"Your Happiness Is a Combination of 3 Psychological Macronutrients..."

The Motley Fool is here to make you smarter, happier, and richer. In this podcast, we're all about the happy! But what does that mean? Is it achievable? Does money help? Arthur Brooks, an author and columnist for The Atlantic, has a new book out, co-written with Oprah Winfrey, that puts a scientist's lens on the subject of happiness. Are you ready to build the life you want? No time like the present!

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Sept. 13, 2023.

David Gardner: How To Build a Life. That's the title of the Arthur Brooks' regular column in The Atlantic on the time-list, and critically important topic of what is a good life, and what is happiness? How to Build a Life. Well, Arthur has stirred some of those past columns of his as ingredients into a cauldron. He's invited Oprah Winfrey to get some of her own mix in there with him, and together they've arrived at a new brew, well, it's actually a new book just out this week. Build the Life You Want; The Art and Science of Getting Happier. What is happiness, and does your money help? Are you doing it right building your life? Are you building the life you want? Let's talk about it with Arthur Brooks this week, only on Rule Breaker Investing.

Well, I'm delighted to be joined by our special guest, Arthur Brooks. Before we get started, I want to thank Jason Moore, a long time listener, because it was Jason's note or tweet or mailbag item that pointed me first to Love Your Enemies, by Arthur Brooks, which I read his 2019 book. From the moment I finished it about a year ago, I thought I'd love to have Arthur on this podcast. Jason, you're the catalyst for this happening this week. Now, when we got in touch with Arthur a few months ago, he said, "Well, let's hold off because I have a new book coming out." We thought, "Yeah, let's hold off until this very week when his new book is out."

We're going to talk about his new book, his old book, and his whole life, and yours of mine, and happiness. Build the Life You Want; The Art and Science of Getting Happier. Arthur Brooks is appreciated by many people in many different ways. Growing up at Seattle Light as a young man, he became a concert French horn player in Barcelona, Spain. He then later got his college degree, helped run a think tank. He's written a bunch of good books, and is also now a Harvard professor at both the Kennedy School and Harvard Business School in what I bet are lively classrooms. Many will also know him as the Happiness Columnist for the Atlantic. Well, more formally, the How to Build a Life column, which makes a lot of sense, since his new book out this week, out yesterday, in fact, is entitled Build the Life You Want. It's out there now, so go buy it, you'll love it. I have Arthur Brooks. Welcome to the Motley Fool and Rule Breaker Investing.

Arthur Brooks: Thank you David. It's so lovely to be with you. I've been looking forward to this ever since we set it up a couple of months ago. 

David Gardner: Yes, indeed. Thank you. Let's get right into it with my aliens questions. We're having fun today. Arthur, aliens have just landed on planet Earth. They come in peace. Having done their research, they selected Harvard University as ground zero for their educational purposes. One visits you during office hours. It's incredibly curious about the concept of happiness. What is happiness? It asks, "How would you explain happiness to them in a minute or less?"

Arthur Brooks: You bet. Happiness is not a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness, just like the smell of your Thanksgiving turkey is evidence of the Thanksgiving dinner. Your Thanksgiving dinner actually is a combination of three macro-nutrients; protein, carbohydrates, and fat, and similarly, your happiness is a combination of three psychological macro-nutrients which we call enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Happiness is the quest to get happier by having more enjoyment in life, more satisfaction in life, and finding more meaning in life.

David Gardner: That was huge. I think you left us with 10 or 50. I wasn't timing you, Arthur, but you nailed that. In fact, you nailed it so well that the alien now wants to go to one of your classes. Are you teaching this fall at Harvard?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, this fall at the Harvard Kennedy School, I teach a class called Non-profit Management Leadership, which hearkens back to my old days teaching that, and writing a textbook on it, and then running a big non-profit think tank in Washington DC. This is for academic class. In the spring at the Harvard Business School, I teach the science of happiness, which is this massively over subscribed class. One hundred and eighty kids in the seats, 400 on the waiting list, and there's even an illegal Zoom link they think I don't know about.

David Gardner: That is amazing. If I recall, and we'll get into maybe later, Arthur, remote distance learning is part of your past?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, it is. If it weren't for, as we say, non-traditional learning methods, I wouldn't actually have any academic background at all. I come from an academic family. My father was a biostatistician, a math professor, his father was a philosophy and theology professor. It's the family business, but I was the wayward child, the black sheep as it were in almost every way. I was the capitalist in the family. [LAUGHTER] It really set me apart. I wandered off after a year of college. A year of college that went poorly, which is a familiar old story. The debate is dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs at this point. [LAUGHTER] Then I did what my parents called my gap decade, where I actually went on the road as a classical French horn player, which was my dream all along. I played chamber music classically. I played a couple of years with a jazz guitar player named Charlie Byrd on the road, and then I wound up in the Barcelona symphony. I actually went to Barcelona chasing a girl, joined the orchestra. It took me two years to close the real deal, which is convincing the girl in Barcelona to marry me. [LAUGHTER] Thirty-two years later, we've got grand kids at this point. The music career didn't wind up that great, but the marriage certainly did. Then in my late '20s, I figured out that I was pretty interested in some things besides music. I started studying, but there was no way to do it. I didn't have any money. I didn't live any place exactly. I was on the road all the time. I started taking correspondence classes from universities all over the United States, and banking the credits at a place called Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, New Jersey, which is part of the New Jersey state higher ed system. Before I knew it, I had enough to graduate, and they gave me a bachelor's degree. That's why I got a bachelor's degree in economics, a month before my 30th birthday.

David Gardner: Am I right recalling correctly that the conductor of the Barcelona Symphony did not create happiness for you?

Arthur Brooks: He was an evil genius. I mean, actually, all conductors, some are geniuses, but all are evil [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah, no, I mean, it was unbelievable. I remember, actually, we had a really great conductor who was quite a tyrant by the name of Franz-Paul Decker, a Dutch conductor. He had been in Montreal before he came to Barcelona, but a fantastic conductor. Finally, he retires, and we're auditioning new conductors, and one after the other, they were even worse. I remember one of the conductors that was auditioning for us, he reduced a 65-year old male flute player in the orchestra to tears in front of all his colleagues. I thought to myself, could it be worse? In fact, it could, and it was pretty bad.

