Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 280: Proven Rules for Deep Living (w/ Arthur Brooks)

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

The mega-bestselling writer Arthur Brooks is one of the rare individuals to have both lived a carefully cultivated deep life and written a book on the topic (co-authored with Oprah!). In today’s episode, Cal interviews Brooks, going deep into the details of his unusual and inspiring career and extracting proven rules from his experience.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaINTERVIEW: Mega-bestselling writer Arthur Brooks [6:39]Cal’s Favorite Completely Unnecessary and Embarrassingly Geeky Things for 2024 [1:16:04]Links:https://www.calnewport.com/slowThanks to our Sponsors: rhone.com/calshopify.com/deepnotion.com/calThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Work, HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, Happy Merry Christmas, I should say. This episode is coming out on Christmas Day, I think, if I'm doing my math correctly. Merry Christmas. There we go. Can we have Mark add some holiday music back here? We sure can.

right, let's do that. All right, here we go. Now we've got a holiday episode up and running. I don't know, actually, Jesse. I don't know what you think. The week of Christmas vacation, when this comes out, is this going to be an unusually large number of listeners or an unusually small number of listeners?

I could really see both being true. People aren't commuting. They aren't going to work. On the other hand, I imagine a lot of people listening to this right now are, you know, at their in-laws house on their third walk of the day. You know what I mean? Like, I don't need to hear my brother-in-law's theories on the Middle East anymore. I need to go pick up some eggs from the store.

So we might have a lot of people just looking for some peace and quiet right now. So I think we're doing an important service. I actually do have a holiday-related public service announcement. I think this is very important. not for our Christian listeners celebrating Christmas, but actually this is for our Jewish listeners. Very important public service announcement. A couple weeks ago, went to a party.

This was during Hanukkah. And there's kids there. There's some draodles. So the host said, hey, let's do a dreidel tournament. It's like, great, we're going to do a dreidel tournament. This should be fun. I don't know, Jesse, do you know the rules of dreidel? No.

It's a betting game pretty straightforward. You start with a certain A pot of, you each have a certain amount of whatever. M&Ms, money, Gelt will call it units. You antheon one to the pot. Then you roll a four-sided top. So there's four options. You take turns spinning this top, the dreidel.

There's four options. If the Hebrew letter, none comes up, you do nothing. If shin comes up, you put one of yours in. So you're adding to the pot from your own pile. Okay. If hay comes up, you get half of what's in the pot. And if Gimel comes up, you get everything that's in the pot. So you look at this just from a mathematical perspective,

like there's a lot of movement out of this pot because 50% of the probability is on taking a lot of stuff out of the pot. So you think this is going to be a pretty quick moving game. And we played this in the tournament starting with just six units. So you know, you anti-one. So you only have five to begin with and one in the middle. You think this game would end quick. these games went on forever,

forever, just like going, going, going, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So, come home from this party, and because I'm awesome, and women find me very interesting for this reason, I decided to program a Dratel simulator, which is the right thing to do in this situation. So I threw together some Python code.

It's a pretty simple simulation, right? You have a random number generator. There's only four outcomes in each round. You just keep track of whose turn it is. There's only four outcomes. track of the pot did this trail simulator configured it with the exact same pot sizes and initial sizes of units we used in this tournament some of these simulated games jesse over 270 rounds till someone lost really yes it is an incredibly uh even game the there's a lot of movement in and out

but it's incredibly evenly matched so it's actually very difficult to have someone go on a sufficiently large run to empty out the pot. So I think it's a public service announcement. Do not get into a Dradle game casually. You're going to think, hey, I've got four or five, we've got some gelt here. It's not going to take very long. You could be playing this game for a really long time. How long did it take you to run the simulation?

It took me maybe like 10 minutes to write it. I just threw, I just loaded up a web-based Python IDE. And then this is like CS1 or CS2 type of programming, right? I mean, it's not so hard. You've got a loop, keeping track of some pots. You have four outcomes. You're printing out what's going on, you know. A couple things you can do to make the code a little bit more condensed and no big deals.

