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- [Narrator] Welcome to the Wiener Conference Call series, featuring leading experts from Harvard Kennedy School who answer questions from alumni and friends on public policy and current events.

- Hello, welcome. I think people are still gathering. I am Ariadne Valsamis from the Office of Alumni Relations and Resource Development, and it's an incredible honor to welcome you to this Wiener Conference Call. I want to make sure to thank Dr. Malcolm Wiener and his wife, Carolyn, and their family, who champion the Kennedy School in so many ways, this call being one of the premier ones. Thank you. Before I introduce our expert for today, I wanna remind you this call is being reported. It will be posted on the Kennedy School's website and on our YouTube page, and if you would like to turn on the feature that provides real-time transcription of the audio, you can use the meeting controls toolbar in the bottom here of your Zoom screen and click on show captions. And for the best view of our speaker, please click speaker view at the top right of your Zoom window. And now it's my great honor to note that we are joined by Professor Arthur Brooks, the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership. He's the author of multiple best-selling books, including most recently, and I'll try to get it in your camera, I'm not succeeding, but this wonderful book, which is "Build the Life You Want," "The Art and Science of Getting Happier," which he recently co-authored with Oprah Winfrey. It's a treasure. Before joining the Kennedy School's faculty, Professor Brooks led the American Enterprise Institute for 10 years, and today he will share his expertise about how to cultivate happiness, and we've asked him especially to address this during the U.S. election season and in a time of incredible polarization and division in our nation's political discourse. We're very fortunate that he's agreed to share his work today with the Kennedy School's alumni and friends. Professor Brooks.