David Gardner: Back to your new book, Arthur. The first chapter of Build the Life You Want is somewhat surprising, in that it begins with happiness is not the goal. Now this from the happiness calmness, so we'll bite. What is the goal?

Arthur Brooks: The goal can't be happiness because happiness is not attainable, at least in the mortal coil. The reason for that, is that, we have evolved all bad or not bad, but negative emotions that keep us alive. Most people don't understand the nature of emotions. They're nothing more than signals. They take inputs from the occipital lobe of your brain, which is processing visual stimuli, and then the limbic system, which is the very middle of your brain, it turns all of these outside signals into emotions. That's just a machine language, that is then sent to the prefrontal cortex of your brain so you know what's going on, and you can decide how to react. People often think about emotions as nice to have and terrible to have. Wrong. It's all just language. It's all just signals. If it weren't for the negative emotions which are negatively valence, they're unpleasant on purpose so that you will be aversive to what's going on, in a week, you'd be dead. You need fear, you need anger, you need sadness, you need disgust, you'd be poisoned or eaten by a tiger or run over by a car, you need these things. We should wake up every morning and say, "Thank you for my negative emotions today." But, of course, they're not pleasant since you need them, but they're not pleasant, you can't be completely happy, and so that can't be the goal unless you want to be dead, which is not the goal for most people today [LAUGHTER] in their happiness quest.

David Gardner: The pain of loss is three times the joy of gain. This research has been backed up again and again. It has real implications for money, and for our investing. One of the things I've tried to do with the Motley Fool over the years is, convince people it's OK to lose. It's OK to have stocks go down or the bare market happen if you live a long life, which we all want to, for the most part, you're going to have a lot of bear markets, and not selling is the real trick. We are hard wired against the downside, and that's important for our survival, but it's not really important, I don't think, for our prosperity.

Arthur Brooks: No, that's true. One of the most important things that people can learn so that they can become happier, the goal is not happiness, but as Oprah Winfrey likes to put it, happierness. She created that word for our book [LAUGHTER] as a matter of fact; happierness. Because the goal is to actually make progress in happiness, is to learn about your emotions with science, to learn to manage your emotions, and to learn and grow from the negative emotions. By the way, this sounds an awful lot like your philosophy in the Motley Fool.

David Gardner: Thank you.

Arthur Brooks: Which is, you're going to have losses, that's completely normal. You need to learn emotional fortitude around them. You need to manage the losses, and then learn and grow from what has actually happened, because of the losses, you'll get better and you're going to make more money, and you're going to have more prosperity. The idea of emotional self management is an awful lot like portfolio management in this way.

David Gardner: Love that. Arthur, it occurs to me that a book, and this is a great book, and I've enjoyed a couple of your other books, and I think they're great too, a book, I'm curious, how far can it take us to really changing us? We can read your wisdom. We can read Oprah's wisdom. Is a book the most effective device truly to change our mindset and habits? Do you supplement it in other ways? Can I finish literally building the life that I want capably?

Arthur Brooks: No. You need to practice what you actually read. This is the biggest problem with the Internet culture which is one weird trick. The Hack culture. [LAUGHTER] You're trying to find some glitch in the metaphysical matrix, and you're going to find it online. I don't think so. That's not how it works, but what you do need to make progress in your life is, you need knowledge. Then you need to learn deeply, there's a couple of ways to do that. Then you need to change your habits and practices in your life and pass on the ideas. Again, tons of parallels with what you're actually teaching and learning with your customers at the Motley Fool about the people who are in this particular community. There are certain principles you need to learn them but then you need to practice them so they can be part of your life and you can get better at them and then pass on the ideas so that we can all share the love. By the way, when you pass on the ideas, when you become the teacher, then you own them permanently but just reading about things isn't enough.

David Gardner: Love it. You're reminding me of the great Thomas Jefferson quote. I won't reproduce it verbatim here, but it's all about how our ideas are candles and I can light your taper and mine is no the dimmer. That sharing and that knowledge learning together and growing together, I think is the story of humanity. Even if sometimes we tend to forget that or think it's all about win, lose, lose, win. We're going to talk about that later though. Let's go back again to the book because you've co written this book with Oprah. I think a lot of people by now may know that even one day after it's launched, I'm curious, what was it like working with Oprah?

Arthur Brooks: It was a delight. It was incredible. We actually discovered each other. I mean, I knew her, about her since I was a kid. She's iconic, probably one of the five most famous people in the United States but she turns out is a reader of my column in the Atlantic and she was reading it pretty religiously all the way through the Corona virus epidemic. Now, I've got 500,000 readers a week. I don't know who was reading the column. Like you don't know exactly who's listening to the Motley Fool. I mean, I bet you and the Barack Obama and George W. Bush are both listening to this podcast.

David Gardner: At least this one. Definitely this one, since you're on it.

Arthur Brooks: Then, hello, Mr. President, is all I can say. [laughs] But the point is that you don't know and it turns out Oprah was a follower of this. Then my last book came out which is called From Strength to Strength. About how strivers AKA Motley Fool community members.

David Gardner: Thank you.

Arthur Brooks: They can get happier as they go through their life. I mean, what's the science of getting happier as you get older? She read that book on the first day it was on the market and called. Now, why? Because she has a podcast about books. Super Soul is a phenomenal podcast about books because she's an incredible interviewer and a voracious reader and she interviewed me and man, it was like a house on fire from the first minute because we see the world in the same way. The whole point is that this is not a job. This is a mission and I know you agree with me, David.

David Gardner: I do.

Arthur Brooks: This is a mission to lift people up. Look, we don't have that much time on Earth. We don't have that many footsteps that we can put down. You better use every minute that you can to lift up and lighten the load of your sisters and brothers. Some of us like you and me and gosh, Oprah Winfrey, super privileged to be able to do that in a big way and so we're talking about it on her show and then offline and on the phone and then socially at her place and after a while we're like, let's do something bigger. She said, let's write a book. Like if in the old days I still had my show and I had you on 30 times until people start saying, who's the bald happiness guy I keep seeing every time.

