know, and you've talked about this so much and your show too, is about how how all addictive mechanisms are implicate dope. The dope put energic pathways in the brain that it basically it's hit the lever, get the hit, hit the lever, get the hit again and again and again and again. The same thing is true for success. This is this is why so many people are success addicts. They got to get the next hitting.

It's like those primate cocaine experiments from the fifties where they self administer cocaine and do nothing else but sit in front and hit the lever until they stop eating, drinking, sleeping, and die. This is how success addicts actually work and how people actually work. I want the next satisfaction, the next satisfaction, and life tells you life lies that you do it, do it, do it, do it, and finally you're going to get the bliss. And then you have

to break through to the truth. You have to to come face to face with the fact that that is actually not true. And you must be in charge, you must be the master of your own emotional fate under those circumstances. And that's when you stop running from success to success and you start on the transcendental walk to actually experience your life moment to moment. It's a different

way of being. I think that for those who come from the other way of being that you describe, it can actually be boring, you know, at first, at first, for sure, it's very hard. It feels unnatural, boring and unnatural. It's correct, it's a funny thing. It's a you know. So if you say to somebody, for example, most young people, you know, my students, your students, all of our students, you'll say, do you like Instagram? They'll be like, no,

do you like Twitter? It's like they're like, no, I hate Everybody says they Hey, Twitter, but it is stuck on Twitter right to say, Okay, I'll tell you what's next time you're on the train, you're gonna be looking at your phone. You're gonna be looking at your Twitter feed. Okay, turn it off, put it down, put your hands in your lap, and look out the window. And they're going to be crawling out of their skin. Doing something that they objectively like better because the natural thing feels like

the unnatural thing. And this is just when when the brain is used to the constant and stimulus, and the constant stimulus is really had the first half of your life and the formula for success. You're stuck on it. You're gonna have it. You have to make a change. And that's what this book is all about, is how to get to that second curve. But once you get on that second curve, but once you practice for it, it doesn't matter if you're twenty five or thirty five.

You start practicing for it, and there's a lot of good that's in your future. Yeah, for sure. And most of your book is teaching those skills to help people get get on that second curve. I want to talk about something you call the principle of psycho professional gravitation. That's kind of nerdy. I liked it. Say that's kind of nerdy. If you look at the footnotes. By the way, Scott, there's a mathematical proof of the concept. Oh, I didn't see that. Actually, I will go through my editor. I

can't believe it. I will. I'm also scientist to end. I will love that So this principle of psycho professional gravitation is the idea that the agony of decline is direct by the way, I love that expression of the agony of decline, the idea that the agony of decline is directly related to prestige previously achieved and to one's

emotional attachment to that prestige. I bolded emotional attachment to that prestige because I wanted to talk to you about that, and I have an idea I wanted to run a bible. I think we make a lot of noise, big hype in the psychological riture and the distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, and it's never really sit right with me. It's never sit right with me. And I've been formulating a new theory of what I call value motivation, which

I think is better than intrinsic motivation. And this relates to your sentence. So I wanted to kind of just talk about a nerd out of it. I see what you thought about it. It just seems like we make a lot about that distinction and intrinsic motivation being defined as are you enjoying your activity? Are you enjoying it? Are you enjoying it? Are you feeling joy when you

engage in it? But I think that feeling joy when you engage in it is overrated and it just seems to me like what you're kind of getting at is something deeper than do you have to always intrinsically enjoy

what you're doing. Value motivation, I think is more sustainable, and it allows you to be motivated by your values, motivated by your long term plans, desires, how you want to see the world encounter, even if you're not feeling it day in and day out, even if you go months where you're like intrinsically like, I don't feel joy every time I engage this, but I really do want this to be I know this will be really meaningful when it's accomplished. But anyway, so I'm just going to

be that there and just yes, I like it. I like it an awful lot because that's really consistent with this one thing that I find in my research and that I found particularly really the course of writing this book, which is that if you're motivated by the what of your life, you know, the success, the money, the power, the pleasure, the fame, then you're going to be running on the hedonic treadmill, as we call it, and then

you'll never actually be satisfied, and you'll be stuck. You'll be stuck in exactly the ways that we're talking about. But if you go from the what to the why is Simon Sinek always talks about which is so important, then you'll be talking about your values and it's not always fun. On the contrary, this is one of the things that we that you know, I teach a class and happiness at the Harvard Business School and the first day we define happiness and say, I think of happiness

as having It's like food. It's made up of macro nutrients. It's not a thing. It's not just food. It's actually proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Well, happiness is actually three macro nutrients, which

is which is enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose. And the most paradoxical of those is purpose because purpose requires values, purpose requires sacrifice, purpose requires pain, and so paradoxically happiness requires unhappiness to get it because of that and that, and it can be intensely, intensely meaningful to do things that are difficult, but only if you're pursuing your why or as you would point out that you're you're serving your values. Yeah,

