A Bit of Optimism - Happiness with Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

Can we ensure that we will stay happy through every phase of our lives? Arthur Brooks discovered that there is a clear fork in the road that we will all face at some point. Some of us will struggle to find lasting happiness and the other will only get happier as time passes. The trick is knowing what to do to get on the happy path. The best part - Arthur tested his theory on himself…and it worked! He offers lots of words of wisdom -- and lots words I had to look up -- to help guide the rest of us in our quest for personal fulfillment and lifelong happiness.This is...A Bit Of Optimism. If you enjoy the episode, visit ArthurBrooks.com and check out his new book for more on the subject, From Strength to Strength.-----Here are a list of some the big words Arthur uses in the episode…just in case you need it :-)Routinized - to develop into a regular procedure.Syndicalized - to join together as one entity, as in a labor union. Pedagogical - instructional, characterized by the art or science of teaching. Metacognitive - having to do with metacognition, high-level thinking that enables understanding.Baroque - of or relating to the musical period following the Renaissance, extending roughly from 1600 to 1750.Fugue - Music. a polyphonic composition based upon one, two, or more themes, which are enunciated by several voices or parts in turn, subjected to contrapuntal treatment, and gradually built up into a complex form having somewhat distinct divisions or stages of development and a marked climax at the end.Liminality - a state of transition between one stage and the next, especially between major stages in one's life or during a rite of passage.Disconsolate - characterized by or causing dejection; cheerless; gloomy.Wizened - withered, shriveled. 

I usually don't like to introduce someone based on their resume. Arthur Brooks has written 12 books. He's the former president of the AEI, and he teaches at Harvard Business School. He is a pretty smart and well-accomplished guy. So what would we talk about, you ask? Well, it's one thing to accomplish a lot. It's another thing to be happy. And this is what Arthur's thinking about these days.

How can we be happy in the work that we do? This is a bit of optimism. Here's the trouble I have talking to you, and I think this every time we talk. I love you to death, but I always feel a little dumb. Well, I just always feel a little pretentious. That's worse, Simon. That's worse. You're so smart and so well-read. I love the idea of books. And people have a big

misperception of me, which is since I was a kid, I've struggled to read because of undiagnosed ADHD when I was younger. So I couldn't focus. And a lot of people give me all this credit for reading all these books and assume that I'm extremely well-read. And I like to joke that I've written more books than I've read. But you harvest material effectively, which is really the skill of serious nonfiction, learning how to learn very, very quickly without being bogged down in verbiage. I think this is something we don't teach our kids. And again, I was very, very fortunate that when I was pretty young, I learned how I learn. Once I got to college,

I took classes that amplified how I learn, not amplified my weaknesses. So for example, I avoided classes that relied heavily on the necessity to read texts. I took classes with very, very good professors who are extremely good at explaining things that I could go after class and talk to them about it. And I had to go to every class. I couldn't skip class and read the text. And so I did okay. But we don't teach kids how they learn. No, that's absolutely true. Absolutely true. I was very lucky that I learned this and I learned that I learned from listening. And so a lot of what I know and all my retention comes from talking to people. You're an auditory learner. One of my sons is a reading learner, is a visual learner. One of my

sons is an auditory learner. And the auditory learner was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD and all that, but he can retain anything that you tell him, but you have to tell it to him. The truth of the matter is that my son who, you know, diagnosed as ADHD and dyslexic, those are precisely the qualities that make him an outstanding US MarineS. Marine. The truth of the matter is that he sees things in a different way than the rest. He's able to solve problems, especially kinetically and in real time. He's a great Marine. He's a squad leader. He's flourishing. He loves his job. It's fun. He gets to blow stuff up and jump out of helicopters. And when it comes down to it, he has to do dangerous things too, and even risk his life, which is what he wants to do.

And somebody who's like, let me go and look on the internet about the odds of dying under these circumstances. And let me think about it. Let me get a book. Let me get a book on how to be a good Marine. It's not going to be a good Marine. I'm so proud of him for becoming a man fully alive. And not only getting around what we would call a learning disability, but flourishing because

of the way that he's wired and doing something that frankly, I couldn't do. Like your son, I was diagnosed only as an adult with ADHD. It is my superpower. And one of the problems with modern medicine is we study, especially in psychology, we study broken, but we don't study what works. And so the whole happiness movement is great because we're studying what works. I lament the fact that we call it the attention deficit disorder. We tell a child, you have a deficit and a disorder. Me and everybody who has ADD and ADHD, we have hyperfocus. And I prefer to say I have hyper focus. And occasionally, I'm extremely distractible and struggle to get my work done. But when I have focus,