David Gardner: Dr. Arthur.

Arthur Brooks: Exactly. Oh man, you're killing me. [laughs] That's right and so we did that. The book is structured like that. It's structured like one of her shows but where I'm talking about the deep science of happiness. Now anybody who's really interested in the science, it's based in academic research that nobody has to read or understand. But if they want to, there's a thousand academic research citations in the footnotes to that thing so it could actually also be used as a textbook but it's not intended as such. It's a book for everybody. It's a manual. It's the owner's manual for your emotions and happiness.

David Gardner: I love it. Now, my instinct is that of those thousand footnotes, approximately 1,000 of them were written by Arthur not Oprah, am I right?

Arthur Brooks: Oh, yes. No. [laughs] She trusted me but we had great back checkers too. She's interesting because she framed every part of the book. Her introductions were just lovely and there were certain places which I have to tell you she's really refined my own understanding of my own science. I'm a behavioral scientist and I've been thinking about this stuff since I got my PhD, years ago. But sometimes she'll say something and she says, so the same question you asked. If it's not happiness, what is it? I said, well, it's making progress toward getting happier and she said it's happiness. She coined this neologism for the book, It's phenomenal and that's what it's like to work with, Oprah. By the way, there's not that many people in public life who are the same in their private life because public life, you have to have an image. Oprah's crack the code on how to be exactly like the person that people admire. You want to know the code? You want to know the secret.

David Gardner: Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: Make sure that all of the world's rewards the fame, the fortune, all of it, is dedicated to lifting other people up and bringing them together.

David Gardner: That's great. I love it and a supplemental, great quote you've made me think of is that if you just keep telling the truth and being authentic, you don't have to have a good memory. [laughs] I think these are all words to live by. The Motley Fool's purpose statement, Arthur is to make the world smarter, happier and richer. I don't know if you know that, but it keys into so much of your work so I'm glad that on Day 1 on August of 1994 on our AOL site, before the web existed, we said to educate, to amuse and to enrich and we've always thought of that middle piece that amuse as the happier. These things are very connected to us. Does the research show that a richer country is happier and maybe that as a country gets richer, it gets smarter?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. These are complicated questions and they have everything to do not just with money but also with values. Here's the key thing, St. Tom's Aquinas the Great Philosopher from 1265, of paraphrasing Aristotle by the way, he said that people have idols. Everybody has at least one idol and there are four basic idols that people tend to follow. Money, power, pleasure and fame. Those are the big four. Now, he didn't say they're bad. He said that they can be misused if they're worshiped per se. In other words, if your goal in life is money, you're going to wind up being really frustrated. However, if it's a way station toward something that you want more and those really good four goals can bring you true happiness. Those are faith and family and friendship and work that serves other people. Those idols, they can be used for great good but we can't stop there. We shouldn't stop there. People really should work for their prosperity. They should make very smart investment decisions. We should work for a country with a free enterprise system that has opportunity for everybody. It's so critically important, but not because of the money per se rather so that we have the security to be able to pursue the endeavors that bring true happiness which are involved in love and family life, in the pursuit of our faith or philosophy and friendship and in creating an economy where people have a free labor market and they can pursue their passions so that they can earn their success and serve other people. That's what economic growth is all about. That's why what you're doing really can add to gross national happiness but not if we pop on money per se.

David Gardner: I love it. Thank you for that. We've always said smarter, happier and richer never won without the other two. Never two without the third. It's the connection of the three. It's that then diagram nexus point where we try to live. If there were a happiness Olympics, which country do you think would win the gold these days? Maybe the silver, maybe the bronze?

Arthur Brooks: That's an interesting question because you basically, have two basic sets of nations in the world. You have those that are getting happier and you have those that are stagnating into getting unhappier. The ones that are stagnating getting unhappier by all rights should be the happiest countries. These are the OECD developed nations. United States, Western Europe, etc. The countries that are getting a lot happier are the ones that are in a process of development and the reason is this, one of the great secrets to getting happier is making progress in your life. This is the thing, it's funny when most people listening to us, they've gone on a diet in their life and one of the things that you know is that it's actually pretty easy to take the pounds off, but it's almost impossible to keep them off. Now, the reason for that is every day you get a little reward when you don't eat the things that you like. The scale goes down and that's an enormous psychological reward. But then when you hit your goal, the reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life, [laughs] congratulations. [laughs] That's a huge problem. That's called the arrival fallacy, that when I get there, I'm going to be really happy. When you're making progress, you really, really like it. That's one of the reasons that country is in a process of development, even when they're still relatively poor, can be quite happy because life is getting better every single year. This is something that we haven't been able to achieve very successfully in places like the United States. We're finding that happiness is actually in decline. We have a lot of really bad happiness hygiene. We're paying attention to a lot of things like politics and polarization and the news and all of these things, social media, which we're just fiddling while our happiness is burning. We need to be paying attention to what really matters, which is our love and our relationships, and our faith, and serving each other. When we actually do that, then there's a reason to go to work, then there's a reason to check your portfolio. Then there's a reason to actually earn the money in the first place, and then at that point, not only would we be winning the Happiness Olympics, but we'd be making the greatest progress toward holding that lead for the rest of time.

David Gardner: I love it. Now, I don't want to pin you down too hard, Arthur, but will you please either give a gold, a silver, or a bronze to one country, just so I can check my box and feel like that was a question worth asking.

Arthur Brooks: Now, here's the problem. Here's the reason I can't. [laughs]. I want to answer it, Dave, I promise you but I can't. If you go to the United Nations, they'll give you an answer. It's like Denmark. [laughs]. Why? Well, because they have all of these happiness surveys and they compare countries. Now, here's how they do it. They go to 1,000 people in each country, more or less, and they say, how happy are you about your life? Then they take the average and they compare the average between countries. Now, that's crazy when you think about it. That'd be like going to a bunch of countries and saying how much do you like your music? Then saying who has the best music on the basis of that? [laughs]. It doesn't make sense. It's different standards. Literally, it's a different word that has different cultural connotations in different places.