- Thank you, Ariadne, and thanks to all of you for joining us here today. I see that we've got a little under 100 people here that are really central to the Kennedy School's mission of propagating our mission, so many of you are supporters of the school. Thank you so much to the Wiener family for making this possible and for the spirit that Malcolm Wiener has brought to all the work that we do here. It's the best that we are able to do is to think about public policy in the way that Malcolm Wiener has propagated it over the course of his distinguished career, and thanks to all of you for being supporters of what we do. I mean, many of you are donors to the Kennedy School's mission and all the things I'm gonna be talking about today, but all of my colleagues as well, we're so deeply grateful to be able to do this work. This is our life's mission, and it gets done because of you, so thank you very much. You know, the gratitude that we feel is really predominant over everything else. I want to talk today about my subject of expertise and what I do my work on in my lab at the Kennedy School, what I teach at both the Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, which is happiness. Now, when people ask me what I do for a living, I say I teach at the Kennedy School, and they say, oh, yeah, you're teaching economics or statistics, and I say, no, I teach happiness, and they think I'm lying. I mean, how could that be a subject of public policy and business expertise? But the truth is I do, and at the business school where I teach my big happiness seminar, I'll be starting, I'm teaching non-profit management at the Kennedy School right now, but my big happiness seminar on HBS starts in January, the end of January, and already I have 180 students enrolled. It's already maxed out. There's 400 in the waiting list, and there's even an illegal Zoom link they think I'm not aware of. Why? Because people want to be happier. The truth of the matter is that everybody actually wants that. My class is a science class. I'm a behavioral scientist. I teach neuroscience and behavioral science in the context of how we can get better at the skill of being happier people, and more importantly, as leaders, how we can help other people to lift themselves up in bonds of happiness and love. So, it sounds like I've got a kind of a freaked out '60s mission. What I have is a cutting-edge scientific agenda on how we can build a better life. Of course, that's what we're all about at the Kennedy School is a better life for more people. So let me talk a little bit about what happiness is and then how all of us can get more of it in a particularly difficult time, a.k.a this year with an election. Now, I've studied that an awful lot, so it's gonna be a case study in what I talk about in the science of happiness. And then I'm really looking forward to what's on your mind, the questions that you have, the comments that you have. You'll be able to do that through the chat. We'll be watching the chat. And also with the hands functions, we have enough people and that actually makes it the most efficient way to have a conversation. So, let's start off with really what I'm talking about here. On my first day of class at HBS, I say, okay, you had a hard time getting into the class. It's popular elective. You must know what happiness is. What's happiness? And then I make them define it, and they all get it wrong. Now, why? This is actually the problem. We all think we know what happiness is, but we can't quite define it. And so, the result is you can't pursue something you're not defining. Here's what they say. Happiness is how I feel when I'm with the people that I love or how I feel when I'm doing the things that I enjoy. And I said, that's beautiful. That's lovely. That's wrong. Happiness is not a feeling, which is incredibly good news. To say that happiness is a feeling is like saying that your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the Turkey. That's not right. Feelings are evidence of happiness. The smell of your Turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner. Now your Thanksgiving dinner is a tangible thing. Either it's a list of ingredients or dishes, or if you're kind of a nutrition nerd like me, it's just like any other meal or any other food, which is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Those are macro nutrients. That's not a very sexy way or sentimental way to be thinking about Thanksgiving, but it's literally true. Now, why do I make that metaphor? Because that's the same thing as happiness. Happiness is a combination of three elements. When we talk about the pursuit of happiness, we're really talking about pursuing three macro nutrients, behavioral macro nutrients. Here's what they are. You want to be a happier person. You need more enjoyment in your life, more satisfaction with your accomplishments, and you need more meaning in your existence. Satisfaction plus enjoyment plus meaning equals happiness. Each one of those areas has an enormous psychological and neuroscientific literature around it about how to get better at these things. And none of it's straightforward, which keeps me in business. The truth is, people think that enjoyment is pleasure. It isn't. Pleasure is a limbic animal phenomenon. Nothing wrong with it, but the pursuit of pleasure as a life goal never ends well. Why? Because it tends to lead to subjugation, to addiction, whereas enjoyment takes pleasure and adds people and memory such that it can be experienced in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the human C-suite of your brain, making it permanent and self-regulating. That's what enjoyment is. I talk with my students a lot about the fact that if there's something that you really, really love that gives you a lot of pleasure and that can be addictive, if you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong because you can't turn it into enjoyment without people and memory. Now, the second is satisfaction. Satisfaction is a very human, strange phenomenon in which we get joy from struggle. Only humans want to struggle for our accomplishments. My dog, Chucho, he's a very good boy, but he doesn't want to struggle for his accomplishments. No, no, no, no, no. He would eat lying down if he could. But I, on the other hand, don't get any sweetness from my accomplishments unless I work hard and sacrifice for them. That's a very human phenomenon. That's the reason that we teach our children to defer their gratification, not because it's just gonna lead them to be more successful economic actors, but because we want them to have a happier, more satisfying life. And if they can defer their gratification, their gratification becomes sweeter. That's why we tell our kids, don't eat before dinner. The truth is, we want them to suffer. We want them to be hungry when they get to the dinner table because then dinner's nice. That's one of the many examples. But of course, there are many other examples with this. Now, there are other things, weird things about satisfaction that I teach about. For example, mother nature imbues us with the intuition that if we get something that we really want, an accomplishment that we'll enjoy it forever, they'll get satisfaction that lasts. And of course, that's not true. Mick Jagger, that great scholar, he sings, I can't get no satisfaction, but I try, and I try, and I try. That's actually not right. You can get satisfaction, but you can't keep no satisfaction. And the reason is because your emotions are transient. Your emotions are nothing more than information about the outside world. And it has to change according to your circumstances. But mother nature doesn't let you know that when you get something that you really, really want, that that satisfaction is only gonna last for an hour or a day or a week or maybe a month. And then you'll be on to the next thing because you have to be ready. That's what your emotions are for, to give you approach and avoidance mechanisms so you can ascertain and act appropriately toward threats and opportunities. That's what the brain is for. Homeostasis is your emotional retrograde back to your equilibrium. That's what your brain is supposed to do, but you never figure that out. So one of the things that I wind up talking about with my students is the way to moderate that tendency to think your satisfaction will last and then being frustrated when it doesn't is not trying to get more and more and more and more and more, but learning how to want less and less and less and less. Your satisfaction is your haves divided by your wants. Don't work on the numerator for the rest of your life trying to have more. Work on the denominator where you are to want less. Now, if that sounds Buddhist to you, that's because it is, but it's also a Christian. I'm a Catholic, literally the most important thing in my life. And this is an ancient Christian teaching. And no matter what your philosophical tradition or religious tradition or lack thereof is, it includes that truth that you need to manage your wants more than your haves to get lasting and stable satisfaction. Third is meaning. Meaning is a hard one because I can go a long time without enjoyment and satisfaction. I'm a very self-disciplined person, but I can't go 10 minutes without meaning. And so, I'm working on the idea of meaning with my students constantly. The biggest crisis that we have in mental illness among the young is a lack of meaning. We talk about devices, and we talk about polarization, which we'll talk about in a minute, but the real problem is that young people are less and less likely to be able to define the meaning of their lives and are even less likely to be looking for that meaning. They're frittering away their time on work and devices in ways that doesn't actually lead to the sense of life's significance and coherence, and purpose. So, I have a series of tests on whether or not people have a meaning crisis in their life. And I have a series of exercises that I take my students. And by the way, that I take my adult children through as well to find meaning in their lives. That's happiness, enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning. Now onto the main topic today, which is happiness right now. One of the things that I find because I've been, I look at the data on happiness is that, you know, some pretty distressing things, for example, average happiness in the United States has been declining since about 1990. A little bit each year ticking down by about half a percentage point a year, but then there's storms, and the storms that are down drafts and happiness, they tend to happen in election years. There has not been an election where happiness is higher than usual. Every major election year, every four-year cycle, happiness is lower in America than it is on average. Now we're going downward, but then it's even farther downward. And this year is no exception. All of the data show that Americans don't like what's going on politically, don't like the arguments, don't like how divided we've become as a country. And the result is that we're frankly a little depressed about this. Now I'm not gonna make any political points at all because you all disagree. And that's great. That's kind of the truth of how democracy is supposed to work. We're not supposed to disagree less. The secret to becoming happier is disagreeing better. And that's what I want to talk about now. Now, what is the basis of much of the unhappiness that we have? I've written about this in my column. I have a weekly column in the Atlantic called "How to Build a Life." So, if you like what we're talking about here, you can read "The Science of Happiness" every Thursday morning if you subscribe to the Atlantic. And I think that you can get it for free through the Kennedy School, those of you who are part of our community. So, what is the basis of political unhappiness? And why do we see this downdraft in happiness for particularly people who are paying the most attention? This is actually, once again, a kind of a Buddhist concept. The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering. That's the first noble truth. It's called dukkha. And it has everything to do with the fact that we're attached to things. The second noble truth of Buddhism is that the source of our suffering, our dissatisfaction, this is the second truth is called samudaya. And it has to do with attachment to things. We're attached to things, and they don't satisfy us. Predominant among those things, according to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in our interactions, but many Buddhist teachers going back thousands of years, is attachment to our opinions. The more attached you are to your political opinions, the unhappier you're going to be when the conversations are about politics. That's just the case. In the same way that you're going to be more unhappy if you're really, really attached to your car and somebody scratches your car. You're gonna become an unhappy person. If you're not really that attached to your car and somebody scratches it, you're gonna say, yeah, it's a car. I got a scratch in it. But if you're really opinionated, you're watching Fox News or MSNBC for hours every single night, you're exchanging political articles on social media all day long. And somebody actually gets into a political discussion with you, and they disagree with you, you're going to be unhappy because samudaya. Because the Lord Buddha says your attachments are dragging you down and your predominant attachment is to your rightness, to your political opinion. You are the source of your suffering, is what the Buddha would say if you were alive today and listening to our political debates. Now, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm certainly not saying that I'm wrong because that never happens. The problem is the