Anyways, this is why I'm a very cool guy and very impressive. This is the type of young men out there. This is the way that you find yourself a mate in life is just show off your in the moment programming skills, especially at a party. I think it's like a really cool thing to bring to a party. especially if you're young. Excuse me. Did you go back to the party? I wish I had written it right there.

It turns out later I now know how to, you can use this on your phone, but I wrote it when I got home. Then, this is true. So the guy who invited the dad, who I know, I was like, well, he's a computer scientist. Let me send him this code. Like, hey, a program to simulate,

I think you like this. I'm like, why is he not responding? Turns out I sent you the wrong person. There's another person out there who's getting text from me with Drayal simulator code. So it's been eventful. But that's my public service announcement. Draydle is not actually a good game.

It's too well balanced. You got to offset that balance with larger antis. Maybe these rules need to change. I don't know. We might need a rabbi involved. I'm not sure how this works. But be wary about casually agreeing to play a game of Dradle. You could be doing that for a long time.

So what are we going to do today, Jesse? Well, I figured no one's working this. week. So instead of having one of our normal, like, let's get in the weeds about how to find depth in a world of lots of technological distractions to get more organized, to avoid overload, the type of things we've been talking about. Let's step back and do a more deep life-centric episode, and we are going to bring on a guest here in a second to help us. So we have an interview episode here. I figure you all have time as you're escaping your in-law's house and trying to take long, long walk. So you have time to listen.

So who we have joining us is actually the number one New York Times bestselling author, Arthur Brooks. You may know him from his most recent book, Build the Life You Want, which he co-authored with none other than Oprah Winfrey, number one New York Times bestseller. Before that, he had another mega bestseller in his book from strength to strength. What's interesting about Brooks is that his last two books are about systematically, cultivating a better life. He also did this in his own life. A really interesting story

where he goes from professional music to entering and crushing it in academia with a late start to completely switching from that to something else, the nonprofit sector, and completely switching from that in his 50s into full-time successful writing. And along the way, he was very systematic

by how I thought about this. So when he comes on, What I'm going to talk to him about is his life story, how he made these decisions, these seemingly drastic changes in his life that led to a deeper, more interesting life. And then we extract from that some general rules for anyone who during this holiday week is just taking a moment to step back and saying, what path am I on? How might I want to shift this path? If I want to shift this path, what is the right way to do it?

We're going to get all into this with Arthur Brooks. And then stick around because in the third and final segment in honor of the holiday, holidays, we are going to do my own gloss on Oprah's annual favorite things. You know, Oprah every year says, here are my favorite things. And because we're interviewing Oprah's co-author and friend Arthur Brooks, I figured, let's do my version of my favorite things. And instead of me just actually talking about reasonable things that you might like, I'm going to present my favorite completely unnecessary and embarrassingly geeky things

for 2024. So stay tuned for that. This is going to be hardcore geekdom. We'll get to that after the interview. One other quick note before we get started, because we're doing an interview, there's no slow productivity corner in this episode, which of course makes me sad, but good news, we just set something up. For those who are interested in the slow productivity book that's coming out in March, we now have an excerpt available. So you can get a head start on reading some of the core ideas in the book. just go to calnewport.com slash slow and you can download an excerpt of the book.

That's calnewport.com slash slow. All right, with that, Jesse, let's get started with my interview with Arthur Brooks. All right, Arthur Brooks. Thank you for coming on the Deep Questions podcast. Thanks, Cal. I've been such an admirer and consumer of the show. I'm delighted and really excited to be on with you. Well, so that you know, as someone who's consumed the show, that we have something in common.

What we talk about here on the show often is how do you intentionally engineer a life that's deep? When you have all of these shallow, often digital distractions, they're trying to pull you away from meaning. So your new book, Build the Life You Want, is exactly the type of thing we're talking about. I'm excited to get to this blueprint-type approach of how do you get intention. about designing your life. My listeners love this. But if you'll indulge me, what I wanted to do first was actually go back and spend some time on your life story, which I have broken into four acts, each of which is really different than the last.