David Gardner: Yeah, I see that.

Arthur Brooks: You can't compare countries, that's the problem. Mexico and their conception of happiness and where they are just can't be compared with Iceland. Man, I wish we could, but we can't do it.

David Gardner: I get it. I will say before we leave the Olympics, I might have read this in one of your books, but this is, I think it's a truism and it may or may not have come from you but it's often been pointed out that if you look at the three people standing on the podium as the flags go up, the music plays at the Olympics, the gold medal winner is often either completely exhausted or crying. The silver medal winner is the least happy person because they're like, I could have had gold. But the bronze medal winner is smiling because they're like I got up here.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, there's a ton of science behind this theory. [laughs]. There's a ton of science on it. The secret is go for the bronze. That's the secret.

David Gardner: [laughs] That's the key takeaway.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. Well, the reason for that is actually two-fold. Saying I'm not going to be happy unless I win the gold is the secret to an unhappy life, misery. Part of the reason is because even if you have the gold, then there's only one direction to go.

David Gardner: Yeah, you're right.

Arthur Brooks: Then you can't make any more progress, and that violates the progress principle. The problem with silver is that you compare yourself to one person, gold. If you're bronze, there's progress that you can make and you compare yourself to all the other losers. [laughs]. Now, the unhappiest person in the world is Number 4 who's not on podium at all.

David Gardner: [laughs] Oh, it's such a good point. Well, speaking of Harvard, your Harvard colleague Steven Pinker has written a bit about happiness too over the years. He joined me on Rule Breaker Investing a few years back. We were discussing his book, Enlightenment Now. I want to quote him here from that book and just get your take, and I quote, "An implication of the circumscribed role of happiness in human psychology is that the goal of progress cannot be to increase happiness indefinitely in the hope that more and more people will become more and more euphoric. But there is plenty of unhappiness that can be reduced and no limit as to how meaningful our lives can become." End of quote.

Arthur Brooks: Steve's a genius and there's a lot in that. There's a lot, as they say, to unpack. There's a couple of things to think about. Now, to begin with his conception of what happiness is, is the feeling definition. We've already dispensed with the feeling definition.

David Gardner: Okay.

Arthur Brooks: It's absolutely the case that we shouldn't try to feel happier and happier, and happier.

David Gardner: We want our Harvard professors disagreeing with each other. That's what academia is for, right? Sibley.

Arthur Brooks: No, Steve is awesome. Steve's great. Steve and I actually sit in the same academic council at Harvard on academic freedom. There are 100 of our senior professors at Harvard that are working from [inaudible] and they're super important. Any place he goes, I know it's a good thing to do. The secret to success at Harvard is you follow Steve around. [laughs] If Steve eats a carrot, eat a carrot. That's the first thing to think about. But the broader point that he's making is really important, which is that one of the ways that you can create better well being is by trying to lower the misery that's around us. This is one of the things that a lot of people, not just for society, a lot of us as individuals. In this book, Build the Life You Want, how to build the life you want that Oprah and I put together, one of the things that we have in there is a self test to see whether or not your challenge in life is that you need greater happy sets of emotions or that the intensity of your negative emotions is too high. Now, what we find is there are four groups of people across the population. There's people who have intense positive and intense negative emotions. Those are called mad scientists. You have people who have high positive and low negative emotions. Those are cheerleaders. These are equal quarters in a population. You have high negative and low positive. Those are the poets. Then you have the low negative and the low positive, the low affect people, and those are the judges. Now, the world needs all four of these things, but all of us need to understand which we are.

David Gardner: I'm speaking to a mad scientist, right?

Arthur Brooks: I'm a super mad science.

David Gardner: Keep going. I just wanted to be clear, have our cards on the table. I think I'm probably also a mad scientist.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, I bet you are.

David Gardner: This is dangerous. Two of us talking to each other.

Arthur Brooks: This is combustible [laughs]. Now, what's really dangerous is if you marry a mad scientist, because if your wife is a mad scientist, she is not going to be hammer and tongs all the time. [laughs]. Actually, you know what? Worse is two cheerleaders because cheerleaders, they can't see threats. Their biggest weakness is that you give high positive and low negative, then you have a real weakness, a real a blind spot with threats in your environment. When two cheerleaders get married, they can't actually see the threats. You know what they do? They spend all the money and go bankrupt, because there's nobody going, we better save for a rainy day here. They don't subscribe to the Motley Fool.

David Gardner: I love the money application at this point. I do want to correct myself, I do think I'm actually a cheerleader. I wish I were a mad scientist in some ways, but I'm definitely somebody who doesn't see or look for downsides and doesn't think too much about that, so I do think I'm a pretty avid cheerleader. I'm definitely not married 30 plus years myself to a cheerleader. Would you briefly share your own marital pairing?

Arthur Brooks: My wife is a cheerleader. She's a cheerleader bordering on mad scientist but she has much lower negative affect than I do.

David Gardner: Well, who doesn't love a personality test? Everybody wants to take one and I'm glad it's packed right there in the book.

