Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - How to Know What You’re Supposed to Do With Your Life | Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

How do you figure out your purpose? Why don’t you feel happy? These questions get answered in a mindblowing episode with #1 New York Times bestselling author Arthur Brooks.Thank you to our sponsors!GEVITI: Use code "ALEX" to get 20% off of your first purchaseNATURAL SLOTH: Use code ALEX for 15% OFFTECH WELLNESS: Use code "ALEXCLARK" for 15% off EMF-Free Air Tube Headphones, Faraday Bags, and EMF Protection PacksPUORI: Use code "ALEX" for 32% off Puori Creatine+ when you start a subscription VOTE ONLINE: Check your voter registration status now Our Guest:Arthur BrooksAruthur's Links: WebsiteBooksXInstagramYouTubeFacebookFOLLOW ALEX:⁠⁠⁠Alex's Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Culture Apothecary's Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Alex's YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Alex's Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Alex's X⁠⁠⁠🌿 Culture Apothecary ⁠⁠⁠WEBSITE/NEWSLETTER⁠⁠⁠Join the ⁠⁠⁠Cuteservatives Facebook group⁠⁠⁠ to connect with like minded friends who love America and all things health and wellness! New episodes drop 6pm PST/ 9pm EST every Monday and Thursday.DISCLAIMER: This content is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Always talk to a qualified healthcare professional for any health-related questions or decisions.

If you get up before dawn and walk for an hour without devices every day with an intention, the information will find you. There's three emotions that you feel when you're facing a decision that's ambiguous to you. Number one is excitement. Number two is fear. And number three is deadness. Here's what you want. 80% excitement, 20% fear, zero percent deadness.

Happiness for most people is a feeling and that's wrong. Happiness isn't a feeling. Feelings of happiness are evidence of happiness. Happiness is a combination of enjoyment of your life, satisfaction with your accomplishments and the meaning of your existence. We actually become happier, not just, you know, temporary feel good for a few hours or think like we just have to really earn it, but actually building a life where we experience more joy, satisfaction, meaning, and love. Today's guest has spent decades studying the science of happiness.

Arthur Brooks is one of the world's leading experts on the science of human happiness. He's a professor at Vanderbilt University and a senior fellow at Harvard Business School, a bestselling author, speaker, and former president of the American Enterprise Institute. He's written 16 books, including the number one New York Times bestsellers, The Meaning of Your Life, Build the Life You Want, with Oprah Winfrey, and from strength to strength. Watch this episode on the real Alex Clark YouTube or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. On this show, we invite guests to share their unique remedy to heal us at culture, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Before we start, please pause, take three seconds to leave. a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. This show is free, and to keep it that way, that's the only thing I ask you to do because it helps the show remain high in the charts and discoverable to new people. Now, another thing that helps, sending episodes to friends and family and telling them you better listen to this show or else. Please welcome author, speaker, and professor of happiness at Harvard, Arthur Brooks, to Culture Apothecary.

What is Happiness? Yeah, what is happiness? I'd say, you know, this is the biggest mistake that people make. The reason that people are searching and searching and not succeeding in the thing they most want in life is because they have the wrong definition. I mean, if you didn't, you wanted to get to Tacoma, but didn't know it was a city in Washington State, you'd be in big trouble. Happiness for most people is a feeling, and that's wrong. Happiness isn't a feeling. Feelings of happiness are evidence of happiness.

Like the smell of dinner is evidence of dinner. If you're just going for the smell, going for the smell, your health is never going to improve. You're not going to eat what you need. So what you need to do is to actually approach it scientifically. Happiness has macronutrients like food, and that's what you need to look for. Happiness is a combination of enjoyment of your life, satisfaction with your accomplishments, and the meaning of your existence. Enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning. Those are the three things to pursue.

Those are the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness. That is the definition of happiness. Is it healthy to want to be happy? Like, is that something we should be trying to, to, to, pursue and find, or is that unhealthy to be thinking, like, I want to be happy? Well, so there's a couple of things in there. Everybody wants to be happy. Everybody wants to be happy.

I mean, that's what Thomas Aquinas said. Everybody wants to be happy. Aristotle said that. This is true that everybody, now, not everybody acts like they want to be happy, but they do. But saying, I want to be happy all the time. And pursuing happiness per se is, that's a problem because that's just like saying, I want to be healthy. No, no, no, no.

Pursue things to get healthier and don't just walk around wishing you. you were healthier. That's what it comes down to. So yeah, you want to be happier. Now go do something about it and pay attention to that. Pay attention to the process and you will get happier. You won't be happy perfectly. Actually, you will. Just not here. Right. But in this life, but you can be a lot happier if you actually know the science and have good strategies. So you became a happiness expert because you said that happiness didn't come naturally to you. Now obviously you study this and do this for a living and you believe that you are truly happy. I'm happier. I'm not truly happy. I'm all only be truly happy in heaven.

That's what I believe. And by the way, everybody wants to be completely happy and they can't on earth because you have negative emotions and you have negative experiences and you're going to until the day you die. But you feel like you can be perfectly happy. The reason is because that hunger is evidence of the truth that it exists. I believe, as a religious person, I believe that your hunger for pure happiness is evidence of heaven, which is a beautiful thing. Just as your thirst is evidence of the existence of water

and your hunger for food is evidence that food exists. You want perfect happiness. You do, you do, but you can't get it here. Oh, no. Yeah, you can. Never right. Were you a Catholic

whenever you were struggling to be happy? Or did you find Catholicism, find Jesus? Then you felt like, okay, now I am happier. So I was raised in a Christian family, in a very serious Christian family, evangelical family. I converted to Catholicism as a teenager. I had a mystical experience, or maybe it was childhood rebellion. I don't know. My parents were like, I guess it's better than drugs. Well, true. I came into the church at 16, and that was right for me. So I'm a lifelong Christian.