I think it's a case study of really applying, not just intention to your life, but revision. Okay, where are things now? Let me adjust my vision. Let me make perhaps a major change. So I thought we would start with the real life case study. study of designing your life with your life itself. So to start at the beginning, I have your act one as serious musician. Would you, do I have that right?

You would say this is your first act as an adult life was music. Yeah, that was my first act as a child too. And by the way, this systemic approach to actually building your life, you're the, you're the best guy in the world to talk about this because you have this systematic, well, you do two things incredibly well. You understand the difference between complex and complicated problems. mathematically. Complex problems don't have solutions, but they're easy to understand. Complicated problems are hard to understand, but you can solve them with enough horsepower. And you understand

that you can't use complicated solutions to solve complex problems. And all of this goes into the way that you're going to build your life. And I know we're going to talk about this. You're the guy that actually understands for people how to do this. So I'm delighted to be able to be a case study for you, for this. And for your first question, music was the only part of my life that I didn't shoes actually. It was it was chosen for me. Perhaps divinely, I don't know, my parents. When I was four, I started violin. When I was five, I started the piano. When I was eight, I started the French horn, eight. I mean, yeah. And I was really good at that and that really stuck. And it was fun and I liked it. And I loved music, et cetera. And so that's what I was, by the time I was 10 or 11 years old,

my ambition was to be the world's greatest French horn player. That was what I wanted to do. I wanted to grow up and do that. All of my heroes were great. French horn players. The greatest horn player who's ever lived is a British guy from the 1930s and 40s named Dennis Brain. And Dennis Brain, I had a picture of him up on my bedroom wall. I didn't have Michael Jordan. I had, or, you know, Will Chamberlain. I had, I had Dennis Brain up on the wall. And that's what I did. And so it was, you know, my unsuccessful run in college when I was 18. Really what it was was my heart wasn't in it because I wanted to go pro. So I left, I was, I was, there was a mutual decision of the college and me to pursue my excellence elsewhere, put it that way.

And I left right after my 19th birthday, and that's when I went pro and musician. I did that until I was 31. Well, you know, and I've heard that before from a professional musician friend of mine is that these colleges that are focused on the arts, if you make it the graduation basically means you failed. So you go to one of these colleges. He went to a Berkeley School of Music in Boston. Yeah, yeah. The whole pressure of that system is go pro.

So I should mention, by the way, Arthur, when I was eight years old, I started playing the French horn. Did you really? So we've got that connected. So third or fourth grade, you started playing the French horn as well. It was very hard. And you made good. Look, you escape the vortex, Cal. It's an impossible, it's a preposterous instrument, I would say.

It's so hard to play. The physics are no good, which you don't know. The problem is that it's almost as long as a tuba, which should make it a base instrument. But the mouthpiece that you blow into is the size of a trumpet. mouthpiece. And what that does effectively is it sets the harmonics on top of each other that are so close that it's easy to miss notes. The reason that French horn players notoriously are inaccurate is because the mouthpiece is too small for the length of the instrument. And so, you know, hitting the harmonic in the series right is perilous, like a tight wire arc, like being a flying

Walenda, but for the brass section. Yeah, the trumpet players just sort of blow into that thing. And it's like their notes are clear. And the French horns, you have to, A, you have to blow into that thing like a hurricane force and be precise. Well, anyways, I did not have the poster of the professional French horn player. But so we see you then. You're in your 20s. You're playing, you dropped out of school to be pro. You're playing professional French horn.

By your 30s, you are a full professor. I mean, you're an academic. You're a standard academic at Syracuse. So walk us through that transition. How do we get from playing and was at Barcelona to, I'm on an academic track, not a typical path. So what went down there? Yeah, it's not a typical path.