and just and your framing of that. The emotional attachment to the prestige is very interesting, right. So a lot of us probably are emotionally attached to our prestige in a way that we're not consciously aware of, and it's driving us. It's driving our motivations. So I think it's when people read your book, it might be a big dose of reality for a lot of people and they might have a lot of aha moments where they're like, Wow,

that's what I've been driven by. Yeah, yeah, for sure, and they can What I'm hoping is when people read it, they're you know, depending on what point that they are in their life. I mean, I'm fifty seven years old, and so if people were my age, a lot are going to be perplexed by you know, Number one, it's it's why is it that it looks like even though I'm I'm in many ways the prime of my life, but my skills might be waning in a particular area. And I'm not talking about my ability to do a

deadlift or you know, the bench press. Because you could talk to me about Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, it's uh weirdly, I'm a better physical shape than I was when I was thirty seven. But you know, there are certain things that I'm much much worse at and some things that I'm much much better at. And it's the same for almost everybody. So, for example, my ability to solve puzzles quickly has declined, even though I've had no cognitive decline, so it seems. And my ability to tell

stories and to teach has increased dramatically. And this is a you know, this is hard for people to deal with because what makes them successful, what jumps them on the hedonic treadmill, what makes you good at what you're good at. Everybody listening to us, by the way, watching or listening to us, is almost everybody's going to be in the same boat of why would you listen to the Psychology podcast? And the answer is because you want

to be a better version of you. This is, in a very real way, a self improvement podcast, but based on truth and intellect, not just shooting from the hip. That's why this is a valuable podcast. Okay, So that means that everybody who's listening to this is hugely invested in ideas to add value to themselves. People who have this in common, they find that what they're really good at is using ideas to create value. This is what everybody, all of us in this community, we have using ideas

to create value. Well, you find that your speed and your innovative capacity for doing so declines in your thirties and four. So the first thing in this puzzle is why is that? And then the second thing is what are you better at that you can jump to? And that's the big mystery that I solve in this book to my own satisfaction, I hope with the satisfaction of

readers as well. As you get much slower at innovation, and you get much better at at at instruction, you get much better at explaining ideas, of mixing big ideas together into a coherent story and telling other people about them in ways that they can use it. So you've got to go from software pioneer to college professor or some equivalent of that. And this is a really interesting thing. So you early in your career a good example of this. You have always done a lot of really path finding

high level technical research. Do you read your journal articles? This stuff is at the forefront of what psychologists do. You have to be able to understand. You read articles. Look, we're in one. We're in a pretty small community here. I didn't know you reads and well, I mean I got nerdy journal articles too. Is how I cut my tea, you know, back in all these and I go back to my journal articles from when I first finished my PhD,

and I can't literally even understand my old math. I was using early artificial intelligence genetic algorithms to model public finance mechanisms, and you know, I was publishing in these theory journals, and I can't understand my own math now. But I can write a book that takes relatively complex research and explains it of a whole bunch of different, baliant people and explains it in a way that people can understand it. This is exactly what you're doing in

your podcast as well. And that's the first kind that innovative capacity is called fluid intelligence, which you have in huge amounts when you're young, and you need to jump from that curve to crystallize intelligence, which is wisdom, teaching, ability, ability to explain things to and if you're a CEO, to use other people's brilliance to lift them up and

put them together in really good teams. If you're a podcaster, to take all the best ideas that are out there in the psychology world and bring them together in one place and help people explain them. That's crystallized intelligence. And so the purpose of the book is how can I how can all of us make the investments to jump from fluid intelligence to crystallize intelligence when it's time, how to know one it's time, and then how to make

the jump. And the rest of the book is what are the techniques to actually get you there and so you're happier when you get there? Yeah? I love that. Did I ever send you that book chapter I wrote with Marty Seligman on Why We Age? Oh yeah, I do. I know that chapter chapter that you and Marty Seligman wrote. And when you were still a pen I think, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, when I was still an imagination Institute, we tried to review the whole literature and said, well, what do you

still got when you you know, when you're older? And it's very much in that review is very much in line with a lot of oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was the stuff about intelligences from Raymond Cautel from the sixties and seventies, where he was saying, look, it's just extraordinary how much quicker. And I remember seeing this with my own kids, when my eleven year old son was started beating me in checkers, and he was just much faster at seeing things in sort of hyper dimensional space.

And it's not like he's Albert Einstein. I mean, he grew up to be a forward deployed combat marine, which is what he does right now, which I'm glad he's got these fluid intelligence capabilities, you know, keeping himself and us safe. But it was amazing to me that I saw that I was sort of weirdly slowing down in my forties, but at the same time I was a much better teacher year after year after year, much better writer year after year as things went by, for exactly

the reasons that you and Mardy figured out. And that's that's what I talk about in the book, but most importantly, how to get there and how not to be afraid to get there, not be afraid to get there. And you know, your book is called from Strength to Strength, so in one sense you're saying from food intelligence to crystallized intelligence. But another sensor's saying, from success addiction to to what what would you say? Freedom whole freedom to freedom?