I mean, when I was in my 20s, I was more lazy about it, but I was never turning away from it. the truth is that that's just been the background of my whole life. And what's happened is as I've gotten older, not just to get happier, but because it's more important to me. It's more, I'm realizing that this is the most important thing in life. And, you know, this is the center of my marriage, there's the center of my family life. And at the end of my life, you know, when I retire from what I'm doing and, and, you know, I'm, you know, on a rocking chair on the porch, I'm going to be praying my rosary. Because this is ultimately our destiny, I believe, as Christian people, as religious people. is that you get to move from this linear passage of time,

totally goal-oriented to the, it's kind of like the river turns into the sea, and then it spreads out so time actually becomes less linear, and your time on Earth starts to merge with the eternity in heaven. That's the religious life that you're supposed to have. I realize that's really abstract. No, I love that. Do you think that the bulk of happiness in people's lives

is coming from making changes or accepting what you cannot change? you cannot change. Both. And so here's the biggest mistake that people make besides defining happiness as a feeling, thinking that happiness has to be dependent on things that are happening outside of you, as opposed to working on things that you can change inside of you. People say all the time, I'll be happy when I get a job. I'll be happy when my marriage gets better. I'll be happy if my health improves. I'll be happy if the economy changes. I mean, I'm sorry. I mean, some of those things you can change, but a lot of it you can't. Pay attention to the stuff you can actually change. Pay attention to the enjoyment

by understanding what it is, which is not the pursuit of pleasure. I talk a lot about the difference between enjoyment and pleasure. That's a big mistake people make. I talk about creating goals and direction in your life so you can make progress. That's a source of satisfaction. And I'm mostly talking about the meaning of life and actually how to find the meaning of your life, but you have to look within, which is one of the reasons that religion is so critically important, but also just love across all different dimensions. These are real things that we can do. It's not just an abstract, sure hope I get happier. No, on the contrary, this is a, like your health. I mean, take control of it, man. What is the difference between enjoyment and pleasure? You said there's a big

difference that people don't realize. Yeah, yeah. So the way that the brain works is it's kind of, you can, there's this ancient theory of the, it's a way of explaining how the brain works, called the triune brain. Where the most primitive parts of your brain are called the reptilian brain, that's the brain stem and the part of the back of your head where you perceive things below your level of consciousness. And it governs all the stuff that you do that you're not aware of, like your heartbeat and your breathing, you're blinking,

et cetera, et cetera. That sends signals about things that are going on below your level of consciousness to your limbic system, that system too. And that's your emotional console. That's between two and 40 million years old. I mean,

before we were humans, we were able to have emotions, which is why all the mammals have emotions. Your golden retriever actually feels love and sadness the way that we do, which is an amazing thing. But that's a physiological phenomenon. Your emotions are not special. Your emotions are just information.

And those emotions then send the signal positive or negative to your prefrontal cortex. That's the most human part of your brain. That's the newest part. It's only 250,000 years old that, you know, something's going on. It's a threat or an opportunity. You should pursue it or you should avoid it and make a decision. That's, it's amazing. I mean, God made our brain in this amazing way where it's detection, emotion, decision

that's actually going on all day long. Well, that emotion part, that automatic part, that's where we perceive pleasure. The pleasure centers of our brain, the ventral tegmental area, the ventral striatum, you tap them, you go, you know, and your husband says, I love you, and it taps the ventral striatum of your brain.

Or if you take drugs, it'll tap the same thing, because our brain's really, really thrifty, which, by the way, is one of the reasons that people who are super lonely and want love get addicted to drugs, because they want to tap those parts of the brain. It's psychology's biology. It's super important to keep that in mind.

So that's the thing. You don't want to just be your secret of happiness being tapping the ventral tegmental area of your limbic system. That's like life goals like a dog or a squirrel. I'm like, I'm human. Enjoyment is really, really human. So you take, I'm not against feeling good. On the contrary, I'm not some sort of Puritan. Right.

I'm Catholic. you know and and and but you want something that you can manage you don't want your pleasures to manage you you want to manage your pleasures and and that's where enjoyment comes in enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory and so it becomes really conscious and really memorable and it becomes part of good life is how that works so things that are they're addictive for example which a lot of things can be from eating to internet use to pornography to drugs to gambling it's so addictive because it engages your brain in that particular way. If you're doing it alone, you're doing it wrong.

That's kind of the rule. When people do things that are addictive alone, that's the problem. But when they're doing things socially, they tend to be self-governing and they make those things memorable. That's why nobody eats their Thanksgiving dinner by themselves. Right. You know, it's like, oh, great. It's a November 25th, I can't wait to make the biggest turkey and just sit there and eat it by myself. No.

You know, you take a picture of it in the oven because it's so beautiful. You know, that's what we used to do when I was a kid. There's like 30 pictures of turkeys and ovens. I mean, it's like, because we're trying to make a memory. And then we can have it together as a family. And that's the essence of enjoyment of life. I like what you kind of brought up briefly about pets. So pets do experience emotions.

You're just saying it's a little bit different than humans? It's, well, the emotional, I mean, their living system is different than ours, but not that different. And so, you know, it's funny. there's this, there's a neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin. Of course you know it. You know, it functions as a hormone. It's called the love molecule for a reason. And so when you're with your husband and you're looking at each other in the eyes, and by the way, you're newly married. Congratulations. Thank you. Don't stop eye contact. Okay. And he will stop eye contact because women have three times as much oxytocin as men, which means they need more of the, they just stimulated more,

which is what you get from this really intense eye contact. Five minutes before you go to sleep at night while you're lying in bed, staring to each other's eyes for five minutes, it saves marriages. I like this marriage tip. For sure. I mean, I got protocols for saying. My wife and I, we'd actually do these scientific protocols for saving marriages. We'd marry 35 years. What? We could have done a whole episode on that.