Arthur Brooks: It's right there. It's called the PANAS test, the positive affect negative effect series. Back to Steve Pinker though. Steve says that what we should be working on is lowering the negative affect in society, lowering the misery in society because there is a lot, and that's what you can do with money. Money is really good for lowering unhappiness. It's terrible for raising happiness. When the government says, I'm going to make you happier, watch your wallet because the bad thing is about to come. You're about to get taxed like crazy for a dumb program. What you really want is public policy makers that are dedicated to reducing the sources of misery. What are the sources of misery? Loneliness, unemployment, food insecurity, lack of healthcare. Now, I'm not saying how you should do it. I'm a big capitalist. I'm really into the free market system. I prefer free market systems but I understand that the markets fail sometimes, and that's why we have a public policy. There's another point that's really interesting about this. People say, does money by happiness? The truth is individually, money lowers unhappiness when you don't have very much of it. Up to $75,000, $80,000, $100,000, you will actually get past the sources of avoidable misery in your life. The problem is, that's usually when you're young, and then you get into a mental pattern of thinking that if I get more money, I'm going to feel better. When I was a kid, when I was in my early 20s and I was a musician, I was poor, I didn't have healthcare, I didn't go to the dentist for six years, and I needed to go to the dentist. Now, of course, I will admit that there wasn't a day that I didn't go without cigarettes. I guess it was priorities, but anyway. Don't worry. I quit many decades ago. But the point is, when I was 25, I finally had enough money. I went to the dentist. I filled a bunch of cavities, and I felt way better, and I remember concluding, money buys happiness. No, I didn't get the sums right. Money had lowered my unhappiness. That happens to everybody. Now, when people get to the point where they've defrayed all of these sources of unhappiness in their life, they keep thinking that more and more money is going to make them feel better, and they can't figure out why it doesn't work. It doesn't work because you got past the threshold, but there are a lot of people in our society that we can do that for, and that's what Steve's talking about.

David Gardner: Fantastic. Thank you for that. I also recognize maybe the work of Teresa Amabile, if I'm pronouncing her name right, because she wrote the Progress Principle, and you're talking about the importance of making a little bit of progress every day. She's also a Harvard prof. You all are loaded up there in Cambridge, Massachusetts with happiness and progress freaks.

Arthur Brooks: That's why the aliens are coming here, Dave.

David Gardner: I knew there was a reason.

Arthur Brooks: I think that there's aliens on the faculty already.

David Gardner: I can't wait to see the streaming series. I had initially intended our discussion to focus on the wonderful lessons from your 2019 book, Arthur, which was entitled Love Your Enemies for understandable reasons. Given that Build the Life You Want debuts in bookstores and on Amazon this week, we refocus the conversation. But if you're open to speaking about the powerful insights you provided in Love Your Enemies, I'd love to mix in a little of that right now.

Arthur Brooks: Sure, absolutely. Love Your Enemies is obviously something I care very deeply about. Even the book we were talking about, Build the Life You Want, really the secret is love more, love is the secret. But the hardest kind of love is to love your enemies and the most transgressive message really in the history of our society is that which is contained all over every spiritual tradition. But quoting the New Testament of the Christian Bible. You have heard to love your friends and hate your enemies. But today, I give you a new commandment, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. That weird little teaching which you find in Hinduism, and Buddhism, and Judaism, and Islam, and you name it, if you follow it, it's going to change your life, but it's unbelievably hard.

David Gardner: Well, in Love Your Enemies, Arthur, you assert that no matter which side of the political divide that we find ourselves in, and even though I'm a Washington DC native, I don't have much interest in picking sides, I prefer the private sector to the public sector, I think you might as well, and I find myself with many other people in the oft-ignored political center. But no matter which side of the political divide someone might be on, you say that a single problem, a single I think I might even say evil, a single evil, perhaps you would too, is the contempt that each side harbors for the other. Contempt. Would you briefly define that word for us? Redefine in the context of America here in 2023.

Arthur Brooks: Yes, sure. Philosophers call contempt the conviction of the worthlessness of another person. You're convicted that somebody is worthless, that's contempt. Now, neurophysiologically, here's contempt. There's four negative emotions that your limbic system, basic emotions that they produce. Anger, sadness, disgust, and fear. Those are the big four. When you mix them together, you have tons of combinations. Anger is a hot emotion. It says, I care, I want you to change. Disgust is a cold emotion. Anger is largely produced in the amygdala of the brain, disgust in the insular cortex of the brain. Literally different parts of the limbic system of the brain. That's a cold emotion that says get rid of it. When you mix disgust and anger, that's contempt. Contempt is this hot, cold emotion that says, I hate what that person is doing, so therefore, I'm going to cast them out into outer darkness because they're completely worthless. This is a true expression of hate. That's what hate actually looks like. Now, the problem is, it's become the vernacular of politics. If you look at any late-night cable, pundit show, if you listen to most of your favorite politicians on the right or the left, they're not your favorites. But they come from the 5% fringe of populism and polarization. It's pure contempt all the time. I love this country, but then they hate this country because they're stupid and evil, that's the pure language of contempt. What they're trying to do, these are dark triad personalities that are manipulating us. They have a culture and they're conscripting us, they're drafting us as soldiers into their culture war by trying to hijack the amygdala and insular cortices of our brain.

David Gardner: Strong words, and from somebody who understands the science of it. I so appreciate that Arthur, I'm going to quote you from a quick passage in your book. Just would love to have you react to this quote. "You might be getting the impression that this is yet another one of those books calling for more civility in our political discourse and tolerance of differing points of view. It isn't. Those standards are pitifully low. Don't believe it, tell people my spouse and I are civil to each other and they'll tell you to get counseling. Or say my coworkers tolerate me, and they'll ask you how your job search is going. I want something more radical and subversive than civility and tolerance, something that speaks to my heart's desire." The first word in this book's title, you've already said it, but I'd love to hear some more on it, love.

Arthur Brooks: Love, baby. Now I know people are listening going, yeah, great. Thanks, Brooks. Mr. Hippie. It's like, what are you? John Lennon? No. The problem is people don't understand love. People don't understand happiness, they think it's a feeling. People don't understand love because they think that's a feeling too. Love is not a feeling. To like is a feeling, to love is a commitment and an act of will. To love according to Aristotle and all of the even medieval philosophers who looked at this is to will the good of another as other. Think about this.

David Gardner: Love it.

Arthur Brooks: If you love somebody, it doesn't mean you like them, it doesn't mean you approve of them, it means you will their good and you've decided to do so. That's what love really is. Love is not for weak people, love is for strong people. You know what's for weak people, contempt and hatred, that's for weak people. We're weakening as a country. One of the reasons that our happiness is falling is because we're falling into these patterns of contempt and hatred which just makes us weak, it makes us morally weak, and ultimately, it weakens our ability to get happier and more prosperous and free.