You know, human freedom is so elusive and the change that we put on ourself because of the I mean, it's the funniest thing that people often think. You know,

you go back to I'm older than you. So I remember when I was a kid, a really really really little kid, my dad watching some news report about woodstock, but maybe I was four or five years old, and some hippies on TV going, if it feels good, man, do it, and my dad's saying, that's just all wrong, right, And then now you know, I listen to my millennial students and friends and all that who basically are saying, if it feels bad, it's bad. You got to avoid

it and you have to treat it. For example, both are wrong because Mother Nature lies about happiness. Mother Nature doesn't care if we're happy. The truth of the matter is that Mother Nature will drive us to run from success to success so that we're optimal breeding machines, so we're as attractive as possible, we have as much resources as possible, but we do not select. We do not

neither sex select nor naturally select. On happiness. This is the reason, as evolved beings, as spiritual beings, that we have an opportunity and in need a responsibility to learn about the secrets to happiness success and share it with other people. Because it goes against it goes against human tendency, It really does. I feel like I'm so aligned with everything you're saying. I am so aligned and you're a conservative political It's no it's no secret that politically you're

a conservative. How can it be that I and I'm politically I'm progressive, but I'm not far left. I'm more like, you know, classical liberal sort of kind of guy. But how can it be that every time we talk, I'm like one hundred percent on board with everything you say. Would we will we ever get to a point where I disagree with something with you? Like would have to get into the political to mean for me to disagree

with you, like, I just feel so aligned with you. Well, to begin with, we have the same values, which is that's the humanistic values, and that's what really matters. I mean, you call it yourself a classically liberal political liberty. Yeah, I'm a classically liberal political conservative. And the classical liberal

part is these Enlightenment values. So when we think about it, one of the reasons that you and I like each other get long is because we both believe in the in the power of the competition of ideas to make things better. I mean, when you think about it's so interesting. Until the Enlightenment, power was everything. Coercion was everything. If there's a disagreement, coercion is the only way to sort

it out. But the most as far as I'm concerned, the most important thing that the Enlightenment pointed out to people and demonstrated to people is that persuasion is way more powerful and coercion because we can disagree on something and through the disagreement be both better. You know, the

whole idea that we I mean, we love. Competition in politics is called democracy, and economics is called the free enterprise system, which, when properly bounded, requires that we that we cooperate with each other in ways that we would never have had to in the past. And in the competition of ideas, it's so critical. You know, I am super grateful not to be surrounded by people who agree with me. You know, I come from a family of

political progressives. I learned so much from them. They're so smart, they're so and furthermore, I don't I have to I have to recognize and I I truly believe that I'm wrong on tons of stuff. I just don't know what yet. And so I need you to disagree with me on policy ideas, to disagree on politics per se. So where would we find disagreements basically is in differing approaches to serve our common values. And that's the man, that's the

basis of getting better at everything and being friends. Agreed, agreed. But I keep reading. I've read a lot of even your political stuff. And you know, you wrote this beautiful book on like being a bleeding heart Conservative that was so good, That was so good. And right now, what I think we have in American politics is not classical

liberal anything I think that we have. Whereas you and I would contrast as classically liberals and conservatives, what we have right now is between the left and right that are ascendant in political power, at least in Washington, d C. Not really in the states. By the way, there's so much more good going on in cities and states. I live in Massachusetts. We've got this great governor of the bluest state who's a Republican governor and who basically just

wants to get stuff done. It's so it's a really good example of that. But at the federal level you have classically illiberal conservatives and liberals, and so that's the competition of you know, with polarization, with populism, and with coercion, and with hatred and with bitterness, and I reject all of that. I don't want either one of those brands.

I find myself equally alienated from the illiberal right as from the illiberal left, because you know, in my America, the America that I love, it's a nation of people that are basically just kind of an ambitious riff raff that don't fall prey to the true big lie, which is the person in the house next to you who votes through the other party is the enemy of America.

You know, it's astonishing to me that more than half of Americans, more than half of Americans today on both the Democratic or holding inside it's the biggest threat to our countries people who don't vote like them. Wow, that is a huge lie, and it's a huge mistake. And we might as well just you know, bind it up with a bow and send it as a Christmas present to the enemies of a free society. You know, we

need more. I need more. Scott Berry Kauffman's telling me, I'm completely crazy about capitalism and we're going to make any progress in this country. And then but because why because we have differing approaches on how to serve the poor? You know that that's what we need. I love to go down that rabbit hole, but our listeners, can we get back to the This is the psychology podcast, not the economics podcast. There's so much there's so much depth to you, so much. I love talking to you about.

But I think that we just talked about is very seguable. Is that a word segable? It is? I think? I think? I mean it's yeah, sure, it's an aphorism. I mean it's a neologism and I like it too. Higher forms of spiritual of Tian's you talk about and love your enemies, right, and which there's something you know, there's some carryover to this book when you talk about it, right, How is that in cultivating more of that in this kind of second to you know, what's the word to use? Second?