Oh, yeah. Well, next time we should bring her. She's the best. That'd be awesome. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, so this oxytocin that we have, we're not the only species who have it. It links you to other people with intense bonds of love. It makes you feel this kinship.

your dog has it too. It turns out because our brains, our limbic systems, have evolved in parallel with each other. And so when you stare into your dog's eyes and touch your dog, your dog's blood oxytocin levels go up by 56%. Wow. Your cats go up by 12%. Yeah, so they really don't like us. They're like, eh, I can do without a human. Tolerate us.

You know, the dog actually loves you. The cat kind of tolerates you, which is, once again, social science tells you what you already knew. But this is the key thing. And so, yeah, their brains were. evolved in parallel with homo sapiens along the same basic process, and they have emotions. The differences, they act only according to their emotions because they don't have a prefrontal cortex that can make them live up to their moral aspirations. So here's the thing about being human. This is the divinity within us. This is the difference. And from the neuroscientific perspective,

we can choose between animal impulses and moral aspirations because our prefrontal cortex allows us to do that. This is an incredible gift from God that we can actually say, Yeah, I want to do that thing. I'm not going to do that thing. I'm not going to have four pieces of cake. I love four pieces of cake. I have a huge sweet. But a dog can't stop.

The dog will eat everything you put in front of the dog because the dog, a dog is not going to be like, you know what? I think it's imprudent for me to keep eating. No, right? And it'll just get fatter and fatter and fatter. You have to be the moral aspiration for your dog because you're the person and you can get that. But that's what it means to be a self-governing person. That's the beauty of human life.

is to make that choice. So why is it that we are more comfortable than ever before? We have more access to therapy than ever before, more freedom than any previous generation. Yet we don't seem to be getting much happier. We're not just not getting happier. We're getting unhappier. Right. We're going in reverse.

So what in your mind is, what do you pinpoint as the cause of that? Because people say social media and isolate, I mean, I don't know, maybe all. Yeah, no. So that's a big question. That's what I've been studying for decades, you know. So when you talk about happiness, there's kind of the climate and the weather. I don't mean that literally.

I mean, the climate of happiness is sort of the general climate of happiness, and that's been getting worse. We have climate change. With happiness. Happiness, global warming. And then we have storms. We have the weather, weather problems.

So the big climate of happiness comes down to the fact that there's four drivers, fundamental drivers in the lives of the happiest people that they're doing right. They have their faith on point. They have their family life on point. They have close friendships, real friends, not just deal friends,

and they serve other people with their work and they feel like they're earning their success. Faith, family, friends, and work. Those are the big four. Everything else. I mean, the other stuff are details. But those are the big four that we need to be paying attention to. And all four are going in reverse little by little by little by little.

People are less likely to practice faith. They're more likely to say they're none, N-O-N-E, not an N-U-N-U-N. I wish we had more nuns, right? But, you know, the year I was born in the mid-60s, it was 1% of the population had no religion. Now it's 32% of the population has no religion. That is crazy. What's causing it to grow at that rate?

Just the basic secularism of our culture. Wow. That's just been, you know, systematically stamping out the interest that people have, the expectations that people actually have, the fact that at colleges and universities, smart people don't practice their faith. Why is that?

That's just because that's in the cultural milieu. That's just how the, that's basically, I believe it's a slow rolling fad. I think that we're coming back to an enlightenment, a period, but of spiritual enlightenment, I have a kind of period of enrichment. I think that people your age are actually going to usher back in with love the idea that a good life is one where we transcend ourselves in faith. And it's my generation that screwed that up, by the way. Have you ever gotten so bloated that you start bargaining with God?

You're Googling. Is it gluten? Is it dairy? Is it stressed? Did I drink water too fast? am I secretly four months pregnant? And then somebody's like, no, bloating. It's just bloating. And that's normal. No, bloating is common. That's not the same thing. Imagine trying every elimination diet, every probiotic,

every digestive enzyme, TikTok has ever recommended. And then you finally do a GI map test. And then you're like, oh my gosh, it's a parasite. It's been a parasite this whole time. The parasites want the candy. Well, at least you now have an answer. That's one of the reasons I love Jevity. Jevity does not just.

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I was at my friend's house the other night, and his cat would not stop farting. I'm not exaggerating. This thing is committing chemical warfare in a 900 square foot apartment. You walk in, it smells like the fall of Rome. The poor guy's lighting random gas station candles trying to cover it up, which is basically like spraying cologne on a tire fire. I told him, stop poisoning yourself and get something actually clean. That's why I like natural sloth beeswax candles.

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And they're handmade in Texas, small batches, veteran-owned. honest about every ingredient. Now, they also make soaps and room sprays, which are also super good, all non-toxic, organic ingredients, perfect if you've got kids, sensitive people, a gassy cat, a gastroom bathroom. Go to natural sloth.com, use code Alex for 15% off, cleanhouse, clean air, fewer war crimes from your friend's cat. Natural sloth.com, code Alex for 15% off. I mean, you're a professor, you're a scientist.

Is it because, like, a college mindset is, um, you know, you know, you know, you're a professor. need evidence to prove everything and faith is kind of opposite of that. Like faith is kind of a reach for kids that are kind of thinking in that mindset. Is that why there's a lack of it? Well, that's as old as the Enlightenment. So the Enlightenment basically said that science was going to explain everything. Right. And that's wrong. I mean, science is not going to explain everything. The most important parts of life will never be explained scientifically. They won't. And we actually know neuroscientifically why that's the case. You know, science is very good at how to and what? Fantastic. I love it. I'm a scientist. My dad was a scientist. I mean, it's like this is what we do, right?