David Gardner: This book came out, this particular one, again, not the brand new book, Build the Life You Want, which is out this week, buy it on Amazon, that's what I do, I love e-books, I love Kindling up my highlights and sending them to Readwise where they stay with me forever. But that's a separate topic another time. But this book, Love Your Enemies, Arthur, you wrote it in 2019. It was published, I think, in 2019. That means you probably wrote it in '18. You were probably thinking about it, observing since '16 or maybe since, I don't know, 30 years before that because we're about the same age. But I'm curious, how do you score us in the four years since the launch of that book?

Arthur Brooks: Love Your Enemies was never intended to be an overnight solution. It was never intended to be a dramatic one-weird Internet trick. [laughs] Here's one weird trick to lose belly, fat, love your enemies. It's not like that, it doesn't work. By the way, the one weird trick on the Internet which is the don't eat grapes or something, that doesn't work either, that's all nonsense. They're going to steal from you. This is the long-term play, this is a way of life. That's how the Buddha talked about the idea, this is how Jesus Christ talked about the idea that this is a way of life deciding to love your enemy. When I wrote that book, I really had to offer it up and say, what do I want? Well, you know what, I want, Democrats and Republicans to figure out something they can agree on, so they don't keep screwing up our country through the sheer hatred and contempt that they have. I want political parties and public policymakers and people in neighborhood to say, I sure would like to know if somebody disagrees with me, why? Maybe there's something I can learn from that. I would really love that. But the truth is, I'm not naive, I wasn't born yesterday. Look, I was the president of the American Enterprise Institute for 11 years. I have suffered a great deal in Washington, DC. I know how these things work, but you've got to throw it out there.

You actually have to say what winning looks like under the circumstances, and winning for our country, for humanity is really all about love. The hardest kind of love is to love our enemies and if we want to find our way out of the current morass, which I don't, look, 93% of Americans say that they hate how divided we become as a country, 93% the 7% who don't hate it are in charge. That's a huge problem, those are the generals in the obnoxious culture war that we've got around us. We need to actually have a little mutiny and that's a mutiny of love and loving our enemies. When we do that by the way, I do a lot of work with the Dalai Lama. I've been working with the Dalai Lama for the last 11 years. I've written with him and done a lot of conferences with him. I saw him as recently as this March, and he always says, I destroy my enemies when I love my enemies, they become my friends and then I said, why do you want to destroy your enemies? He said, no, that's not the point. The point is I destroyed the illusion that they were my enemies in the first place. Now, you do have real enemies, but there's no harm in loving them too. Because the innocent bystanders who are watching the culture war around you, they're going to say, I like the loving, reasonable guy more than the hateful, contemptuous guy. Then you win. You still win.

David Gardner: I love it, and I vote for it. I'm trying to live it. I think a lot of your fans are too, and we're grateful for your leadership in that regard. I am someone who in my own small way, tries to unite every day. Tries to bring us together to see our common interest and work toward good and even something like the stock market. It's pitting two people on opposite sides of the table of a trade. It's effectively uniting buyers with sellers, and both are satisfactorily choosing into the transaction from opposite sides. Business when done right as conscious capitalism, creates a win win win for customers, employers, partners, and suppliers, and shareholders win. The nature of politics this is question seems to be win-lose. Then maybe four or eight years later, either lose, win. Does it have to be that way? Is that the system?

Arthur Brooks: It doesn't have to be that way. Now I realize that if you go to a football game or a congressional election, you're going.

David Gardner: Zero-sum.

Arthur Brooks: It's going to be zero-sum to a certain extent. But it shouldn't even be then. Because the losing team, the New England Patriots, when they lose to the Seattle Seahawks, [laughs] I hope you know when that happens. I still want the New England Patriots to say that was a good game. The fans were enriched. We made a bunch of money playing that game and we learned a better strategy from learning that game.

David Gardner: Well said.

Arthur Brooks: That's not a win, lose, that's a win more and win a little bit less transaction. All transactions should be like that in politics as well. Furthermore, when should it really not be win-lose? When you're dealing with somebody with whom you disagree. In business, when you're negotiating, you don't want to take everything off the negotiating table and screw the other guy, ordinarily, because unless you want to have a one-off transaction with that guy [laughs]. On the contrary, you want that guy to walk away from the table. That was awesome. I love working with that guy. That's why you always work to make sure that the other person is happy too, and that's what we should be doing more than politics. When I look at what the Republicans and Democrats are doing in Washington today, the biggest mistake that the demagogic, populist politicians are making is if I don't get 100% that means I've lost. If I don't get 100% of what I want, that means vote me out because I haven't stood up for your interests. That's crazy. That's just bad business and it's completely unnecessary. We should be looking in the Congress, we should be looking at the President of the United States. He should be saying, I want to make sure that I want more of these left-wing things than the right-wing things. But I don't want all the right-wingers to still feel like they're getting screwed every single day.

David Gardner: Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: That's bad politics, that's bad policy, and it's disordered morally, and that's the way our country's gone.

David Gardner: There's a little bit of history you call toward the end of the book, you call out in 1960. I'm quoting you again, only 5% of Americans said they would be displeased if their child married someone from the other political party. By 2010, that would be 50 years later, the number had moved from 5% to 40% and no doubt has risen from, there you go on. We've become far removed, indeed, from Thomas Jefferson's admonition that, ''a difference in politics should never be permitted to enter into social intercourse or to disturb its friendships, its charities or justice end.''