What wave of your life? Second? The second the success curve, the second curve, the second curve on the one that doesn't curve down, that you can maintain that successful the absolute rest of your life, the central ingredient to it's interesting. There's a study that you're really well aware of and some of your listeners might have heard of as well, called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is an eighty year longitudinal study launched in the late thirties and

early forties. It was looking at graduates of people that were graduating from Harvard College and it was going to follow them all the way through their life. It was matched up with another study of people who wasn't just you know, Harvard men. People who hadn't gone to college have different backgrounds, and so it's demographically representative, and it looks over eighty years at what they did to wind

up happy when they were old. Now, this is like a crystal ball, and I talk about it a lot in the book, and I teach you about it a lot at my class at Harvard about on the subject what can you do when you're twenty five? And this is really the big promise of the book is basically a lot of people say, I would be great if I were happy when I'm seventy five, but I don't know. I just have to wait and see when I get there. No, you don't have to wait and see. You don't have

to get up the chance. There are some things that will be worse and better, to be sure, But there's a lot you can do when you're twenty five and thirty five and even sixty five such that you will be happier than you would have been when you're seventy five, guaranteed. And a lot of that comes out in this Harvard Grant study. And there's all kinds of things in there to do. But the number one big takeaway is that happiness is love, full stop. That's the punchline of this study.

If you don't have loving relationships, you're not going to be happy as you get older, which means that you have to make all kinds of investments in love. And that means love for friends, love for your partner, love for your family, love for the divine. You need loving relationships at a very, very meaningful level. Love is expressed in your work. You know, you and I talk about your work. Why are you doing this thing that you're doing is because you want to serve. You want to

help other people live. This is an act of you know the psychology podcast I Happen to Know is an act of love that's hugely meaningful and everybody deserves that. The problem is that the world's not telling you to do that. The world is telling you that. Basically, here's the world's formula, Scott, here's the world's formula. Use people, love things, worship yourself. That's the world's formula for happiness. And it's completely dead wrong. The right formula is use things, love, people,

worship the divine. That's it. I love that. Those are the seven words to remember at the end of the book. Yeah, booked myself. That's the end of the book. That I was going to lead up to that. I had a whole plan where what I was going to my next question was going to be leading up. I had a lot, a whole plan to lead up to them. It's okay, it's okay, now, it's okay. But what I was going to ask you to kind of segue into that was you say that love is We just talked about love,

but that you can level up from love. The next level is worship, is what you say, and I wanted to unpack that a little bit. What is worship? Could how is like when I think of that, I think of it as a negative thing actually, because I think it's like it's like too much self sacrifice. You know, well, to worship is is a is a true adoration. But this can't come from from something where in which you have a peer relationship. The biggest one of the biggest

problems is interesting. You know, in my own in my own spiritual journey, I dedicate this book to my guru. And I learned my guru when I was studying in southern India with a famous, very famous yogi named Shri Nochurbnka Traman. And I was in a little town of little house and he was asking me questions. He was interviewing me, not like this. He was interviewing me just to me to be able to help me more. And he asked me about my wife and I said, I said,

she leads me on paths of righteousness. I mean she reads me the holy scriptures, she helps me to pray and uh. And then he said does she love you the most? And I said no, no, she loves God

the most and she's told me that. And he said, she is your guru and this is was incredibly meaningful me, meaningful to me because I realized that the secret, one of the real secrets of success in my marriage is that my wife worships not me, and and a lot of there's a lot of pressure on spouses too, for the spouse to be the beyond and all and to love the person beyond all others to the point of adoration.

That could be considered worship. And it is so helpful to me that I know that with my dying breath, I will be my eyes will be on my beloved, my wife, but that I will be in the hands of God, and that she will be fine because she's in the hands of God as well. That's worship. And that is an that's an un that's a that's a disordered relationship for another person. Yeah, that is really profound.

You to have the to have no ego, to be like okay with that, that like oh you you feel in God more than me, Like you're okay with it. It's like you happy? Yeah, Well, now, I don't know. It's funny because at the beginning of our of our marriage, I mean, this is an evolution as we've gotten older as well, and as we've had our children, as our

children have grown, and it's really helpful. It's interesting because we were explaining this to my oldest son is engaged, and we're explaining this to my oldest son and his fiance, and I wasn't quite getting through right. It sounds almost as sort of a compromise, or as if we don't love each other enough. But you need the adoration, the worship to go to an entity that's higher than higher paths. Yes, absolutely. And David Foster Wallace, by the way, who wrote famously

that everybody worships something, everybody worships something. Now more dangerous than worshiping your partner, of course, is self worship. And that's the world that we're being pushed into. You know, if you're posting seventy five selfies of yourself on Instagram every day, then you're practicing a form of really metastatically dangerous self worship. So there's a lot of things that are tied up in this, but love, which is defined by Aristotle and later Saint Thomas Aquinas as to wheel

the good of the other. Nothing about feelings. It's a commitment. It's the decision to love. That's why you can love your enemies, right, And that's why loving your enemies is actually possible, because it's the way that you choose to behave as opposed to the feeling that's written on your heart in any particular moment. So love, love, love, love, love in the appropriate way for people all around you, including your enemies, including your your friends, your family. Love