intensity of my attachment to my opinions, not my opinions themselves. Now, I've looked at this phenomenon over and over again in my study of happiness using databases like the General Social Survey, which is collected by the University of Chicago, a little-known university in the Midwest that tries to steal our students and never succeeds. According to the General Social Survey data, if you're somebody who says, I am very interested in politics, on average, your happiness will be eight percentage points lower than somebody who's not very interested in politics. That's controlling for all your demographics and your education and your awareness and your political affiliation and your religious observation and your age and all of it. Just at the margin, saying I'm very interested in politics will drag you down eight percentage points in the likelihood of saying that you're very happy about your life or eight percentage points up and saying, I'm not very happy about my life. If you watch one extra political news show per day, that on its face will bring down your happiness level by 6.1% of your happiness. That's the best way. If you're super interested in politics, that's one of the single best ways is picking at that little poison item every single day to lower your happiness. Now, I could explain the brain science about how dopamine comes when you actually satisfy the urge to hear that you're right, to watch something that's pugilistic about the person you think is the threat to democracy, to hear an insult, hearing the forbidden words about how terrible people who disagree with you are, that's gonna give you a little satisfaction, but you're gonna get unhappier. That's just the fact. Now, how does it actually degrade our quality of life, and what's the mechanism toward our unhappiness? It largely has to do with our relationships is the way that this works. For example, again, I'm quoting the Buddha a lot in this talk. I could quote Thomas Aquinas or Marcus Aurelius or Aristotle or anybody because they're all more or less saying the same thing, but the Buddha was asked one time, what's the problem with hatred? And he said, hatred is like picking up a hot coal to throw at your enemy. The person who's burned worst is you. Now, that's kind of an axiomatic idea, but it's absolutely true when it comes to the behavioral science data. Political outrage is satisfying momentarily, but ruins relationships and hurts you more than anybody else. Your political outrage hurts you the most because it isolates you. That's what the data are very clear in saying. Now, who's fomenting the political outrage? The answer is people who want you to hate, and who don't care if you're unhappy. That's called the two major political parties and all of the cable networks. They want you good and outraged. Why? Because that translates you into a political activist and a good consumer. When you hate somebody, somebody's profiting. They're profiting in votes. They're profiting in advertising dollars. They're profiting in subscribers into the publications that you look at. They're profiting from followers on social media. But the person who's not profiting is you, is the bottom line. Now, what is the result of this? Today, this very day, one in six Americans is not talking to a family member because of politics. My friends, that is insane. That is a huge problem that you're cutting. There's one reason to have a schism with a family member, that's abuse. Differences of political opinions, I'm sorry, they're not abuse. This has changed my life personally. I study happiness because I want to be happy. I'm a very selfish man. And this is the kind of information that's life-changing for me, quite frankly. My wife and I, we vote differently than our kids do. All three of my kids and their spouses vote differently than me and my wife. It's okay. Why? Because I've decided it's okay, right? They think we're crazy. My kids think that my wife and I were a bunch of freaked out hippies. They really do because of the way that we vote and the things that we say, and the whole thing. My wife and I privately, we say, kids these days, who raised these rotten kids? But you know what? It's not affecting our love because we've decided it's not going to. Don't give the outrage industrial complex the satisfaction of expressing and feeling the hate that they want you to feel so that you become a good consumer. That's point one. Point two, in the class that I teach at HBS, the most popular unit is called falling in love and staying in love. Of course, my average student is 28 years old. This is what they want. They want to fall in love and stay in love. And what you're finding is that young people today are less likely to fall in love. They're less likely to cohabitate. They're less likely to get married, and they're less likely to have kids than at any time since we've been keeping records. There's a lot that goes into this. Dating apps are a problem. The activism of our culture is a problem. There's a lot of problems that go into what we're seeing today. But one of the biggest problems that we see, particularly in election year is what we call political homophily. That's just a fancy way of saying that we've decided that we will not date across party lines. One of the most interesting things that I've seen of late is that 71% of registered Democrats in their 20s will not date a Republican. 41% of registered Republicans in their 20s will not date a Democrat. Now you're thinking to yourself, wait a second. 71% versus 41%. What's going on here? Does that mean that Republicans have lower standards? And the answer is yes. That's absolutely the case. And the reason is because most Democrats are women and most Republicans are men, and men have a lot more tolerance for differences in their dating, particularly on dating apps, than women do. That's always been the case across all of time. And there's evolutionary biologists are really interested in that phenomenon. But one way or the other, what that means is with that sort of asymmetry, 41% is too high, by the way. If you go back in time, you'll actually find in the 1960s, it was 8% of people would not date across party lines, right? That's about where it should be. I'd like to see zero, by the way. Lots and lots of love. I don't really care because that's what makes the world... This is the reason my kids think I'm a freaked-out hippie, by the way. Anyway, so that's a big problem because, particularly in election year, there's less love, less dating, less romance, less fun. What's the point of being in your 20s, my friends, to be outraged about politics? Are you kidding me? Life is short. We need to stop that. Okay. Parents are a problem too. 60% of parents today say they would not consent to their child marrying somebody across parties. That's craziness. Third, people avoid you when you're more political. You actually find that people who agree with you politically will say privately that they don't want to be around you if you're a highly political person. This comes from Gallup polling data. You become less popular and more obnoxious, the more interested you are and the more you're talking about politics, which means that you're losing friends and being avoided because you're talking about what you saw on Fox News or MSNBC last night. Fourth, you become ignorant. Really interesting new data show that the more partisan television you watch, the less knowledgeable you become about the facts. And it's equally true on right and left. I know you're thinking about the people on the other side. It's true for everybody. You'll find that people who watch more than two hours a day of highly partisan television know less about politics objectively than people who don't watch any television at all, who don't watch any news about politics at all. You're better off in complete ignorance than you are actually watching this when it actually comes to the level of knowledge, objective knowledge, you have about what's going on in the world. And that's not good for you. That's what it comes down to. I hope I've made the case. Now, underlying everything is the truth in my profession. Happiness is love. It just is. It's romantic love. It's love of the divine. It's love of your family. It's love of your friends. It's the love that you express toward everybody through your ordinary work. We have reams of data, but the data that matters the most is the truth that you've experienced in your lives. Happiness is love. And the way that we do politics today makes love harder. And that's the problem. That's what it comes down to. So, what are you gonna do? Let me give you some suggestions before we open it up, because that's really what matters. What can you do to militate against this in your life, in your family's life, in your community life, in the life of your loved ones? What can you do? Number one, get involved in things that matter at the local level as opposed to throwing a shoe at the television set. I have a great political scientist. He teaches over at Tufts on this side of the river. I wish we had him at Harvard. His name is Aidan Hirsch. And he shows that the greatest threat to citizenship is political involvement at the national level. People are substituting outrage about federal politics, about national politics. They're substituting that for getting involved in the local community and causes they care about. Get involved at the local level where you can make a difference as opposed to paying more attention to what's going on federally. That will make you happier, and it will make you more effective. Number two, ration your time. You don't need more than 15 minutes of political news a day. You're not going to learn anything. All you're doing is scratching poison ivy. When you look at political news over the course of the day, nothing happens. Do it first thing in the morning, schedule it, read about it in your favorite source, move on, no more. You must ration it in the same way that you ration one glass of wine at dinner. If you find yourself drinking from breakfast all the way through to the end of the day, trust me, there's a problem. You don't need an addiction specialist for it. If you're treating your political news the same way that somebody who drinks alcoholically is drinking wine, it's the same deal working in the same way in your brain, and it's gonna lead to misery. Ration it. Number three, turn off the hyper-partisan stuff that's making you ignorant and miserable. And that means the hyper-partisan stuff on your side. You're not watching the hyper-partisan stuff on the other side. I know you're not. Of course you're not. You're getting satisfaction from people who are saying that you're right. Turn it off. Don't read your favorite columnist who says the forbidden terrible things about the other side. It's not helping you. On the contrary, it's giving you minor satisfaction in exchange for major amounts of loneliness, of emptiness, of sadness that you're getting at this particular time. Number four, pay attention to the love relationships for the people around you and focus more on the love that you have for a person who disagrees with you politically. If I asked for a show of hands, which I could, we could have a vote, but that would waste time. How many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically? All of you would say it's you. I know it because I've done it a hundred times in front of audiences. That means you have an opportunity to show love for that person that will give you the satisfaction that you need, the neurochemicals that you crave, and will give our society what we deserve, which is more love, more reconciliation. That means going out of your way to show more love for a person, notwithstanding the politics. Last but not least, we need more gratitude in this country. As I was talking about in a small private session that started before, we got on this main session, we are so ungrateful in this country. Sometimes I work with political leaders on both sides of the aisle. And the one thing it seems that they can agree on is that America is a crummy country in decline. They disagree on everything except that. The United States is, we used to be great, and now we're not, and this is the end of democracy. This is the only election that really matters. They're agreeing that this is a lousy, rotten country. This is the most successful, progressive, upwardly mobile, charitable country in the history of the world. It's imperfect, which is why God created the Harvard Kennedy School, to make it better. That's you all are involved in this community. Thank you for doing that. By the way, that's a bold theological point that God created the Kennedy School. He did it on the eighth day, by the way. I have a special edition of the Bible. If you want it, let me know. If we're not able to recognize how great that we have it, that we can even have this conversation, for Pete's sake, that's insanity. If we actually focus on the gratitude that we have for living in this country and having these arguments and being able to disagree openly, then we're on the right track. That's really what it comes down to. We should be the people who say, God bless this country where we can have these arguments in the first place. That is the most inflecting statement that you can make when you're witnessing an argument that can turn it back to what we really should be paying attention to, which is gratitude for this country and energy to make it better and live up to its full potential. So, that's where I'm gonna leave it today. On the note of gratitude, let me express it one more time. You made the conversation possible. You're participating in this in a productive and wonderful way. You've given me the opportunity to talk about it today. Thank you so very much for being in the Kennedy School community. Now back up to Ariadne.