my mind is crystal clear and adrenaline helps me, which is why I'm good on stage because it's exciting and the adrenaline pumps when I go on stage and I'm lucid. I wish we would tell children they have a superpower that comes with a liability rather than you have a liability and we never tell them about the superpower. Dr. Yeah, for sure. And there are all kinds of ways to exploit the unique advantages of people who learn in these different ways, whose brains are wired these ways. This is not some evolutionary glitch. This is not an oversight by mother nature. On the contrary, there's a reason that so many people learn in this particular way, because there's a genetic advantage. There's an evolutionary set of benefits

that actually comes from this. But we have decided because we treat people like cogs in a machine, and we march everybody through these routinized, syndicalized school things where everybody's crazily the same age year after year after year. So we can't learn from people with different levels of experience. And then we set them up like we're stamping out widgets in a factory. So everybody's got to learn the same way. And by the way, it's very convenient if they sit quietly. Sitting quietly is wonderful for teachers. It's just really bad for students, as it turns out. And if we were a little bit more creative and we cared more about children, we would have an education system that's more tailored to the advantages.

And as such, we'd be a much richer society. There's other examples that we dislike, but they're really important to keep in mind. And a classic case of this is the way that we treat clinical depression and anxiety. You know, we have a tendency to say that this is the broken brain. It's just a big mistake. And again, there's tons of suffering and you don't want to have your boat overturned by suffering. And you have to have things treated from time to time such that you can function as a human being without complete misery. But the truth of the matter is, if you look at any fair reading literature shows that people who

have some dystemic tendency, some chronically low mood, they're better decision makers. They tend to be more creative. They have a better grasp on reality. They make fewer mistakes in their decision making. And so the point is, the most important thing that we can do is not to regret who we are and to remediate everything about us, but to understand ourselves because we have unique power. I'm going to change tacks on you. I know the answer to this question, so it's rhetorical and it's designed to spur conversation. So you're teaching now. Do you like teaching? It's interesting. University teaching is the family business. It's the family business. My grandfather, my father, I mean, this is something I grew up on a college campus.

When I was 19, I got myself tossed out of college. I mean, I got tossed out of the California Institute of the Arts. I'm like the first person in the history to get tossed out of that place, right? You have to work hard. And I didn't go to college until I was 30. And the whole thing is like, I'm never going into academia. And then I woke up like somebody slipped me a Mickey and I woke up as a college professor. And it's turned out to be great. It turned out to be as great as my dad and grandfather told me. What have woke up as a college professor and it's turned out to be great. It turned out to

be as great as my dad and grandfather told me. What have you learned as a teacher? I've learned how other people learn, which is the most important thing that I see every day, getting back to the early part of our conversation. One of the big problems at the universities, and some people had pretty mediocre or unrewarding experiences as college students, especially, I mean, think of your economics 101 class. Why was that unrewarding? Because the teacher would come in and she or he would say, I have a model and write the model on the chalkboard and make you learn the model and then give you a couple of examples and move on. And the examples would be the cheese industry or the widgets industry or something really boring. He didn't quite get it, didn't

quite care. And the reason for that is that about 5% of learners, they tend to learn deductively, which is to say that they get a model and then they expose it to data. But 95% of people learn inductively. They notice all kinds of stuff around them and then they try to look for patterns. The biggest revelatory experience for me is being kind of an academic, but that most of my students are inductive. I turn around the entire way that I explain things. And so I'll say, did you ever notice, isn't it weird how people, did you ever feel? And now I teach happiness. I mean, I teach this big happiness class at Harvard Business School. It's perfect for inductive learning. So the first 20 minutes of the lecture will be a bunch of experiences that people have and asking people if they've

ever felt this and that and the other thing. And then I'll say, well, it turns out there are 50 academic journal articles explaining what's going on with the neural substrates of the brain and actually what the bias is and the social scientists have weighed in. And by the way, Aristotle was talking about it in this way. And by that point, they're locked, man. They're locked because they're starting to understand themselves, but only when they can see themselves at the beginning. So that's the most interesting thing for me from teaching is that I have learned how people learn. And so I can teach to people in a way that is an expression of my love. That is so good. That is so good. And the key point is also that the algorithm for getting happier is actually relatively simple. I

mean, the biggest mistake that people make is they wish that they were happier, but they don't work for it. The second thing is that they learn about it, but they don't apply it. And then the third part is that they don't share it. And so the way to learn happiness, to become happier, I can't say you'll be happy because, you know, there are limits for each one of us, but you can be happier is number one, work for it by learning about it. You know, use your brain to learn about human happiness. Number two, apply it, practice it in your life. You know, just as you wouldn't, you know, try to learn golf from a book, you got to actually go out there and play golf. Not that I do. And the third is the most beautiful of all, which is that you can only get it when you give it. And that's where the leadership comes in.