Arthur Brooks: No, I mean, I couldn't agree more. But the real interesting question is why has that happened? You know, what has actually happened along the way? Some people can say because the right wing is more right wing and the left wing is more left wing, and so there's bigger differences between members of the other party. I get that. There's no more Dixiecrats, there's no more blue-dog Republicans or blue-dog Democrats. What are we talking about? We're talking about Rockefeller Republicans. There's no more of that stuff going on. I get it. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that we have a fading sense of the real metaphysical in our lives, the transcendent in our lives. You know this increase in the importance of politics is totally contemporaneous with the fact that religious and spiritual activity has been in the decline. Sacrosanct is very important. We are made for a sense of the metaphysical and the transcendent. When we stop getting it from nutritious ends, from good stuff, and look, you don't have to be like I'm a practicing Christian, It's the most important thing in my life. But I'm a social scientist and trust me, you can get the benefits not from being a Catholic, [laughs] I recommend it, but you can also get it from reading the Stoic philosophers for ethical principles, or adopting a meditation practice. With loving-kindness meditation, you'll get the same benefits from it because you will be transcendent to your own here and now. Which is so boring and which is so tedious. But if you don't have a practice like that, you're going to look for, meaning you're going to look for the sacrosanct elsewhere and there's gonna be some snake oil salesman in Washington, DC. Saying that you're going to understand your identity, you're going to identify the enemy. I'm going to give you a series of rituals and secret language. If you follow my political point of view, and that's what's happening in America, Politics has become religion to people.

David Gardner: If I were an enemy of the United States, I'd be cheering this on all out, and that's something I often think about. Thank you for your eloquence and again, your thought leadership here. At the end of that book, Arthur, you say, I just reduced this whole book to a few lessons which you do. But you go on to say, want it even simpler. Go find someone with whom you disagree. Listen thoughtfully and treat him or her with respect and love. The rest will flow naturally from their end quote. That's basically something that anyone can take away. Anyone from this conversation can take away and use, put into real practice in life for everybody's happiness.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. It's a funny thing. These days I do a lot of work because I'm teaching MBA students the science of happiness. One of the things they're most interested in in my happiness class is the neuroscience of falling and staying in love. It's what they want to know, I get it. I was 28 years old at one point myself and that's all I cared about in my '20s as well. Was, finding the love of my life and keeping the love of my life. The problem is, it's getting harder and harder and harder. Because dating apps, they sort on compatibility. Compatibility is death for your relationship, you need difference. All kinds of difference. If you want to have an exciting relationship in which you have. Ways that you can fill each other's gaps in which you can complete each other. But what you find is with the technology that it doesn't sort of on complementary. Matchmakers will say this person fits really nicely with that person, not because they're the same, not because they look like siblings. That's not hot, because [laughs] they look different than each other. They've got a repertoire. You find that the happiest marriages are often between one introvert and one extrovert, as very commonly the happiest marriages that we find. But the dating apps, basically, they say, what's important to you? We're so vain that we say, well, what's important to me, my politics and my taste in music and what I like to eat. The cities that I think are cool Austin, Texas, which is apparently a personality now or something [laughs] and you put it in your dating profile and you've ruled out people who are different than you. This is really critical because that makes it harder and harder and harder for you to see people who are different and literally love people who are different.

David Gardner: I would think in time, artificial intelligence, if it's truly intelligent, would be able to start discovering really interesting new connections and possibilities. Especially if powered up by some of the research and thinking that you're smacking down here this week on the podcast.

Arthur Brooks: I think so. I think that ultimately what they're going to find is it will say here are the most successful relationships and here's actually how we can back out the way that you should meet who we should be looking for. But we have a tendency to look in the mirror and say that's my perfect wife. By looking in the mirror, and I want somebody who's really smoking hot, but I want somebody who, God knows, doesn't vote Republican or whatever happens to be. But what happens is I suggest to my students that they take certain areas like politics out of their political profile. They say, and they make a deal with the people they're going to go out and a date with that we will not talk about politics until at least the fifth date if we get there.

David Gardner: Fantastic.

Arthur Brooks: Why? Because that instigates the neuro-chemical cascade of falling in love and by the time you get to a fifth date, if you get to one, you will care a lot less about somebody else's political point of view.

David Gardner: I read in the wonderful book, The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker about parties. I've since been to one where you're not allowed to say anything other than your first name and nothing about what you do for the first 2 hours of the gathering. Then maybe over desert, you reveal. I'm actually, I'm Arthur Brooks, and Yeah. I just wrote a book with Oprah and I teach at Harvard. You wait, that was, you were just Arthur to us the first two hours. I've experienced that. It's a great feeling. I really appreciate that advice. I love that one of the most popular things learned by Harvard MBAs is relationship advice from the good Dr. That's fun to hear. We're going to start running out of time. Arthur, let me ask you before we go to buy, seller hold. Our signature game to close. Do you invest in individual stocks? Are you a stock market person at all? What's your approach to money?

Arthur Brooks: I am an efficient markets guy. I am an economist by training. My degrees and graduate degrees are in applied microeconomics, but markets are something that I recognize, what I don't know. I understand that if I have a lot less knowledge and markets are relatively efficient, it's a lot better that I have two choices. Get more educated or get a guy. [laughs] Those sort of the two strategies. Given the fact that I'm specializing in something besides this, I have a guy, and I trust my guy. My guys make smart decisions and he makes prudent decisions. He takes my emotions out of the equation. That's how I do it. Now I have done it a little bit with my kids.

David Gardner: Good.

Arthur Brooks: Because my kids, I want them to understand how this thing works. They set up their brokerage accounts and they'll say, and we'll look at a little of an analysis on these things, and the kids will make their decisions and then they'll lose their butts. Then they understand that they're not so good at picking stocks.

David Gardner: I wouldn't put it past them. They're pretty bright kids. Plus I think kids are getting smarter. But I'm getting ahead of myself because we're about to play, buy, sell, or hold. Arthur Brooks, these are things that are not stocks, but I'm asking you, if they were, would you be buying, selling, or holding a lightning round? Let's get started. Let's start with Arthur, buy, sell, or hold kids these days.

Arthur Brooks: Buy. Get to all your money. Buy.

David Gardner: Why?

Arthur Brooks: Because children will bring you, meaning they won't always bring you enjoyment, especially when they're teenagers. But they will bring you, meaning, this is a critically important thing for people to understand. I've seen this again and again and again in my data. The media have lied to us about this. That somehow it will take away your opportunities. That somehow, especially for women, that it will lower your sense of well-being and meaning. It's wrong. It's absolutely wrong for both women and men. Buy.