But when I was a kid, I had this theory, believe it or not. I mean, it was kind of a precocious theory to have I realized. But nonetheless, I had this idea that you could build your life. You got to make your own decisions, that it was almost incumbent upon you to make a decision about different areas of your life. And so I always figured at some point it was my responsibility to choose my religion. Not every year, like some sort of sentimentalist, but to choose my faith and practice it seriously. To choose my own political views.

To make a choice on the basis of the information that's out there. So not take things, important things in your life as given. And that meant my vocation as well. The problem is I hadn't chosen my vocation. I hadn't chosen my vocational path. And by the time I was in my mid-20s, you know, my life was great. I have to say, I mean, I moved to Barcelona and joined the symphony. not because of the symphony, but because I was in love with a Spanish girl.

And I chased her to Barcelona in a bid to learn the language so I could ask her to marry me, which took two years to close that deal. But, you know, we just celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary, and we have kids and grandkids at this point. So that turned out that venture was really successful. But in that time, I realized that I, you know, I was good at it, but I didn't love it. I didn't love it. I wasn't the world's greatest French horn player, but I was making a living, which isn't nothing.

And so my wife, my new wife, said, why don't you figure out what you love? I mean, don't you have this theory that you get to choose everything once? And I said, huh. So I actually went back to school. She was studying for her high school diploma in her late 20s. She had dropped out in high school when she was 16 to sing with a very famous rock band in Barcelona. And so she was doing that, taking a few math classes. And she said, you got to try math.

I said math. You know, my dad was a math professor, but, you know, no. for me. I took calculus and it was like doing crossword puzzles, man. It was easy and fun and just because I was 27 or something at that point. And so I wound up enrolling in correspondent school, distance learning in Barcelona, took a job in South Florida teaching French horn because it gave me enough time to finish my bachelor's degree by correspondence, which wound up being in economics because it was so interesting. Social science, this is something I chose. And when I got my master's degree in economics, and by that time I was 31, and I was actually ready to try something

new, so I quit and started my PhD. So I did my PhD in three years in public policy analysis. My fields were applied microeconomics and math modeling. I was doing operations, military operations research for the U.S. Air Force while I was in graduate school to make a living. And then I came out and took an academic job, you know, used my PhD to get an academic job as a social scientist, first at Georgia State for a little while, and then at Syracuse. and I had all told that first paths through academia was 10 years where I took promotions and tenure and, you know,

endowed chairs and all the stuff that you do in academia. But when you were making that intentional vocational choice there in Spain, was the vision all the way through to academia or was it, I don't want to do French horn anymore, let me go back to school and then we will see what that opens up. How far in the future were you thinking?

I was, I had notions of it, and the truth is that academia is the family business for me. My father was a professor, was a math professor, his father was a theology professor and an administrator at a college, at religious colleges actually. But it is a family profession. So I always kind of thought, you know, it's a pretty good life, et cetera, but I don't know. You know, maybe I'll try to run a company, maybe I'll go to one of these crazy think tanks, et cetera. What I really wanted was to learn social science, which is incredibly interesting. I mean, human behavior is the most interesting thing ever because you can use mathematical and statistical tools, complicated tools, to at least apprehend some of these complex problems of human behavior.

Not perfectly. This is not computer science we're talking about here. But it is amazing how much power you have. And so I just couldn't get enough of that. I was much happier as a social scientist than I ever had been as a classical musician because it was the thing that I chose. I was passionate about it. And then when I got out of graduate school, I realized I could continue to love. learn and I needed to learn a lot more only if I went into academia. So my assistant professor life,

you know, before I got any, you know, I was on, I was on the tenure track, but before I got any of that tenure, it really was an extension of my PhD. I learned probably more as an assistant professor than I did in graduate school. You too, probably, right? Oh yeah, well, especially like teaching a course, you know, then you learn. Oh, I understand this. I understand this topic now. But also writing code. You know, I was running very sophisticated packages, you know, software packages for my statistical programming and I had to learn how to write code, which taught me the statistics. And then I was writing a lot of theory. I was doing, you know, early AI stuff.