But that's very left hemispheric. The left side of your brain does that. The right hemisphere of your brain is about mystery and meaning and intuition and love and happiness. And it doesn't work that way. And we've been given to hemispheres for a reason. This is where we ask the why questions of life. But the problem is increasingly, especially over the past 50 years, not just the enlightenment, but the way that our culture is gone, there's an app for that.

Yeah. We have an engineering culture. So what's really, really hurt us. And that one is that. Now, it's also we find that family life isn't a good. between, friendship is in decline, and we find that people are less engaged in their work as a, as a kind of a vocation sense of calling. That's the, that's the culture. That's been ticking us down by half a percentage point in happiness every year since 1990, effectively. Then you got the storms.

There's three weather patterns that have gone through. Number one was starting in 2008. And I used to think it was, at first I thought it was like the financial crisis. That's when everybody got a smartphone. So the first smartphone was delivered in the end of 2007. By 2009, we all had a smartphone. And then they all had apps on them by 2010. And they were all dating us by 2012. And so that was when we started to mediate our relationships with actually the small screen, which is really bad because the small screen is a left hemispheric scientific simulation

of the right hemispheric love and mystery that we want. And you can't simulate. We're living in the Matrix. That's what it comes down to. That's storm number one. Story number two is the culture war. And the culture war was a slow rolling thing, the woke apocalypse. That actually, from 2010, really until the present, but the apogee of that was in, you know, 2021, 2022 was horrible.

Were you teaching at that time? Oh, yeah, I've been a teacher. So did you see in real time college students in particular? I'm just curious between 2010 and 2016 getting unhappier? Absolutely. That's very interesting. And, you know, John Haidt, have you had him on the show? Jonathan Haidt?

No, but I'm very familiar. Ancient generation. Yeah, he and I have been great friends going way back to 2007. It was the first time we collaborated. And we have these kind of careers in parallel. We're the same age. And we're both social scientists. And we're both all about love and happiness, right?

He's the greatest social scientist of our generation. Oh, wow. Anytime he writes a book, that's what everybody's going to be talking about in two years. He's a crystal ball. It's the most amazing thing. And his new stuff actually talks about two things that have made young people miserable. number one is the smartphone and number two is well I mean he talks about kids that weren't actually able to play and go outside because of the smartphones but he talks about on campuses for example

young people that have been conscripted into a culture war by baby boomers people my age have tried to conscript people your age into hating other people because they disagree about politics which is what wait wait what do you mean what do you mean what like give an example of a behavior of baby boomers that's propagated this you go to college you take a class You find out that everybody who believes a certain thing is actually incredibly ignorant and stupid, including your parents with whom you should go in no contact. That's happening every place. Right, but how is that a baby boomer thing? Because all the teachers are my age.

Okay. That's why. Because what happened was that the culture war activists in the first generation were disproportionately gen X and baby boomers. This is not a generational war thing. This is basically a problem with activism in America, which was disproportionately. undertaken by dark triad personalities, people who are above average in narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathic traits.

That's one in 14 in the population, 7% of the population. Is that big? That's huge. That means that you look around, you've got dark triads all over the place. Dark triads will wreck your life. So when people, because I see this all the time

and I wanted to ask you about it, when, you know, I feel like everybody's a narcissist. At least that's what you see online. My ex-boyfriend is a narcissist. My ex-best friend is a narcissist. I think it's thrown around and it's used to Cavalier. But you're saying, though, we are seeing an increase.

And on my website, people can take a test to see if somebody they love is a dark triad. Now, narcissism is one thing. Okay. And narcissism basically is all about me. And you can actually take a well-validated survey to say whether or not you score above average on that. But you want to add two other things when people become actually dangerous. When they're Machiavellian, which is to say they have a tendency to say, I will hurt you to get the small, this thing that I want. I will disproportionately harm you to get something that I want. And I have

a psychopathic trait, meaning I'm low in empathy and remorse. Okay. So look, this is by a show because I'm a conservative, I'm open about it. So when I hear you describing that, obviously my boss was Charlie Kirk who was shot and murdered for what I think, a trivial, personal point of view, and they wanted that small thing, they wanted him dead, everybody cheered, they feel no remorse. So why is it that we almost see leftism attributing a lot more of those traits, even though? then far right. And I mean, I can think of psychos on the far right, but their traits are even different than that. Well, they, no, fundamentally they boil down to the same set of traits. Okay. So the extremes are activists who are dark triads. And that's actually what's been so

miserable for young people to get back to the original question. Young people who, especially on college campuses, they were disproportionately activated by activists, advocates, as opposed to college about inquiry. College is about learning cool stuff, making great friends and falling in love every week. That's college. That's what college is supposed to be. College is not supposed to be. We hate everybody.

We're afraid. We're aggrieved. We're oppressed. And you're blaming the professors for that. The baby boomer professors. Really. It actually has a lot more to do. Sam Abrams, who does work at over at the American Enterprise Institute, which is my old home.

He shows that it's actually administrators, middle administrators. That whole thing. You know, the dean, the associate dean for campus life. And it's really the professors are, I've been a professor, my whole. career. And, you know, most of my professor friends who are, you know, left of center, they're not like this at all. So that's actually not, and Harvard's not like that at all. But a lot of the problems are the activation that actually came from, from activists who were in different parts of the ranks, a massive part of that. And his, Sam Abrams work really shows

this clearly. So that's a big problem in college. And that's mostly on the left, but it's not only on the left. People who are watching this is very easy. When somebody is telling you that you should hate somebody else, they're profiting and you're not. They're men. They're manipulating your emotional life. They're manipulating the limbic system of your brain. Here's the part that they're manipulating, by the way. The science of this is really clear. There's a part of your limbic system called the insular cortex, also known as the insula.