David Gardner: Buy, sell, or hold hard and fast distinctions around generations like millennials and Gen Z.

Arthur Brooks: Well, this is age not generation. We have a tend, we always mistake age and generation. I used to do work on symphony orchestra economics because I was an old symphony orchestra player, so I became an economist so I studied symphony orchestras. [laughs] People are always going like we're doomed. The audience is dying. Well, how do you know? Because they're all old. Well, guess what? They're going to die but then there's going to be new old people and they're going to like classical music.  It's age not generation. There are, look, I mean my friend Jean Twenge he teaches that IG stuff with Jonathan Haidt. There are particular circumstances. We know that millennials and Gen Z are a lot more oriented toward identity politics. But most of the phenomena that we see are age not generation.

David Gardner: Thank you. Next one buy seller hold distance learning.

Arthur Brooks: Buy. God knows, I should say, buy, because I got my bachelor's degree by distance learning. If I were telling you right now, sell, it would actually reflect relatively poorly on my own education. But the truth of the matter is we need more opportunities in our society and the way that we're going to do that is by figuring out all creative and new ways to deliver educational opportunity to people at the margins of society and in non traditional circumstances. I'm about opportunity all day long. By.

David Gardner: It's related to distance learning but it's different. Arthur Brooks by seller hold remote work these days. You're allowed to hold something. You don't always have to be a buyer or a seller.

Arthur Brooks: I know. I got to sell the hate males coming in, [laughs] The Motley Fool. Don't blame the Motley Fools. This is Parks talking here and the reason is because I've seen the data and I get it how convenient it is. It's made me phenomenally productive too. I'm able to give a speech in Milan when I'm in Denver, and it's just great. Plus, I'm able to keep up with all classes and do office hours when I'm on the road. It's so incredibly convenient. But I see what's happened to loneliness in this country. I have never seen a downdraft and average happiness in the United States like I've seen since the beginning of the Corona virus epidemic and it hasn't come back because people haven't gone back in very large numbers across large parts of the economy, especially among professionals under 30. The key thing is basically this, when you're lonely, your executive centers will lie to you in your brain. They'll tell you, you know what you need? You need to curl up on the couch with a fuzzy blanket, eating ice cream and watching Netflix. When the truth of the matter is you need to call a friend, go get some sunshine, get out your bike. That's what you actually need. What's happening to us is that for the sake of the convenience, which is real and true, and for some people it is really really wonderful, we've made a whole lot of sacrifices that are not leading us to a good place in this country.

David Gardner: Strong sell. I hear you, thank you for that. Let me ask you, before we do our last two. You are often thinking about our country, America. You were in charge of the American Enterprise Institute. You are at America's oldest, or is it William and Murray University? You think a lot about our country. I'm curious because I have to some and a lot of us who work for organizations do the core values for that organization. They're like, what do we stand for? What is this program? What does this for profit company stand for? I'm curious, Arthur, because sometimes I'd like to ask, and I don't intend the question to be rhetorical. In this case, I hope it won't be. But if you were to come up with a few of the core values that you believe we should hold together as Americans, what core values occur to you?

Arthur Brooks: The core values that we need to remember is that we're all sisters and brothers. That we all have the fundamentally the same set of challenges and emotions, and that when we're pushing somebody else down, fundamentally we're pushing ourselves down. We need the sense of solidarity in which we understand that your happiness is my happiness as well. In other words, we need a mission value of lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love. That is the privilege and obligation of people in a good society.

David Gardner: Thank you. Last two, buy, seller hold, winning an argument.

Arthur Brooks: [laughs] That's a hold. Because the truth of the matter is that when you win, let's say, Dale Carnegie used to say, used to have this little poem you used to read, I know you know it. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. If you win an argument and somebody else loses, you have also lost. If you win an argument and you've persuaded somebody else, you have won. It depends on the context I got to hold that because what I do want to do, is I want to win arguments and I want other people to win arguments with me because we've used the principle of loving persuasion.

David Gardner: Winning an argument is human, it's civil, it's not something to avoid. Arguments are not things to avoid. As spouses, as countries, as organizations, we need to have internal conflict and arguments, otherwise, we're not being real. We just need to learn how to handle them.

Arthur Brooks: That's right. No, we don't need to disagree less. We need to disagree better. That's the truth in every couple that's on the rocks, and America is like an enormous couple on the rocks. That's what we need in this country.

David Gardner: Disagree better. Last one for you. Buy, seller hold. I just have to ask this. I don't even know what you're going to think. Buy seller hold, college football.

Arthur Brooks: I'll buy it. It's fun. It's awesome. Here's the thing, I'm not an expert in college football, but if it comes on TV, I'm hooked. I can see two colleges I've never heard of and I want to watch. I want to watch because it's exciting and everybody's having a good time and people are not suffering. That's as close as you can get the good, clean fun in modern society. I'm buying.

David Gardner: Any truth of the rumor that Harvard is being coated by the big 10.

Arthur Brooks: I don't know. That's a good question. It's like, boy, is that ever internal politics. I'll ask the president. 

David Gardner: Arthur. Thank you. You've been most gracious with your insights and your time, and it was a delight to spend time one fool to another. Congratulations on the publication of Build the Life you Want with a Brooks and O Winfrey Carpet DM. Go get them.

Arthur Brooks: Right on, man. Thank you, David. Thank you very much, and thanks to everybody for listening.

David Gardner: Well, food for thought. Richly served up by my guest star this week Arthur Brooks, in our ongoing quest to get smarter, happier and richer together. Now I'm talking about you and me and never just one without the other two. Smarter, happier and richer together. I think there's quite a lot to reflect on from this week's podcast. I would say do reflect some in the week ahead. True understanding wrote leadership author, great Warren Bennett. True understanding comes from reflecting on your experience. I would say after this week's podcast, do and then join me next week for our latest newest episode of the Market Cap Game Show. Yeah, it only comes around four times a year. It's special like that and next week is one of those weeks. In the meantime, get happier out there. Carpet DM, even if it just involves reducing some unhappiness your own or someone else's. Fool on.