Happiness and leadership is the study, the science and practice of happiness in your life and the way that you cement it into your own life by sharing it with your sisters and brothers. And leaders have a unique opportunity to do that. I've seen you so compellingly talk about this, to talk about how leaders have this gift, this gift, which is not just telling people barking orders down the hall. It, this gift, which is not just, you know, telling people barking orders down the hall. It's this gift of actually being a teacher of things that matter in people's lives by embedding core values into your message, into your leadership journey. What a gift that is. And leaders get to do that.

And good teachers, people who like teaching are good leaders because they want to see those people around them do well. They want to see them excel. They're cheering for them rather than, as you said, the command and control, do as I say. Or you could say that great leaders are great teachers too. You could say that great leaders, they're pedagogical. They're pure crystallized intelligence. And great leaders never consider themselves experts in leadership. They all consider themselves students of leadership. And you and I, we've both met some remarkable leaders over the course of our careers, and they're insatiably curious about leadership. They read books, they read articles, they want to talk about it. They're really accomplished

people and they want to talk about the topic all the time. Yeah, for sure. They can be the chief executive officer of General Motors. And if you tell them some interesting insight that occurred to you, they'll be like, oh, wait a second. I want to write that down. I don't want to forget that. That's important because that means they're learning. They don't want things to escape them. They want to make a big idea more than just a sensation. They want to make it metacognitive so they can use it. Today is February 15th and your new book comes out today. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. February 15th, the day after Valentine's Day is strength to strength day. Strength to strength day.

And you read it. You read it a long time ago. You blurbed the book. My blurbers were Simon Sinek and the Dalai Lama. So from now on, I'm going to call you Your Holiness Simon Sinek. Holy cow, you got the Dalai Lama to blurb a book. It was a very calm blurb, I have to say. It said, Arthur Brooks has written a book that shall help people. Hey, man, it's the Dalai Lama. How did you get to know the Dalai Lama? I put together a list. This is about 10 years ago when I was still president of AEI.

For our listeners, that's a think tank in Washington, D.C. that I led for a long time. And I made a list of the people that I thought that I needed to know so that I could be better at what I did. And furthermore, that people would find unusual alliances. One of the great aspects of effective leadership is going where you're not invited and saying things that people don't expect in a spirit of love. I made a list of people and I put the Dalai Lama on it. I taught publishing in the New York Times, places that the president of the American

Enterprise Institute would not ordinarily show up. But then I had to figure out how to execute on that. I figured out who actually worked with His Holiness in the United States. And then I secured an opportunity to get an hour of his time at his monastery in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills. And then I went there. At that point, there was no flights from, you know, the closest city was a seven hour

drive. You know, I almost hit a goat on the way. I mean, it was just harrowing up the mountain. And I sat for an hour with his holiness and we talked and it was this, for me, a magical connection. And over the last 10 years, since that first meeting, we've worked together, we've written together, I've interviewed him. He was the first guest speaker in my Harvard class last January, which was me and my Harvard students and 14 million people on live webinar, which was a beautiful experience. And I have to say, he has taught me so much about what it means to be a full human on the earth. I have to say, I love him. He's been a mentor and teacher to me and a really, really treasured relationship.

What's one thing that you've learned from him that we can internalize and implement reasonably easily to take one step towards that better human being space? Let me give an example. And this is something I talk about in this new book, Strength to Strength. And it's about the satisfaction problem and the hedonic treadmill, you know, this like run, run, run, run, run. And your brain is telling you, if you get there and you hit the goal and you'll get the reward and it will endure for the rest of your life, notwithstanding Mick Jagger's injunction that he can't get no satisfaction, et cetera. Well, the Dalai Lama tells us how we can solve that problem. And it's basically this. He says to get stable and steady happiness, we need to stop having what we want and we need to start wanting what we have.