- Thank you, Arthur. That's beautiful. I've got a question from the chat from Daniel Salado. And before I ask that, Barbara Zwick, we want to get your question. We're not sure we can do it audio. So, would you please pop it in the chat or email it to Ariadne? We will get that right up. Meanwhile, I have a couple of chat questions. The first one from Daniel Salado, who is a National Security Fellow from 2022. Daniel wants to know, is having meaning in life the same as success?

- Yeah, no, it's not. Success in life, generally speaking, is denominated in terms of money and power, and admiration of other people. If you determine your success to be one that is a life of meaning, you've defined it as such, then yes. But the traditional orientation toward outward markers of success, this is as old as the Hills, and philosophers have talked about it a lot. Aristotle went into great detail about this. Thomas Aquinas said that the idols that we search for are money, power, pleasure, and fame. He called it honor. You're a National Security Fellow, so you know that honor has a different connotation. Two of my kids are military, and they serve with honor. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the admiration and prestige that actually comes in life. Those are things that we naturally crave, but they don't bring satisfaction. They don't bring meaning. On the contrary, if you stop there, you'll actually never find what you're searching for. There's nothing wrong with money. There's nothing wrong with power. Inherently, there's nothing wrong with prestige. But you have to use it as an intermediate good to get what really matters, which is love. You want love. And love comes from faith, family, friends, and service toward other people. That's what love really comes from. And so, to the extent that you stop at those worldly markers of success, we all face a life of frustration and a sense of emptiness.