in the right way. That is the secret to aging well ultimately, And that's an empirical phenomenon. That's what we find in the eighty to your longitudinal study that people have the most love have the most happiness. Absolutely. This stuff tails so much with my interest in Maslow's notion of being love be love, which is a higher form

of love than he calls it. Unneeding love versus needing love comes from a place deficiency motivation, right a telic versus telic love in the Aristotelian framework, Right, nice, nice, All this stuff can be mapped on do to to the for sure, and he will. He and Masa drew a lot from Buddhism and from like tai Chi and as well uh and Zen ideas. So yeah, a lot of this stuff is deeply connected. So what does it mean to start your vana prosta retired artist, literally retiring to

the sarist. But what is that vana pasta is actually it's a it's a word in Sanskrit that actually comes from two words von and prosta. I mean to retiring and then into the forest. That's why vonaprosta it's is a larger concept. Is literally means to retire to the forest or to withdraw into the forest. But actually it's it's metaphorical and it comes from an ancient Vedic philosophic notion. This is probably at least a four thousand year old idea of a good life which should be modeled in

four quarters now. According to the ancient notion is Hindu wisdom that a good life, of perfect life, of balanced life is one hundred years long and it has four to twenty five year quarters horse You know, as they say in finance, your results may vary given the fact that most people don't live to AE hundred, but the whole points you need to pass through phases. The first is Brahmasharia, which is the student phase, the phase of learning. The second is gree hostile, which is a householder phase.

Build your family, work in your job, become successful, earn money, The third is called van a prasta, where you start to work backward, where you start to retire away from the earthly rewards of money, power, pleasure, fame, prestige, whatever, where you're thinking much much more about the trendscendental benefits that actually come from the love relationships in your life, such that you can do the spiritual work that's required to get into the fourth quarter, which is called sanyasa.

Sanyasa is a period of real enlightenment, and in ancient times, many Hindu men would actually leave their families at age seventy five and go spend the rest of their lives at the feet of their yogi masters and the Himalayas. I mean no joke this would be. But you can't

do that without twenty five years of elite training. So what this means for us today is basically, look, when you're at a certain phase in your life, notwithstanding the change in your skills, you need to start spending time thinking about the unique transcendental benefits that you can get from a contemplative life as you get older, and you need to do the work first. You can't show up at the Olympics without training. You need elite training to be able at the end of your life to attain

some amount of enlightenment. And that means taking your spiritual life seriously, taking your love relationships seriously, building the root system that actually is your family and friendships that you're going to need, thinking, reading, contemplating, starting a practice of meditation in prayer, and I go through all of the things that actually go into not just in the ancient Hindu thinking, but in our modern American thinking as well. That makes perfect sense to all of us who are

real moderns. You you are so good to got You're like like you're such like a good principled person, Like do you have any naughty side of you? Like that makes you more human? I mean, we don't want need to talk about We don't need to talk about it is it just tell me that meant dark thoughts. I mean, this is a huge thing. But I met war with myself.

You know, this is the key thing, And this was the most liberating thing was recognizing that the day that you stop being at war with yourself is the day you start to lose that that it's perfectly okay to have a dark side. What's not okay is to accept the dark side you know that, in point of fact, that the war that you have against your own dark side, this is one of the great adventures, the great joys of life. That difficulty is part of what it means

to be fully alive. It's interesting. Saint aaronais this fourth century Catholic saint. His most famous saying is that the glory of God is a person fully alive. And what he meant by fully alive was not like you know, a healthy blood pressure and you know no, but even by fully alive is actually living and engaging in life under your own terms. And this is not libertinism where my own terms or if it feels good, do it,

because that's not living according to your own terms. That's your lizard brain telling you how to live and living according to your urges and basist desires. No, no, no, no no. Who is the person that you want to be? Who's the Scott Berry Kaufman of your dreams and living according to that? And I guarantee you it's not Scott with a boat. I guarantee you it's not Scott with a Ferrari.

It's Scott who is morally elevated and transcendentally aware and lifting other people up and glorifying the divine in your particular way, and then and then and then shooting at that, day after day after day, shooting at that, shooting at that. That's to be fully alive. Well, I love that so much. But I will say so I don't come across a hypocrite. I hope to take up sailing lessons this year. It's one. There's nothing wrong with sailing, So I wouldn't mind maybe

a boat someday. But it's not the thing that drives me exactly exactly. And I don't mean to be some sort of acetic you know, that would come across this if critical. It's not like I'm walking some itinerate anonymous path. I'm a professor at Harvard University. I'm a little a privileged existence, to be sure. But you got to hold it lightly, is the bottom line. I mean, you have this fabulously important and impactful and popular podcast, but you

have to hold it lightly. Yeah, because if it becomes if this success of this podcast is the essence of Scottness, trouble awaits oh for sure, for sure. Well I struggle, uh sometimes knowing what is my essence? You know? And that but that's all I'll take it's a whole different conversation. But I struggle, I mean I and I wonder do other people struggle with that? Who are successful? Like? Am I the only one? You know? I struggle sometimes to know, like who am I? You know? Who is the the