And what that means basically is this, how to implement this in practical terms is the following. We think that satisfaction is a function of getting what we want, of having things. You know, if I have that job, if I have that spouse, if I have that relationship, if I have that success, if I have that money, then I'll be satisfied. And no, you won't. The real way to understand this is that to remember that your'll be satisfied. And no, you won't. The real way to understand this is to remember that your satisfaction is not a function of what you have. Your satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want. It's a fraction. And the wants

are the denominator of your happiness fraction. And if you don't know about your wants, if you only have a haves management strategy, you're doomed. But if you have a wants management strategy, you can decrease the denominator and there are ways to do that. Your halves divided by your wants. The number goes up if you have fewer wants and have more halves. So it's not, I wish I had the new, it's I love the thing I've got. Or I'm going to break my attachment to something that I'm craving. And so here's what I recommend to lower the denominator of your satisfaction equation, which is halves divided by wants. How do you manage your wants? We've learned forever that we got to have a bucket list.

It's on your birthday, write down your cravings and desires and attachments. And this is what's going to fuel your ambitions. And it's going to make you more successful. And you're going to climb the ladder, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The bucket list is a metastatically terrible idea for your satisfaction. What you need is a reverse bucket list. And the reverse bucket list is where you do make a list of your cravings and your desires and your attachments, absolutely, on your birthday. And then put your hand in that bucket and take a handful of those things and say, I am no longer chained to this attachment. If I get it, fine, but I'm no longer going to consider my success a function of the car and the relationship and the success, the outward

success and the admiration of others and the money and the power and the pleasure and the fame, uh-uh, goodbye. And saying I am the master of my own desires is this reverse bucket list is a positive act of rebellion against your wants. It seems like Western society is hell bent on the opposite. What is the first step that we can take to sort of operate independently within the system? It's all fine and good to talk about, you know, the reverse bucket list, but the pressures upon us are extreme. You know, that really famous book called Atomic Habits by James Clear, he makes a very good point on how to do this, which is he says, stop paying so much attention to goals and start paying more attention to systems.

I mean, systems are, what they do is they make it possible for you to be effective day-to-day and to be more mindful of what you're doing. Your system should be putting your priorities in order. One of the things that we find about the happiest people is that they're really focusing on four things, their faith or life philosophy, their family life, their friendships, their deep friendships, and work that is meaningful insofar that they feel they're earning their success and serving other people. Those are the four things. You know, if you're going to have a bucket list, make it those four things. But to do those four things, it's not about worldly goals.

It's about proper systems. And so what I recommend to my students is that we do it. We have a little exercise called intention without attachment, where you basically say, okay, where do I want to be in my life, in my family life, in my faith life, in my friendships, in my work, 10 years from now? Just kind of describe it 10 years from now. Okay, now what do I need to be doing in five years to be on track for that? What do I need to be in one year? What about one month? What about one week? Okay, what do I need to do today? What are the systems I need in place today? And then live in the daytight compartment. That is intention without attachment with a focus on systems

and a mindfulness that can bring you true and enduring enjoyment. This is finite, infinite thinking, right? The goals are finite and systems are infinite. This is your newest book. Speaking of newest books, what was the motivation for Strength to Strength? I was on an airplane eight years ago and it was very dark on the plane. It was 11 o'clock at night or something. And I heard a couple behind me talking. It was an elderly couple. I could tell by their voices. And I assumed it was a married couple, a man and a woman. I don't know, but I assumed so. And I couldn't quite make out the husband's words, but I heard the wife saying, oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead. I'm like, whoa, man, that's heavy. Then I hear him

mumble, mumble, mumble. She says, it's not true that nobody cares about you anymore, that nobody respects you, that nobody even knows who you are anymore. This goes on for like 20 minutes. I get in my head this picture of this guy. He's probably disappointed with his life. He didn't get the education he wanted and didn't get the promotions and the jobs or start the companies. And now he's kind of put out to pasture and he's disappointed. The lights go on when we landed Dulles. And I'm curious enough that I want to get a look. And it turns out to be one of the most famous men in the world. This is not controversial. He's beloved for his achievements that happened a long time ago. And this is blowing my mind. And I'm just sort of thinking about this. As a social scientist, this is ago. And this is blowing my mind. And I'm just sort of

thinking about this, you know, as a social scientist, this is interesting. And it has this human pathos. And as we're leaving the plane, the pilot spots him, looks right through me like a pane of glass and looks at the guy behind me now, who's a hero and says, sir, you've been my hero since I was a little boy. And I turned around and he's beaming. And I asked myself, which is the real guy, this one or 20 minutes ago? And then I had a selfish thought. How can I be that guy now and not that guy 20 minutes from now? No, I'm not going to be a great world famous hero. This guy's a much bigger deal than I am or ever will be. But I'm trying to do a lot with my life. And so are you. And the fact that people are listening