- That's wonderful. I have another question from the chat from Josh Gibson, MPP, 1998. Before I ask that, I wanted to say if you would like to ask your question in person, please do that as well. We appreciate all these chat questions. They're great, but please also use the virtual hand-raising feature of Zoom. And I can call on you, and you can unmute yourself and ask directly. In the meantime, Josh wants to know, does the same inherent unhappiness that comes with watching political shows also go for people who watch or play competitive sports? Is it really just about the perils of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat rather than the subject matter, or is there something specific to politics?

- Yeah, there's something specific to politics, which is that it tends to take on an existential struggle. If you honestly believed what people are telling you about politics and you transpose that onto the Yankees and Red Sox, if you actually came to believe the propaganda that you're hearing in this particular way, if the Yankees beat the Red Sox, your fundamental rights are gonna be taken away. Then it would actually bring the same kind of unhappiness, and then you'd want all kinds of dirty tricks. You'd want the Red Sox to blow up the Yankees' bus on the way to the game, which, by the way, is not competition. Competition is all about collaboration and rules and abiding by the outcomes and trying to bring your best team, and hoping the other side brings their best team too. That's what competition is really all about. That's why competition is so wonderful in economics. It's called free enterprise. It's so wonderful in politics. We call it democracy, when it really, really works, which sometimes it doesn't, when we make the stakes completely existential and apocalyptic, like we currently do. That's why the Yankees-Red Sox is really, really, really, really a beautiful rivalry, and especially when the Red Sox win.

- I particularly appreciate that as a Mets fan.

- [Arthur] Oh, yeah.

- I'm going to go to Luke Kuehler, who is a mid-career MPA from 2012. He asks, Dr. Brooks, please discuss your reasoning for why hoping for civil discourse isn't a high enough bar for our dialogue.

- Yeah. Referencing your book, "Love Your Enemies."

- Yeah. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. For the longest time, I'd say I was working for greater civility. And then my wife said at one point, you know, she's a critic of my work. Everybody's a critic, you know? She said, you always talk about civility. You know, what if I went and told our friends that you and I are civil to each other? I said, well, probably they think we need counseling, honey. She said, right. She said, what if I told our friends that we tolerate each other? I said, that's worse. That's right. She said, what's the standard? You know, my wife is my spiritual leader. She says, you're not living up to the title of your book, "Love Your Enemies," buddy. You're not living up to it. Loving your enemies means having the highest possible standard. So, love, by the way, is not a feeling. Aristotle talked about this as well. To love is to will the good of the other. Martin Luther King talked about this in great detail, because he preached frequently on Matthew 5:44 from the Sermon on the Mount, which is that famous passage. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. And king, he said, and you can find these sermons on YouTube. It's just wonderful. He said, Jesus didn't say to like your enemies. And he could have continued to say, Jesus didn't say to tolerate your enemies. He didn't say to be civil to your enemies. That's probably better than hating them and trying to kill them. But it's not a high enough standard. The answer is to love your enemies. What is love? Is to will the good of the other, notwithstanding your feelings. That's really, really important to think. You can love somebody that you don't like. You can actually manage your feelings, so they're not managing you. Can you imagine if we had a whole country of people that were managing their feelings, that willed each other's good, notwithstanding their feelings? It's a new day, man. And that's why I think civility is garbage, because my wife reminded me that it's not a high enough standard for a country as great as America, let alone my family.

- Thank you-

- Once again, I'm talking like it's 1968 in Berkeley. So, there you go.

- And it's what we need you here in Cambridge. I'm gonna go to a question in our chat from Farah Arabe. I hope I'm saying your name correctly. If happiness is love, and relationships are so important, how can we improve policies that support relationships, particularly in the early years? And that's when we first learned to relate. Oh, and Farah gave us her exec ed degree year, which was 2018. So again, how can we improve policies that support relationships, particularly in the early years, which is when we first learned to relate?

- Yeah, thank you.