That's the disgust center. Disgust is a basic negative emotion. You have four negative emotions. Fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Disgust is supposed to be reserved for pathogens. Before there was antibiotics and vaccines and all this stuff, all we had was discussed to keep us from poisoning ourselves. So we're naturally disgusted by things that are dangerous. Blood, really bad smells, the smells of things that are rotting. That's basically your brain going, don't eat that.

That has bacteria in it potentially. And why your dog will eat that is because your dog actually doesn't have the same, doesn't have the same exposure to pathogens. So your dog will lick the floor, and you're going gross. And then when you have a baby, the baby will lick the floor when the dog does. And you're like, you can't do that. The dog can. That's because you have different insular cord disease. your brain because you have different pathogen exposures. Okay. So the whole point is that's why we feel disgust. But what activists do, they try to activate that little part of your brain for disgust against

another person. And the way that they'll do that is saying things like, what she says is disgusting. What the president just said is disgusting. They're trying to activate the disgust center in your limbic system. That's what the Nazis called Jews rats. The Hutus in the Rwandan genocide had a word for Tutsis. for, they call them cockroaches. They wanted to manipulate your brain.

Now, everybody listening to us right now or watching us right now, you're going to know when somebody on your side is doing that. It doesn't matter with somebody the other side, does it? Because you don't, it's your side that's dangerous.

Right. Okay, so that brings to mind conspiratorial thinking. Exactly. Exactly. Because conspiracy thinking is to other, you know, somebody who doesn't agree with you

and to anathematize them to say that they're disgusting so that they'll manipulate. They'll hijack you. I mean, disgust will freak you out. Disgust will override all your other systems because you don't want to get poisoned. And so that's how they can manipulate, turn you into a soldier. Well, this is what I've been wondering, Arthur, is I just can't understand some of this stuff that we're seeing go viral online.

Obviously, I work at turning point. So I see that directed towards us. On the right. And you're seeing it mostly on the right. On the right. Yeah. It's totally on the right. But it's the same.

Same people. And by the way, a lot of people who are on the left today used to be on the right. and vice versa. Totally. Why? Because they're true believers and they're dark triads. That's the thing to keep in mind. They're dark triads.

It doesn't matter if people are on the left or on the right. Spooky. They will hurt you if they're dark triads for their gain. So when you're talking about people like that, what I've been trying to understand is, I mean, some of this stuff, it's so blatantly untrue or laughably untrue, but yet they believe it so fervently.

Yeah. So you're saying it's because the disgust center of their brain is being hijacked, and that's why this is like a, it's like the ultimate way to be. basically propagandize someone? Well, it's how they're activated is through the Discuss Center. Why would they believe it?

That's a different question. And we actually know that, too. Why do people believe crazy conspiracy theories? Now, to begin with, let's be honest, a lot of things that the mainstream media and polite culture will tell us our conspiracy theories, turns out they're not conspiracy theories. Right. And so, see, that's what hard. I know.

Because how do you explain to these people, to be fair, there are some, there are corrupt institutions. No, no, no, I remember. I mean, I was in, you know, in 2020, I was sitting there like everybody else, hearing that if you said that there was a lab leak in Wuhan as the source of the coronavirus, then, you know, you're a kook and a nut. And it's like, wait a second, isn't that a virology lab that's working on on gain of function research around coronavirus? So to me, I'm like, we had evidence. We had evidence early on that those things were lies and that we weren't conspiracy theorists. Some of this stuff online, it goes so far people won't let go of it, even in spite of evidence. There is stuff that truly is kooky. And we should have the prudential judgment to know the difference. Why don't we? Here's the reason.

So the last macronutrient of happiness is meaning. I talked about that before. Meaning in turn has kind of three parts to it. One of them is significance. Why does my life matter? And that's love, right? It's like to whom? God, your husband, your parents, your friends.

The second part is purpose. Purpose is what am I doing with my life? You know, can I make, do I have goals? Do I have direction? Can I make progress? You got to have that. But the last is coherence, this idea that things happen for a reason. You need to feel like things happen for a reason.

Now, I have two organizing theories that work with each other about why things happen. And one is the laws of science and the other is the will of God. And they worked together. My dad really believed that. My dad had a PhD in biostatistics. So my smartest guy ever met. And he used to say, you know the God's greatest miracle? I said, no, dad, what's God's greatest miracle?

He said that he allowed things to happen at random. And he created distributions of events, the bell curve. What a great difference. This is not how difficult people think about it. And I said, okay, okay, Dad, I thought it was such a smart guy. Explain miracles. Explain miracles then if everything's just random. And he said, oh, miracles are just long-tail events.

There are things that are very unlikely to happen, but they do. I mean, he had this organizing theory that mixed his deep, deep belief in God with his understanding of these scientific principles. that's coherence. That's coherence. Me too. I really have that too. But if you don't have, like, not just sophistication,

but trust in science, and you don't have a lot of faith. If your faith is weak or wobbly or something, you're going to start grabbing onto all kinds of coherence theories. Like, it's powerful people doing things behind the scenes. It's powerful people who, they have all the information and you don't, because you're a pawn in this whole thing.

Oh, they have way more power than you think. they have more power than you think. And it goes from there to there to there to there. And then what happens is, of course, is that dark triads will exploit that because they'll give you special knowledge. They're the ones who have their, they're sort of Gnostic. Well, they'll say, you know, don't listen to anyone but me. I'm the only one telling you the truth.

That's how cults work, by the way. 100%. Cults are based on that, on a new theory of coherence. And so if you feel like everything is incoherent, you're really doubting the faith of your youth and science doesn't make sense. and things feel out of control. That's when people join cults. And we're in a whole bunch of cults.