real me? And and you know it's it's tough because I don't. I make the scientific case, there's no such thing as the real you. There are many, many, many sides of all of us. There is the sides of us that make us feel most creative, alive, as you said, most creative, creatively, self actualized, that side of myself. I know what I'm engaging in that side of myself. I feel more alive that I know that I know. But

the question of who is the real me? Is? Is almost feels like a full's Errand you know, well, it's part of it is part of the It's an interesting thing. I mean, this is what philosophers, particularly eighteen, nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers, have engaged with. So the concept has always been there is a true you, and you're responsible to find it, serve it more. Twentieth century philosophy from the Nihilists to the existentialists would say, there is no

true you. You have to invent it, right, and it's almost neither here nor there. Whether it's existence precedes essence or essence precedes existence one way or the other. You have a responsibility to serve the highest version of yourself. Yeah, the circumstances, and that's this unbelievable life adventure. That the great news is we get a bunch of years to

do it if we so choose. But if we want to stay on the amster wheel, stay on the hit on a treadmill and freak out when when some of our abilities start to wane, and just fight like crazy and try to hide everything just with all of our might, we're wasting this opportunity to just start walking the transcendental walk into the most meaningful, service oriented and ultimately cosmically impactful part of our lives. You just made me think

of something that that's that's really profound. But by the way, you just made me think that this idea of the real you. I think maybe what you're saying to a certain extent is we have to really accept that that could change throughout our lives. You know, there can be like a period from like because I look at myself some of the videos I was looking on YouTube and some of the things I did, like when I first started giving talks, and I was like, oh, that guy.

But that was the real me then, And maybe you're what you're saying is kind of accepting or at least that was the best version of me then. But I think the best version be now is someone different, a different path, you know, not completely different and not like going from you know, crazy, but a different kind of you know, I'm not is interested in giving all these talks all the time and you know, being on video and uh, you know, you know certain things. But you know,

now I want to teach more. I want to like, I want to like, I want to help people and mentor them. I'm much more of a drive to mentor and to help the future generation. Right, Which is, by the way, that's the core competency of crystallized intelligence, which is that that second curve. Remember, the first curve is fluid intelligence, which is analytic capacity and the ability to do a purely original work, to do it fast, to

do it well. And the second half is crystallized intelligence, which is the ability to take big ideas, to synthesize them and to teach them to others in a coherent way. So what you're doing is you're recognizing and increasing your crystallized intelligence, and you're being drawn to try to develop it. I mean this and this is what people need to do. The problem is when they're a success addict and they're

stuck on their first curve. They that's what got me here, That's the one I'm going to stay on forever, and I'll be damned if I'm going to actually let this thing leave you behind. And then all it is is like rage, rage against the dying of the light, which is an exercise and futility but also the recipe for misery. Yeah. I mean I don't want to rage against the dying. I want to like meditate on the dye. I want to like see the beauty in it. I want to

I want to feel wonder. I don't want to rage totally. But you know, it's different strokes and it's hard. And this is part of the problem that a lot of people who have who have a pretty I mean, you have a deeply examined life. I mean I've heard maybe think too much. Well I don't. I mean, every a lot of people think that they over think, but intellectuals in particular think deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply, and and and again. One of the things that people don't realize about as

social scientists that we don't do research. We do mesearch. You look at things that are you're interested in your own life and behavior. If you're somebody who's studying, you know, insects or something, you're not studying humans. But if you're a human scientist, it is because there's something about this thing in the mirror that fascinates you and the problems

that you want to solve. So the fact that you're doing this and jumping in with both feet is really really encouraging because this means that you've got a leg up and there's a lot that you can teach to people about how they can make this shift in their own lives as well. Absolutely, but we need to like collaborate on something together someday. Yeah, and you're doing actually you're doing comedia. You're doing you're doing comedy classes, aren't you,

I am? Is that something you want to collaborate with me on? Is that what you're saying? I love to learn more? And part of it is this I've actually done a little bit of research about happiness and humor, which is you know, Jennifer Rocker and company and who is a Standford has done some of that work that's really really interesting. But I did a column. I quoted

them with a column. But the thing that I found about humor and happiness, which is quite interesting, is that there are two kinds of ways to have a sense of humor. One is to appreciate funny things, and the other thing is to say or do funny things. And what you find is that happiness is correlated is associated with the first, but not the second. Hmmm, So people who love funny things tend to be really really happy, and people who are really really funny tend to be

a little less happy than the average. Is that interesting? So interesting explains you know a lot about comedians in their lives. You know, I'm a weird person because I I'm very much in this spiritual path and I resonate so deep with what you're saying. But I also am very cheeky. I also don't need to take myself that seriously. Maybe that's not at odds right, but but I feel

like you often don't see that right. Like people who are like so like who they're like, oh, I am annoyed, And they don't tend to have a great sense of humor, although the Doggi Lom is a good exception. He's he's quite quite quite hilarious. But you know, I mean hilarious, wonderful, right, he's wonderful in that way. I mean, the things that