- Two of the biggest crises that we see in America today, quite frankly, is falling family formation and rising loneliness. Two huge problems. I do a lot of work with Yvette Murthy, who is our wonderful Surgeon General, who was also the Surgeon General during the Obama administration. He's a great Surgeon General. And he's written about loneliness an awful lot. I asked him one time, I was doing a podcast, and I had him as my guest. And I said, what's the biggest public health threat? It was during COVID, by the way. He didn't say COVID. He didn't say gun violence. He didn't say the opioid epidemic. He said loneliness, because that's what leads to the greatest self-harm. Why do we have so much loneliness in this country? Because we actually don't know how to interact with each other as human beings in a society that's largely moderated or mediated by technological prowess that we have in front of us. I'm glad that we've got Zoom. If we didn't have Zoom, we'd be doing this on the phone. This is better. But the truth of the matter is, we'd all be getting a lot more oxytocin. We'd all be having a lot more of the love hormone going on if we were all together in a room. We'd be having a great time right now, my friends. Now, okay, that's not available to us. And so, we'll take the second best. The problem is that this second best is being elected, is being selected by people instead of the first best over and over and over again. So, what do we see? We have dating apps, which are the worst possible way for you to meet and fall in love. We have Zoom work, where people are increasingly working at a distance and taking convenience over the relationships that they're going to build. Zoom school, as a matter of fact, which is a sorry excuse for social bonding. And social media, which is fake friendship. Gaming, which is fake progress and fake work. These are things that we're seeing increasingly. I'm writing a book right now about the neuroscience of this loneliness, of this emptiness, of this deadness that people feel when they actually can't find meaning in their lives. Second is that we have this activist culture that's turning people against each other. It's the most extraordinary thing, where people are literally not making friends and falling in love because they're being conscripted into a baby boomer culture war. That's what we're doing to Gen Z and millennials. We're conscripting them as child soldiers into our culture war, saying you have to be more suspicious toward, you have to be more angrier at the oppressor. You have to be more pugilistic toward the people of the other political party. If this election goes the wrong way, all of your rights are gonna be taken away. Both sides saying that, by the way. All that's doing is it's making it impossible for them to have friendships, less likely for them to fall in love. The result of that is that we're standing in the way of their actual relationships. Number one, let's stop doing harm. Number two, let's actually start talking about the fact that every single one of us on this call, the secret to the happiness in our lives is the love that we have in our relationships. We want more of that in the world.

- I appreciate that so much. I'm struck by the column you wrote as the pandemic was ending about people don't know how much they need to go back to work.

- Yeah, I know, I know. I have to say I wrote a column about the fact that people, they're lonely and they don't like it, but they don't want to go back to work. They're not connecting these two things. I connected them neuroscientifically in the column. And my dean at the business school, Srikanth Datar, he sent that column out to all of the faculty in an email saying that we all have to come back to work. I was not popular that day with my colleagues.

- Oh, the price of telling the truth. I'm gonna ask you-

- Giving my opinion, I guess. Yeah, indeed. I'm gonna go to a question from Margo Harner. Margo is a MC, MPA from 2005, and she wants to ask you about the role of faith versus religion with love. How does agnosticism or atheism inform happiness or a lack thereof?

- That's a great question. It's something I've written about an awful lot. It's what I've discussed in our many interactions over the last 11 years with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and many other faith leaders as well. One of the things I'm most interested in is the neuroscience of faith and how it relates to happiness. I could talk about my own faith, which, as I've is so critically important in my life. As a scientist, the truth of the matter is that what matters not is my particular faith, but rather transcendence. Again, this is not the metaphysical truth of who's right. That's above my pay grade, like what's actually going on in the universe. What I'm saying is that for happiness, what you need is to transcend yourself. A very good way to do that is faith or spirituality, but you can also do that in many other ways that are not traditionally religious or actually expressly non-religious. To transcend yourself is to break out of the prison, the natural neurobiological prison of being the star of your own psychodrama. Mother Nature wants you to be at the center of your existence. So, all day long, it's my breakfast and my commute and my lecture and my lunch and my television shows and my money and my relationships and me, me, me. And by the way, then I go to sleep, and I'm the star in every single one of my dreams. It's just terrible. It's maddening. It's boring. It's terrifying. I need relief. How do I get relief? By getting small and making the universe large. How do you do that? That's called transcendence. How do you do that? That will bring you peace and perspective, 100% sure. How? Maybe it's by studying the Stoic philosophers with real seriousness and trying to live according to their precepts. Maybe it's doing what the... I have a great teacher in Southern India in a city called Palakkad on the border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu. He's a great guru named Nocharavankataraman. He's the one who told me about the Brahma Mahurta, which is an ancient Sanskrit, ancient Vedic idea called the creator's time, which has a ton of neuroscience behind it. Getting up an hour and a half before dawn, don't hang up, folks, getting up an hour and a half before dawn where you feel and you walk without your devices and you're alone in your mind, and it focuses you and makes you more creative, and it makes you happier because you transcend under those circumstances. An absolutely extraordinarily scientifically validated and spiritually motivated, amazing exercise. Third, you might study the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach with seriousness. Maybe you start an apostate of meditation practice, which I've studied with seriousness for a long time, and I recommend to you, or maybe you return with seriousness to the faith of your youth. You need something, you need to transcend.

- Wow, that's amazing. I'm gonna turn to a question from Timur Tapalgocelli. I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that. Timur has a mid-career MPA from 2022, and he wants to know what is happiness in an age of increasing fear, uncertainty, competition, pressure to succeed, and most importantly, of the relativity of time and the speed of social interactions. A lot in there.

- Yeah, there's a lot in there, and that's really a meaning question is really what it comes about. So, a lot of that question comes down to not that the world is worse because, in most ways, you simply can't realistically argue that the world is not more dangerous, the world is not dirtier, the world is not less abundant, the world is not less literate. The truth is that we've wiped out 84% of worldwide starvation level poverty since 1972, that childhood mortality is decreasing, that literacy is increasing, that in many places in the world that our environment is getting better and we have greater prosperity than we've ever seen, and in most places in the world, at least looking over the long term, at least over the past 50 years, that we're more democratic and freer than we've been before. But that doesn't mean anything because there's always trouble. And the real crux of this question is not that the world is getting worse, which of course you're not asserting, it's that the world's gotten crazier and it's just harder to live, right? We've become so abundant that it's awful, you know? It's like I can't get a moment's peace. I can't transcend, right? That's the problem. Now, here's biologically what we're doing wrong. The brain is hemispherically lateralized. That's just a fancy way of saying that the right and the left sides of the brain do slightly different things. They do a lot of the same things too. But here's the big deal. There's a great neuroscientist and psychiatrist, a Scottish guy named Ian McGilchrist. Many of you know his work. He wrote a very important book in 2009 called "The Master and His Emissary." He was talking about the two hemispheres of the brain. The master side of the brain that's supposed to be giving the commands is the right side. That's where you address big questions of meaning that don't really have answers. The emissary side, the left side, is dedicated to frittering away your time on social media and working hard in your job, and figuring out how to get from here to Tucson. It answers particular questions, big questions, little questions. Modern life is marooning you on the brain. That's what's going on. When you can't be bored for a single second, if you're in traffic and you're at a light and you're like, oh, let me check my texts. The reason is because you're uncomfortable being on the right side of your brain because you're not used to it anymore. That's what's going on. If you have to, you know, pick up and look at your email, even though when there's not an email coming in, it's because you don't want to go back to the right side of your brain to be confronted by difficult, big questions, which are the source of meaning. That's what exactly what you need to do. You need a four-day silent retreat. You need to be spending hours every day without your devices. You should be sleeping without your phone by your side. You should be having the first hour of the day without your phone. There's a bunch of emergency measures that you need to take. And if you do that, this crazy world won't ruin your life, and your life can actually get better.