I mean, the internet is a cult machine ideologically. And so people will say, well, you know, she's making sense. She's kind of making sense. And you know what? She's saying some things that put things into perspective I never thought about before. And she seems kind of unafraid. That's a cult leader right there.

That's how cult leaders actually work. And that's a coherence hunger, which means that they're looking for meaning, meaning that they want more happiness. And so the way is when you've got somebody in your family that's doing their own research and going down the rabbit hole in the internet and coming out with kooky ideas, don't say, you moron, look at their evidence, which is what everybody does at Thanksgiving. You moron, look at the data. That's not true. You don't argue about it that way. Yeah, what's the correct way to respond to these people? With love, because that person is actually having a crisis. That person is actually lacking coherence. It can be very hard to express love under the circumstances because it can be bitter and it can be actually dangerous. what they actually come up with. But that's a cry for help.

That's a cry for coherence when somebody's strongly embracing conspiracy theories. Now, again, you know, if you believed in the Wuhan lab leak, you were accused of being a conspiracy theorist, then it turns out you weren't, right? So you have to have judgment about these things as well. What if you can't figure out what your calling is?

Yeah, yeah, which a lot of people can't. And calling is this sense of what I'm meant to do, right? What am I meant to do? And it's funny because that's almost a religious question. You know, if you're a complete atheist, it's like meant by whom? Why would you be looking for what you're meant to do if there's nobody who is trying to means for you to do anything? It's what it comes down to.

There's a greater intelligence that you're appealing to at this point. There's a greater source of knowledge than that which you have. But everybody feels that pull. We feel that pull because we're made to actually live according to a calling. Now, I believe that that is a divine thing. I believe that we're children of God and that were made in his image, and he's generative and creative. And so therefore, we're generative and creative. We're made to make things.

We are in Latin, I'm Catholic here, so I'll talk about homo faber, right? And it's not just Christians who said this. I mean, the great philosopher Hannah Arendt, she talked about homo faber and how when we get away from doing things, making things, being creative, will be completely alienated and depressed. And it's absolutely true in the literature. I see it in the research all the time. That's why, by the way, if you leave all of your writing to Chad GPT to AI, you'll get depressed. We need to write. People who are, why?

Because that makes real ideas, makes ideas in the ether into something real. It's writing and for you, it's actually, you're doing a version of writing here. You're making ideas in the ether real by having a podcast that you're expressing to other people. This is homo faber. This is basically you're chiseling something out of marble and making a statue. you right now we have to do that is the way that that works okay but what am i supposed to do which thing am i actually supposed to do i work with young people and i have for a long time since i was a young person right i mean i've been a professor since i was my you know mid 30s and um so i was your age i was a

professor and and i've been working with people and trying to figure it out myself and the whole point is to to to i believe that if you're religious this is something you need to give up that this is something you basically say so as a christian something i've said something i've said from the very beginning is, Lord, guide my path. Make your will my will. Help me understand your will. As a Catholic, what I would do, every time I had a big change in my career,

is I would spend a bunch of time in front of the Blessed Sacrament. That's at the tabernacle and the where we believe that literally the body of Christ is and say, I'm just, I'm here to listen. I'm here to listen. Lord, show me your will. Lord, show me your will. Make my will your will.

Make your will. Make your will my will. Yeah. And so that's, as a religious matter, And that's a good idea. I've also, to find my calling, I've walked the community of Santiago, which is ancient practice, not just for Catholics, but for all religions. When you don't know what to do, go for a super long walk. We are an ambulatory species. We're made to walk, and we find things and we think better when we walk.

There's a ton of research on this. And so I've walked across northern Spain twice in 2019 and with my wife. And I wanted to do the whole 33 days, 800K, and my wife's like, no. So we did the last eight days instead. That's enough. And I've done it, did it again in 2021 when I have these big intentions and these big questions. But the whole point is that you need openness so that the answers can actually find you. Then what I talk about with young people is do something.

Just do something. I had this realization recently that some of us put wireless earbuds in our ears at 7am. and basically do not remove them until bedtime, especially people 25 and younger. You know, you're working out, AirPods, they're driving, they've got their AirPods in, they're at their desk at the office, they've got AirPods, grocery store, phone calls, walking around the house, listening to a podcast, hopefully this one. We have got to reduce Bluetooth exposure through a device that is literally inside your skull. This is why I recommend and wear tech wellnesses anti-radiation air tube headphones.

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I mean, do you know that your voter registration is up to date? Because most people are walking around with no freaking clue. And voter registration is one of those things that people assume is just handled. and then they show up and find out the government has them listed as deceased, living in another county, or apparently still registered in an apartment where they once paid $2,300 a month to hear their neighbor practice the trumpet. Yeah, a lot can mess up your voter registration. You moved.

You changed your name. You haven't voted in a while. You made one typo three years ago. And now you're in this bureaucratic hostage situation. Millions of people either aren't registered at all or they have no idea if they are. Like one in four people are basically just freelancing their democracy. So here's the easiest thing you can do today. Just go to real alexclark.com slash vote.

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Do you think when you were talking about different pieces of marriage advice at the beginning, do you feel like when you have to make a big decision, make that decision while you're on a walk together would be one? Yeah, that's right. That's a good, well, you know, the whole point is don't make the decision, let the decision, the answer find you. When you're walking, the kind of mystical experience that people have, it's a really long walk. And by the way, you can do it every day for an hour if you get up before dawn. A lot of neuroscience research on this. The Indians call this the Brahma Makuta.