he'll do. It's it's interesting, you know. I have every kind of experience with him that shows that that that spirituality and earnestness are actually antagonistic to each other in a lot. I love that. I love it. And so he'll say, you know, for example, well one time we were doing a thing in here in the States, and after we'd been working together for you know, days and days and days, it was very intense. Afterward, he said, you know, every time I see you, I want to

give you something. I want to give you a gift. And I said, well, thank you. He said, but I don't own anything. And he starts rooting around in his little satchel, his little person that he carries, and he pulls out a ballpoint pen, a ballpoint pen, and he gives me this ballpoint pen and he says, I want you to have this, and it was actually kind of nice. He was a moll bloc. I mean, it's like no joke, but it was. He said, I've been carrying this for twenty years and I want you to have it. And

for me, it's like the Holy Grail was like. And so I carry it with you. I do. It's actually it's not in this room, but I still do. And so I was carrying it around in my briefcase for like six months. And I was with a Catholic bishop, Bishop Robert Barron, in Los Angeles, and we were having lunch at a subway or someplace with paper napkins, and I said something. He said, oh, I want to write that down for a sermon. He says, you got a pin. And I look at my briefcase and there's my Dalai

Lama pen right it out. And I say, and I say, you know you're evidence. This was a pen given to me by the Dolli Lama. Because I was kind of boasting. I'm I'm sure of ashamed to say this to admit of Scott, but I said, and he says, oh, I love the Dollai Lama. He's been so helpful to me in my pastoral work. And I heard the Dollai Lama in my ear going, you know what you have to do? You gave him, I said, I said, I said, I'd like you to have that pen. So I couldn't. I said,

trust me, I have to. So he takes the right. He takes the pen. And then three months later I was back in Durham Salah, which is where his Holiness lives in the Himaly and foothills where his monastery is, and I tell the Dollai Lama the story and he laughs like crazy and he gives me another pen. See, you have the second pen with you somewhere. I got the second pen and he says, you know, I'm looking forward to hearing who you give this one too. But

it's like this all the time. It's sort of this lighthearted, easy come, easy go. You know, he loved he has his cat. He loves his cat. He's crazy about his cat. And I one time I've asked him, we were just having lunch. I said, your Holiness, what's your cat's name? And he looks at me like I asked him, like, what's your left shoes name? Because in you know, Tibetans wouldn't name an animal. And he says no name cat. This is this is amazing inside baseball right now. I

love this. By the way, Arthur, you know I'm a big fan of the di Woma and he's a wonderful man. He's a beautiful, beautiful man. Don't meet your heroes. Don't meet your heroes because they turn out to have feet of clay, you know, to quote the prophet Daniel, and he doesn't have feet to clay. He's exactly the same guy. He's a beautiful, beautiful human being who has love for everybody and wants to share it. Absolutely, I mean and

I absolutely do. That is true what I said. But you didn't catch my joke because I was tell me again. Oh wait a second, you made the pizza joke, didn't you. No, no, no, you know you told me. What did that guy say to you? And all? That's all he had to say to you to get a free pen? Oh that's right, but I don't have it. You have a second, one second, one, It'll be in the mail, scot Yeah. Anyway, I'm you just did you didn't play along with this. It's because I missed it. But now I got it. No, I

got it. I got it. I thought you were making that famous Ali Lama joke, which is, you know, how, what did Ali Lama say to the pizza delivery guy? Make me one with everything? Oh? Yeah, well, I do love that joke. I do love that one. I know that's not as funny as this jokes. Perhaps my favorite chapter in your book, although they're all good, Perhaps my favorite one is the one cast into the Falling Tide and this idea of womenality. Can you kind of tell

our listeners a little bit about what wominality is? Yeah, so we've been discussing this crystallized and flood intelligence, these curves that define what you're naturally good at. Most actially easy for you that those curves, flood intelligence, for example, goes up through your teens and twenties, and it goes down through your thirties and forties. And the second curve comes up through your thirties and forties and fifties and

stays high in your sixties and seventies. The trouble is that you don't just naturally fall from one onto the other. You have to make a decision because you have to do different things to get from your fluid to your crystallized intelligence curve. And that means taking a big risk. It means jumping from one set of activities, from one set of skills, from one set of interests to one set of emphasies in your life. And that transition is really,

really scary. Now most people don't make it because number one, they're super good at what they were doing, so they rage to keep at it, or they're too afraid, or they don't believe there's a second success curve lurking behind the first one, or they're afraid that they won't succeed, or they're just too attached to the first set the first curve. But if you do jump, it turns out that there's this magic that happens between the curves too

when you're making a shift. And I didn't know. Remember I did this research for myself and at the time, I was a CEO of this big thing tank in Washington, d C. And because of that, I retired. I quit my job because I wanted to get on my second curve and I knew I had the data, unambiguous data that you have to make a decision to do it.