to this podcast means so are they. They're trying to get the most juice that they can get from this piece of fruit we call life. How can you, if you do all that striving and struggling and working, and how can you make sure you're on the upper branch of happiness and not going back down again? Because it turns out, the data are very clear that around age 70, the population breaks up into two groups. One group keeps getting happier all the way to the end, and the other group, which is about half, start decreasing in happiness all the way to the end. I want to be on the upper branch. I don't want to be like the guy who did a lot with his life and now is disappointed because it all passed him by. And this book is about what

each person can do at no matter how old they are, whether they're 20 or 50 or 80, what they can actually do with their life to give them the biggest fighting chance to be on the upper branch in the second half of their lives. And I found the 10 big lessons, studying with the Dalai Lama, but also looking at the most cutting edge neuroscience that can give us the best shot at getting that. I think, Simon, I think I figured it out. How different do you feel from before the book? It's fundamental. It's the biggest set of changes I've ever made in my life. And I'll give you an example. When I was doing this, I was the chief executive of a think tank in Washington, D.C. It was a very high pressure, very high

motivation job that got a lot of attention. And I saw that it was good as far as it was going to be, but that it wasn't going to last. And part of it was because there's a change in the kind of intelligence that we have as we move from our 40s to our 50s into our 60s that goes from this fluid intelligence to crystallized intelligence. And crystallized intelligence rewards the ability to use ideas, put them together to share them with others much, much more so than what it takes to do what I was doing as a think tank boss. And so literally on the basis of this research, I quit my job. Nobody quits those jobs. I quit my job because I knew what was coming and I knew what I was going to be good at. And I knew that my gifts were going to be better served by doing what I do now. I remember talking to you when you decided to quit and you told me confidentially that it was

going to happen because it wasn't public knowledge yet. And I was cheering you on, but I had no idea that you were in the middle of this journaling that led you to this wonderful insight, this wonderful conclusion to move on for your own happiness. Yeah, for to remodel my life and to remodel it in a particular way that loads on the particular skills that people have in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, and they can even stay high in their 80s and 90s, but they're different than the skills that people have in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, and they can even stay high in their 80s and 90s, but they're different than the skills that people have and the natural abilities people have in their 20s and 30s. The innovative capacity, the tirelessness on a particular single task that people have, and then they want to keep that. They want to be a big star. They want to be the star lawyer. They want to be the startup entrepreneur or something in their 50s and 60s and wonder why

it's coming harder. And so there's a bunch of things that we can do to understand ourselves, to cultivate that wisdom, that particular crystallized intelligence, and to turn it into a new vocation that's other-focused. Charles Darwin. If you had a three greatest scientists of all time, Charles Darwin would be on your list. It's just, you know, he's inflecting in the way that he understood the natural world as a biologist, a zoologist, a botanist. And he became a super big star all over Europe when he was in his 20s because he did this five-year voyage starting when he was 22 as the naturalist on the Beagle, which is this sailing ship around the world. And it was there that he collected samples of all different parts of the natural world, animals and plants. And he also came up with his theory of evolution, his theory of natural

selection. He developed these ideas over the next 30 years of his career. And he was the most innovative guy. He was the king of the mambo when it came to science all over Europe, celebrate, rich, famous. And then his innovative capacity just screeched to a halt. It just stopped because he hit a limit in what he could understand mathematically. And it turns out that the science had gotten to a point where you needed much more complex mathematics and statistics to make the next step in thinking. He published like 11 more books, but they're all derivative and duplicative. And he felt like kind of a failure and died a hero, but disappointed in his own capacity. He was on the treadmill and then he got thrown off the back

of the treadmill like some hilarious internet meme. Now, somebody who did it right was Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer ever lived. He was the innovative creator of the high Baroque par excellence all the way through his 20s and 30s, super famous, commissions from the greatest royalty, et cetera, et cetera. But then something happened. He had a lot of kids. He had 20 children, as a matter of fact. And his third son, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, created a new style of music, not the high Baroque. It was called the classical style of music. It became all the rage all across Europe, and it eclipsed his father. His father was like writing the equivalent of disco at that point. Nobody wanted to hear it. And so the father then decided that he was simply going to spend the rest of his life

as a master teacher of the forms. And he spent the rest of his life writing a textbook that was an example of the high baroque. And he thought, yeah, maybe sometime in the future, somebody is going to want to know about this stuff that used to be popular. It was called The Art of Fugue, Die Kunst der Fugue. He was in the middle of it, and he stops in the middle of a measure, and it's written on the score, in the hand of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the son who eclipsed him. At this point, the composer put down his pen and died. Strong finish.