- Thank you for that. I wanna ask a question from Gary Grimm, a member of our Dean's Council. And Gary wants to know, since we don't necessarily have an audience or a reach of media, what method would give individuals the largest impact on increasing happiness?

- Yeah, so that's the reason I teach leadership and happiness. The point of my class at HBS is not to make my students happier, although I want that to happen. It's I want them to become happiness teachers. The best way for you to increase the blast radius of happiness is to become a happiness teacher. By the way, that's also the best way to get happier because you get, you master a skill by, like they say in medical schools, the way they train surgeons, watch one, do one, teach one. That's how they talk about becoming a surgeon. Same thing is true for happiness. Learn the science, practice the science by changing your habits, teach the science in your own way. I'm teaching leadership and happiness because I want a whole, you know, a crew, a movement of happiness teachers. That's what I want from all of you on this call because you're all leaders in different parts of your life, in your family, your leader, in your community, your leader, nonprofit life, in volunteer life, in your jobs, in your companies, in the Kennedy School. You're leaders. I want you to be happiness teachers. The blast zone will be bigger the more people you're talking to, but everybody has people who want to be you. And the more that you're actually talking about this, modeling this, living this, helping people with this, you're gonna have all of the influence you could possibly have. And by the way, when you start talking about this stuff, everybody's gonna want to have you at dinner. That's how I wound up getting, that's how I wound up getting hooked up with Oprah Winfrey. She reads my columns, and she read my last book, and she called me up like, hey, this is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, and this is Batman. Turns out it's Oprah, right? And she's like, I want to have dinner with you because I want to talk about this stuff. I'm like, you're on. And it was like a house on fire. It was just the best, right? And we, it's like we were, you know, it's like we were raised together and separated or something, right? It was just amazing because we have this common view of, you know, love and happiness that you have very different lives, you know, and very different lives, but, and it was lovely because she was entertained by an energized by the most interesting thing in the world. And it's science, just, just incredible. So, by the way, if you want to get started on that, I have this website, all this stuff is free. It's called arthurbrooks.com. You can actually find a PowerPoint. That's the introductory science to happiness there, download it, take my name off and put your name on, and give a lecture. That's how you get started.

- Oh, that is terrific. I want to make sure people know they can use the raise hand feature. We are winding down to the end of the call. So, if people have a question, we would really appreciate it. I'm gonna ask one of the pre-submitted questions, which is from Desiree Green and mid-career MPA in 1996. And she was reflecting on how politics predates our founding as a country. And at the end of the day, she believes that that time country trumped partisanship. And what, when did that shift happen? And how can we bring that into balance? I think.

- Yeah, yeah, I know. You know, it's funny to think, but a hundred years from now, there are gonna be historians writing about right now, talking about how great it was and why, because all the nonsense we're gonna forget about and all the big things they're gonna remember. And, you know, they're gonna talk about the heroism of people right now and the, you know, the great giving spirit of people, right? I know it's insane, right? Because, because we're, we're walking in the, it's like, we can't see the forest for the trees. This is always the way that it was. So, you know, I like, I'm really interested in the political milieu as understood by historians, looking at the American founding, looking at the letters and contemporaneous communications and the political brochures, the political pamphleteering that are going on during that time. It was terrible. It was misery. I mean, it's like the dirty tricks were just unbelievable. What Thomas Jefferson did to John Adams. I mean, it was just Thomas Jefferson. He was a complete propagandist. I mean, he made, he made Donald Trump look like Abraham Lincoln. Are you kidding me? And then what was going on in those days was just, it was awful, lies, slander, all this. I mean, it was just Twitter on steroids, except that it wasn't as efficient because you were required a printing press and putting stuff in the public square. The truth of the matter is people are people, is what it comes down to. And, and what we think was better, probably wasn't, is the point, right? Well, there was a lot that was worse, though. I mean, you could, you know, get a sliver, and die, die of sepsis in those days, obviously, but also you could get lynched in a way that, I mean, things are for having the wrong political opinion. You get burned as a witch because you said the wrong thing. It was just, I mean, again, I'm not telling you anything you don't know. And so, I say this with appropriate humility, but I think it's important for us to keep in mind and in perspective, a lot of the progress that has actually been made and not to be thinking that it's so much worse now than it's ever been. By the way, the parties want you to think it's never been this bad, and that's why you should vote for them and their candidate. That's what they want you to think. That's part of the propaganda that comes, that's the marketing that actually comes. Every, in 2012, I remember both parties saying, this is the last election that really matters. Remember 2012? Remember when we had like two people, we both, we all respected?