You have to start doing different things, as by the way you have done in your career the past three years that you've actually made transitions, You've made changes, and you're doing more crystallized intelligence. Now some people can do it very intuitively, like you, but most of us we don't have the gifts, and so we actually have to make this conscious decision. And so I quit my job. And it was unbelievably scary and uncomfortable. I walked away from more money than I was ever going to make,

more a position. I was like the captain of a battleship in public policy. I was in the exciting struggles in Washington, d C. Which I didn't always find pleasant, to be honest, but at least they were always exciting. And I walked away from these relationships with corporate CEOs and leaders and policy leaders. And I was promptly forgotten once I no longer had a position. It's not like people are calling me up to see how I was doing. And I got to Massachusetts, you know, I took up

a college teaching job, and it was weird. It was like I couldn't even I was trying to sign a check after I got to Massachusetts and I couldn't remember my signature. It was really really weird because I was in this what they call a liminal state, which is from one thing to another, a transition. Bruce Filer, who's written that famous book Life Is in the Transitions, which is a really nice book. Yeah, he really is, and he's a very deep thinker. And what you find is

that people go through these regularly. But this is the biggie from the fluid to the crystallized intelligence curve. But once you do it, once you jump, your life just becomes so crazy rich with opportunity because of that. Insecurity per se. There's a word in Tibetan, this bardo b a r d o, and what it means is the decision to leap at the end of your life basically

to the next life. But it requires that you make a positive decision to actually make that jump, which is the ultimate kind of liminality, literally between lives, the subtle wind that the Tibetans talk about from life to life in Ramcar. Yeah, we have this aversion of that of that in our own lives. So people are listening to us. It's like, even if they're not between fluid and crystallized intelligence.

Maybe you're twenty five years old deciding whether or not to quit this good job and go to graduate school or or you know, go to something that's high paying and something is low paying, or moving away from New York because you're sick of it and you want to go back to Wichita where you grew up. Even though

that's not a cool thing to do. You know what you need to do is you need to consider that that jump per se is going to be really, really hard, and there's a deep sacredness in that difficulty and a profound kind of fertility and the things that it's going to make happen in your life. You're going to have unusual clarity simply because of the among other things, because of the insecurity that you're facing. Absolutely might want to double click on a distinction that you make in your

book Passingly. It's kind of a throw away, but I think it was so profound and could probably be a book in itself, and that's the distinction between being happy in life versus feeling the need to feel special. It was like a throws a one line and then you're like, well, maybe you can actually care about being happy as opposed to being special. I was like, that's a book in itself,

you know, like that's wow, wow. I mean, think about how many people right now with social media kind of pressures feel the need to justify their existence by being special as much as possible. Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at what I'm doing, look at me, followers I have, look at many much money I have, et cetera. Those So those two things are very very different, right, Yeah, for sure. And you know, there's this desire to be special,

to stand out for the crowd. And once again there's a lot of you know, if we were if one of us was an evolutionary biologist, I mean, you do a lot of evolutionary psychology, so you know, and you talk about this an awful lot that you have a you want to stand out from the crowd because it makes you It makes you better in the passing on your jeans department, in the pool of people. If you stand out, you do better. I mean, obviously, if you stand out as a criminal or a kook, it might

not help you that very much. You want to stand out in a positive way. So there's this narrative that people have to stand out all the time, and they can become captured by their desire to become special at the expense of actually being happy and So I was interviewing a lady for this book, this woman who's incredibly

successful Wall Street financier, I mean, just killing it. And she's in this period where she feels her skills a little bit in the cline, her decision making, the abilities are not quite as sharp as they used to be. She can tell that younger people in the firm who used to idolize her like she's missing a step there. But at the same time, she also is just very, very reluctant to make any changes. You know, her marriage is not that great, a relationship with her kids is

not that great. She probably drinks a little bit too much. Her health is not as good as it used to be. And it's obvious it's like, step back from the rat race and get on point in your relationships with your children and your husband, and your relationship with alcohol, with you know, your faith journey, whatever it happens to be. Why don't you do that? And she says, because in my work, I'm really really special, and all those things you talked about, anybody can do them. And I think

I just prefer to be special and happy. And I thought about it. I thought, well, you know, that's the success addicts anthem. You know when I talk to people who everybody knows, people who have had alcohol use disorder, have been addicted to drugs, and they you know, they know that sooner later they're going to have to get on the wagon, or they're going to die sooner or later, but they don't because and they know that they'll be happier if they're not addicted, or they're not actively addicted.

But they prefer to be higher than happy, preferring to be special than happy. It's just the success addicts version of preferring to be high. Yes, and your book is all about a deeper form of happiness for sure, and many people ever thought they had before. Arthur, thanks so much for chatting me today and helping people overcome the striver's curse and step into a deeper form of happiness.

Loved your book. It came to me at just the right time in my life, and I'm sure for a lot of our listeners it will come to them the right time of their lives. Thank you, Scott. Thank you for the work that you're doing to lift people up and bring people together. It's it's I have to say that you know you're every week you help me and I deeply appreciate that, and I'm not alone. There's many, many other thousands of people that feel the same way, So on behalf of all of us. Thank you, Thank

you Artha. That means the world to me. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusseecology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page thus Ecology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check

that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.