And he was beloved, and he was happy, and he was surrounded by family and his students. What he was doing is he was taking the he was surrounded by family and his students. What he was doing is he was taking the greatest that had been thought and said, and he was putting it together in the service of others as the master teacher. Bach moved off his fluid intelligence curve to his crystallized intelligence curve and cultivated his relationships and his faith and his love. And he was successful and happy in a brand new way by remodeling his life. I hope young people read this as well, not just people who are in middle age who are going through this. Because I think it sets up expectations and a recipe for what's the life by design,

not believing that the wonderful Disney ride that we're on now lasts. And I've seen this in a couple of friends, which they, again, wildly successful and famous in the past. And other people have replaced them in their disciplines. It's the normal course. And they keep talking about what they did. And what they're doing is an attempt to recreate what they did. And this is not just for people who are wildly successful. If somebody has one success, and we see this in companies all the time, I'm going to keep doing that thing because it worked once, it's probably going to keep working. And I think this is sort of the great insight here, which is no matter how much happiness or much success or the thing that you want, you get all of those things are temporary, every single one of those, to see those and accept those as temporary.

Absolutely. And you know, the interesting thing is also this period when you are remodeling your life is something that people, well, first, they don't know that they can have a transition, but part of it is this fear, this fear of letting things go. And it takes practice, by the way. I mean, the idea of taking your career down to the studs and rebuilding it when you have a really, really good career. I mean, trust me, man, it's tricky. And you're going to be lonely, you're going to be insecure, and people are not going to return your calls. And politicians that you thought were your friends, it turns out that you're not real friends, you're deal friends. This is just the way it works. But there's a key insight about transitions. And this is in the book

too. There's a guy named Bruce Feiler who wrote a really nice book about how life is in the transitions. And that's what social psychologists call liminality. Liminality is the time between two things. And it has a particular disconsolate feeling. I mean, it's scary, it's disconcerting, but at the same time, it's incredibly fertile. And it reminds me, when I was a kid, I used to like to fish. And I remember the first time I went fishing in the ocean. I grew up on the West Coast. I'm from Seattle, but I was on the Oregon coast. I went out fishing on the rocks, first time I ever tried it. And I was catching nothing for two hours. And this wizened old mariner from, you know, the town comes up and he says, Hey kid,

you catching anything? I'm like, no. He says, are you getting any bites? And I said, no. He says, cause you're doing it wrong. And I said, what, what, what am I doing wrong? He said, you can only catch fish during the falling tide. Now the falling tide is the time when the tide is going out really fast. And I said, well, no fish, right? He said, no, no, no, no, no. In a falling tide, it looks like everything's going out, but the bait fish and the plankton are stirred up. So the game fish are going crazy. You'll see. He said, he looked at his watch like 28 minutes later, we throw our lines in and we're pulling them out one after another. I mean, it's unbelievable. And afterward, you know, we're sitting on the rocks exhausted and he, you know, he's,

he lights a cigarette and he's looking all philosophical. And he says, Hey kid, you know, during a falling tide, you can only make one mistake fishing. And I said, what is it? He said, not having your line in the water. And that's true for life, man. I mean, the falling tide, it looks like it's terrible. Nobody wants the falling tide. The tide's going out. This is the end. It was so good. The falling tide, it looks like a period of loss. And what it is, is the game fish are waiting for you. Get your line in the water when you're most uncomfortable, when you've lost the most, when you feel like the best days are past, that's your chance. That's when you need to jump on it because that's when magic can happen. Arthur Brooks, I could talk to you for hours.

You are pure magic. I stand by what I said at the beginning of this conversation, which is, I've never had a conversation with you where I didn't learn something or have a new perspective. My mind right now is firing off. You have so much original thought and I have learned so much from this conversation. Let's just do this on a regular basis. Let's do it, man. I love it. I love every chance to talk to you. It just gives me more of an excuse to hang out with my old friend, Simon. You're fantastic. And for those who want to learn more, pick up Strength to Strength, available at fine bookstores everywhere and some not so fine ones as well.

I met all the disreputable bookstores too. Arthur Brooks, you're the best. Thank you so, so much. Thank you, brother. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.