It's kind of a holy hour. Get up a half hour before dawn and walk for an hour without devices every day with an intention. And the information will find you as an empirical matter. It's a really, really, really good technique because it's like a miniature, it's a miniature commino. It's a pilgrimage that you actually do every day. It's a really good way to find it. There are also ways to think about hard decisions. So, for example, you're married. But if you weren't and some guy wanted to marry you and you're like, I don't know, right? Or if there were a career possibility. I don't know if you're going to have to move to a new city. I don't know. Here's how to think about it. Here's a way to structure that decision that'll be most likely to be coincident with your calling. Now I'm being really practical. There's three emotions that you feel when you're facing a decision that's ambiguous to you or it's abstract to you. Number one is excitement. Number two is fear. And number three is deadness. And you know that feeling? I mean, back when you're probably, you know, when you were single and a guy really likes you and he's like, he's a great guy and he's a good-looking guy and he's got a good future, but you felt

dead inside with him. You remember that feeling? Of course. Of course. Everybody does, right? Or when you're offered a big opportunity professionally and you're like, I know it's a good opportunity, but I feel dead inside. Yep.

Listen to that. That's super important. That turns out to be, that's your gut. And that's actually processing a bunch of data about yourself that you can't quite articulate because it's right hemispheric. It's the Y part. It's the intuition part. So your gut, by the way,

why we talk about our gut, it's because our stomach is left hemispheric. It's actually a little bit biased to the left side of our bodies, meaning it's largely governed by the right side of our brains. Same thing with our heart. Same thing with our spleen.

All the organs that you talk about with your emotions, they're all right hemispheric for reason. That's, it's a really important thing to keep in mind. Okay, so excitement, fear and deadness. Here's what you want to marry the guy, to take the job, to move the city, whatever. 80% excitement, 20% fear, 0% deadness. Or as close as you can actually come. Some people don't have a good fortune to be actually all the way at 0% deadness. But don't override that because that's, that's your,

you're keeping the score inside. Now, you don't want more than 80% excitement. You want 20% fear because you're an entrepreneur, right? I mean, getting married is scary. Yeah. It's scary because it's just like, I don't know. I've met a lot of divorce people in my life. You know, I don't know how I'm going to change. I don't know how he's going to change.

Those metrics are exactly how I would say I felt when it came to big, huge career decisions in my life or what have you. That's exactly the feeling when I was like, I really think this is right. And I went for it and took the risk. And that's exactly how I would have felt. And when you've made mistakes is probably you weren't those purported. Yes. It was too much fear, meaning it was too risky, or it was too little fear, meaning that you're going to get bored really fast. Or there's a little bit of deadness because you let somebody else's judgment override yours. This is excellent stuff. That's what you find your calling.

Next thing I want to ask you about with the little time we have left is you decided to move in with your family and live with your grandkids. Yeah. Why? Why did you do that? I'm curious as a social scientist if there was a reason beyond just you love your grandkids and you don't spend time with them. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of people do this because of necessity because their kids are on hard times or whatever happened to me. That wasn't the case. So all three of my three adult kids, my kids are 28, 26, and 23. And they were living in different parts of the country. I had one son. My kids got married young. My son's got married to 22 and 23. They had their first children nine months later right after they got married. My daughter is 23 now and not married yet. But my kids are really, really independent making their own decisions. They're really. entrepreneurs in their own life, which you do. I mean, people get married young these days. That's like a subversive act. They're very traditionalist in their own way. Two of my three kids are Marines. So they're military. And my middle son was still active duty at the time out in Camp Pendleton in California. Another son was in Boston living across town from us. We were living in Boston as

well. My daughter was still in college up in Providence, Rhode Island. And we had a big family meeting. And I said, okay, what do you want to do? And they said, we want to be together. Like, what do you mean? With you and with us? We want to be together. So, okay, that's old school. Let's do it. Where?

And they voted. And they voted for Northern Virginia because they had been raised in the DMV. They'd been raised in the D.C. region. I was the president of the American Enterprise Institute for 11 years right across town. We're recording this at the Heritage Foundation. I was at the American Enterprise Institute, the crosstown rival. And so they know this region. They went to school to the Catholic schools here.

That's where they want to send their kids. They voted. And fair is fair. So we all moved. We all moved down. Now my daughter is still active duty in the Marine Corps. And so she still has three years. Wow, she's a Marine also. Yeah, she's an officer. My son was a list. Yeah, my son was a scout sniper. So he was an ops guy. But my daughter is an officer. I've never heard of a family where all the kids, including the daughter, are all Marines. My oldest son is not. He's actually working as an AI data scientist for a defense contractor. Okay. And he's also. married has two sons and and his brother is married has two now has two sons they'll have three I would

love to read a parenting book from you yeah I mean my wife and I do a lot of this stuff actually together out of the road and my next book is actually called how to fall in love and stay in love cool amazing science romance yeah yeah for sure but and but we made this decision to actually move to the same place as soon as we could so the two families moved in one moved in with us for the first two years that we were there and so every day I would come down and my grandson would be my oldest grandson and then brother. I mean, it's just, it was the best thing ever. I mean, it's create stresses. I mean, families living together. It's like, why don't you clean up your mess? Right. Because my wife and I are super tidy and, and, and, and young people typically aren't. But they're great. I mean, they love us and

our, your grandsons. It's just a completely different experience. And, and we've gotten away from that and it's a mistake, actually. I recommend that people actually do that again. I mean, I have so much admiration for my oldest son who lived with us and his wife, um, for the incredible job. They're better parents than we were at that age. I mean, I'm looking at them going, man, they're so, and they're younger than we're. I mean, they were in their early 27 kids and they're better parents. And so the whole experience was really, really enriching, I have to say. And it will be because we're all live close to each other. We're a big mess. I want to ask you a little bit about your faith. You're a committed Catholic, obviously. Is your faith important to you because it