- I'm gonna ask Linda to unmute herself and ask her question.

- Hi, this might sound like a setup question, but I really am curious if I wanted to, you know, pursue a course of self-study on the kind of ideas you've been talking about, what's the order I should read your books?

- Oh, thanks. That's a setup, all right. But that's, you know, it's like Linda and I talked beforehand. So, the probably, the most basic book that follows a lot of the teachings from my course and the work that I do is "Build the Life You Want" that Oprah and I wrote together. Then the next one, which is really about how to build a happier and happier life as you go through life, particularly geared toward people in the second half of their life and career, that's called "From Strength to Strength." That was the first book that I wrote. I wrote it during COVID, the first book that I published when I was here at Harvard. And that one really spawned a lot of the interest in this particular work. That's when I started to have, you know, journalists on the illegal Zoom link for my class, et cetera. It's like, wait a second, that student is working at the Wall Street Journal. That can't be right. Or, you know, whatever it happens to be. So, that's what I would do is I would read "Build the Life You Want," and then I would read "From Strength to Strength." By the way, I have a class, a virtual class at edX, which is our platform. It's not, it's kind of an abbreviated skeletal version of this, but it's free on that platform. And you can actually go and get a lot of these ideas and these scientific ideas as well. Thank you.

- Thank you so much, Linda. And thank you, Arthur. I'm gonna give a last moment for people to ask a question, and then I have a little something to share from Denise Madigan. Oh, Rob, please ask your question and please tell us your ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø affiliation.

- Oh, my old friend, Rob. How are you doing, Rob?

- I'm well, Dr. Brooks. How are you?

- [Dr. Brooks.] I'm great. I'm great.

- And I'm here in lovely, sunny Seattle. You'd be happy to know.

- Nice.

- So, I was listening to what you said about getting involved in things that matter. And I assume that part of that thesis is that it will starve politics for the intention that it desires. But I wonder if the institutions of civil society, large and small, should also amend their work to the needs of the day, like to address loneliness, for instance.

- Yeah.

- And so, should nonprofit organizations and civil society become happiness teachers themselves?

- Yeah, I think so. And in fact, that's what I'm teaching to my students, what I lectured on this morning to my graduate students, is the fact that we're a transmission mechanism for a better life, for a more prosperous life, and one that alleviates unhappiness. But that's not good enough just to alleviate the misery. We also have the opportunity to lift people up into higher bonds of love and happiness. How do we do that? The way that we do that is by connecting, by having great causes that do important things and connecting people to them who can support them and thus completing them as people, thus filling their souls with something that's really important. The reason I love fundraising, by the way, I mean, I ran a big think tank in Washington, DC, and I raised, I don't know, $600 million over the course of my career. I told that to the president of Harvard. He's like, good start, Sonny. Everything's relative, right? But the reason I love that is because we had an important thing to make better public policy in the interest of the American people and people around the world. So, we thought, we weren't perfect, of course. And most people in life, they don't know how to help. They don't know what to do. But nonprofit organizations can show them what they can do, how they can be bigger than themselves, how they can be better than themselves. This is what we're trying to do at the Kennedy School. This is why working with donors is such an incredibly thrilling thing to do because, we're all, it's like a magic box. I'm putting in my career and ideas, and the administrators are putting in their time and expertise, and our donors are putting in financial resources and the time that they're doing to bring our community together. And out of that box comes a shared expression of our values of a better world. And it's incredibly satisfying. It's a very beautiful thing, as a matter of fact. And that's really how nonprofit organizations, and any organizations, for that matter, can make life more fulfilling and more meaningful for all of us. By the way, tell everybody what you do for a living, Rob.

- You're still on mute. You're on mute, Rob. Ah, you're back on mute again.

- I used Harvard as a career transition from being a concert violinist for my entire career. And now I raise money for underserved kids to get violin and viola lessons at the highest possible level at the lowest possible cost. And it's a blast.

- Fantastic. And the reason that Rob and I really connect to each other is I made my living for the first 12 years of my career as a classical French hornist, a lot of in the Barcelona Symphony. And then I was able to transition into becoming a behavioral scientist. This, my friends, is a great country where guys like me and Rob, we can have a second life, even after being in classical music.

- I once heard someone refer to the U.S. as the land of second chances. Tell me about it. My wife is an immigrant from Spain. And when she first got here, she didn't speak any English. And her first job was she was hired at an elementary school as an English as a second language coordinator. And she's like, I don't even speak English, but I'm a hard worker. Don't you people have any standards?

- Oh, she's a treasure. I'm gonna thank everyone on this call. And I have one last close out comment here. This is from Denise Madigan, MPP 1993. And Arthur, this is for you. She wrote, this is probably the most valuable thing I've heard about how to survive the intensity of this election year. And she said, just FYI, no need to read. But I wanted to read that because I think it captures what many of us on this call feel. And we want to thank you so much for doing this unbelievable service of sharing your wisdom with us.

- Thank you. Thank you, Ariadne. Thank you to all of you. So grateful and so humbled, and so honored to be part of this great Kennedy School community. We're fortunate to have you and our students, especially. I want to thank everybody who participated on this call. Your questions were amazing. Your comments were wonderful. And I really look forward to seeing you at our next Wiener Conference call, which is gonna be November 1st with Arthur's colleague, Professor Gordon Hanson. Gordon will be continuing on our theme and discussing how the presidential election may affect left-behind regions in the U.S. Like Arthur, Professor Gordon Hanson is also very international. So, there's much for everyone to think about there. And we really appreciate it. Please join us again. And once again, my profound thanks on behalf of all of us at the Harvard Kennedy School worldwide community, my thanks to Arthur Brooks. Take care, everyone.