makes you happier or because it's true? My faith is who I am as a person. Whether it makes me happy or not is almost besides the point. It does make me happier. And I've got the data to show it that people who are seriously religious are on average significantly happier, less depressed, less anxious, less lonely than people who are not serious about their faith. That is an empirical regularity. But that's not why. That's not why I do it. I do it because I believe it's true. I believe that that is God's will for my life. I am living the life that I think God wants me to live. And I want to bring it to as many people as possible because I want to bring the truth to as many people as I possibly can. So let's just say hypothetically, if Catholicism made you

less happy, but you still believed it was true, would you still be a practicing Catholic? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And part of it is because I believe as a Catholic that my job on earth is not to be as happy as possible. My job isn't happiness. My job is holiness. Yes. And that's a really important distinction to be sure, but I also know that we have an opportunity to be happy. And part of our apostolate, which you evangelical is called mission, that will make us magnetic and bring more people in when we're joyful, which is why St. Paul said rejoice. And again, I say rejoice. And it's a fruit of the spirit. For sure. But we're also miserable. We're miserable people just like everybody else. The difference being that when you have a supernatural understanding of life, that your misery has context, that your misery has context, that you're has meaning, that your misery actually is sanctified. And actually, even that can bring you closer to truth. Does the pursuit of happiness always lead to good outcomes? Not necessarily because the pursuit of happiness often leads to a lot of mistakes that we make.

The classic mistake is that people will listen to the world. They'll listen to the world's formula. The world's got a formula, Alex, for happiness. Do you want it? You want to hear the world's formula? Yeah. Love things, use people and worship yourself. Yes.

That's the world's formula. I mean, love things. love the money, the power, the pleasure, the fame, the Instagram followers, you know, the new car, whatever it happens to be, is the colossus of our culture, especially in the internet era, has made us believe that we should love these things, that these things have a soul. You use people. They're there for your gratification, your desire, your ambition. That's what people are for.

And it's all revolving around you anyway, so your God, worship yourself. And that's just the exact way to become completely miserable. That's the pursuit of happiness that leads to misery. Now, there's a solution to that, which has actually changed the verbs and the nouns around. That's a counterfeit formula, by the way. Counterfeit money looks like real money, which is why you can pass it off at a liquor store, but it won't actually have any real value. That's the counterfeit formula for happiness. The real formula for happiness, the real thing, looks like it, but is different in fundamental ways.

It is use things, love people, and worship God. That's all you need to know is what it comes down to. I mean, the use things, by the way, we're told constantly in sort of the cultish environment in which we live that you should feel really bad about using things. You should be really bad about consuming things. Every time you put a gallon of gas in your car, you should feel really, really bad about it. No, you should be grateful. That's liquid freedom right there. You should be prudent about the way you use it, and you should try to be a responsible citizen, and you shouldn't leave your, you know, your car running when you're not in it.

I mean, there's all kinds of things that you should recycle. Good. But be grateful for the abundance, this country, this world. We've pulled, we've pulled, you know, 80% of the worst starvation level poverty out of the world since I was a kid. Starvation level poverty has declined by 80% since I was a kid. It's the most amazing thing. And that's because we have a mindset of abundance, which is beautiful.

But don't love things. You only love people. people are there for loving. And loving means to will their good and act accordingly. You don't use them. You love them. That's really, really important. I mean, this is one of the things that I talk to, even, you know, my secular students, my religious students when they're dating. You don't use people. You love people, which is why dating is not entertaining for the role of husband. Right. That's what, if you want to be serious about it, you want to be happy, by the way. I'm not just being a moralist. If you want to be happy, it's about love. Happiness is love. And then you only worship God. You only worship the divine as you understand the divine. Where can people read more of your work? Yeah, these days, it'll probably just follow you on the YouTube algorithm at this point. I hope. Arthurbricks.com is my website.

That's got all my columns. I read a column every week at the free press called the Presum Happiness. We love the free press. Vance and I are huge, huge fans. We go to their dinner parties. We love them. They're great. It's a really great, you know, alternative form of ideas out there that Barry Weiss put together.

She's a real visionary in India for sure. So, yeah, read the free press every week. You can read my books. I've got a new book that comes out every two years. And go to Arthurbrooks.com. You can take all the tests for all the stuff that we're talking about here and get involved in our internet community. And it's really great. I ask every guest this to end the show. If you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture, it can be physically, emotionally or spiritually, what would that remedy be? That remedy comes down to the fundamental principle of what a good society and a good life is all about, which is that you need to love more. If there's one thing that we remember and you don't know what to do, if you don't know what to do, if you'd don't know what to do. So you'll do that the 10 commandments, you know, starts with loving the Lord your God, et cetera, et cetera. We all know that. And Jesus has asked, you know, it's like, what are the most important of the commandments? And he said, love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. It's about love. It's the two love commandments. If you can't remember the 10 commandments, just the two

love commandments. And then St. Augustine in the fourth century, he says, you know, sometimes you can't even remember that. So just love and do as you will. love and do as you will. That's all you need to know. That's all there is to know on earth and all you need to know. As long as you know what love is, it'll never stir you wrong. And God is love. According to St. John the Apostle and according to my heart right now. Thank you, Arthur, for coming on Culture Apothecary. Thank you. Thank you for your great show. And thanks to all of our fans and friends who are watching us right now. Well, do you feel happier already? I know I do. I am bummed. We couldn't talk longer, but so thankful for the time that we did

I definitely want to have Arthur on again. Leave us a five-star review. Tell me what you thought of this episode. New episodes come out every Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern, anywhere you listen to podcasts, or real Alex Clark on YouTube. Keep the discussion going in the cute servatives Facebook group, by the way. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture of Hot to Carry.