I was doing a lot of stuff with genetic algorithms and using genetic algorithms as learning models across economies. And I had to learn how that worked. And, you know, I didn't get any of that in my PhD. Talk about a topic that has fallen out of favor. I remember genetic algorithms. You would actually evolve the algorithms with natural selection. But I think you're selling, so just to set the stage for the I and she.

You're being modest here because I think a misnomer a lot of people in the general public have about academia is this idea of like, well, if you get a PhD, like one of the things you can just choose to do is teach. It's just like this teach is how it's described. And it's like, yeah, you could go be a professor if you decide to or not. The reality course is that, especially when you get to an R1 institution or an institution like Syracuse, it's incredibly competitive. It's very hard to get hired at Syracuse and then advance through the promotion chain. So it must be what you were doing in Georgia State had a spark to it, right? So it must have been you were seeing early on or maybe you're doing this on purpose. You were finding a niche that was gathering some heat or some attention because that's actually a really impressive jump.

I mean, typically, again, a professor of Syracuse would have been good school, straight out of college, into grad school, like their whole life focused on getting hired into one of those slots. You came into it sideways. So I'm assuming what you were doing was seen as was innovative, or you found a, you found a, you. vein there that was really rich. Yeah, it's basically what it was. I had my eye on Syracuse because Syracuse was the number one school and policy in the country at the time. And there were great professors there, people I really venerated.

It was a community I wanted to be part of. And so when I came out of graduate school, I went into academia at Georgia State, also, you know, very fine university and I enjoyed it a lot. The first thing that I did was I figured out how the system works. The biggest mistake that professors make when they come out of graduate school is that they'll say something like, you know, I'm going to get my courses under control, then I'm going to start paying attention to my research. That's the, I can tell that that person's probably not going to get tenure. The truth is that in an R1 research university, research is everything. It really matters what

you're doing in research. So I got a lay of the, I got a notion of how the traffic patterns work. And that meant basically that there was a certain number of articles in certain set of journals. I looked at those journals and the articles that I admired the most, and I found most interesting, I actually made a template of those articles. I didn't make a macro to write the articles. That's completely impossible, obviously. It's still a creative task. But I made a structure that I needed to follow, and I started to follow that particular structure.

And I did that about six times in each of my first three years in academia, which gave me a real leg up. and it made it possible to show that I had a big research record. I was doing economic, statistical research in public policy, which was a little bit unusual. You were doing six best journals. Six papers a year you're hitting in your journal papers in your assistant professorship years? Yeah, that was that's right. Mostly sole authored, which actually was a weakness. I needed to co-author a little bit more.

I could have had, I could have been doing higher quality research if I'd been co-authoring with more senior people. But I was trying to keep up a speed. I mean, I was working pretty hard, I have to say. And by that time I had little kids. kids and there was a cost to it. I mean, I was working 60, 80 hour weeks. That's superstar. Before our audience, six journal papers a year in that field, that's superstar level performance. I think what would be more typical is two, maybe three. So I mean, you really, you work backwards. By the way, what you're saying reminds this is exactly a same story that I think

our mutual acquaintance, Adam Grant, has told me about when he started at PIN was figuring out the same thing. What do you need to write a paper? How many people? papers are my typical colleagues writing. All right, let me do twice that. And then he ends up the youngest ten-year and youngest full professor in Penn history. So I'm sensing something very similar. You deconstructed the system and said, then let me level up. Like, let me level up to be doing probably much more than your colleagues were at the institution at the time.

Yeah. Well, I was doing, I was doing more. And part of the reason is because I had a little bit of a pathological need to catch up with my cohort. So Adam Grant, who is, you know, a genius. He's unbelievable. He was the youngest guy ever tenured at Penn. I was not the youngest guy tenured any place because I had already had a 12-year career as a French horn player before I even went to graduate school. So by the time I graduated with my PhD, I was 34 years old.

And to catch up, I kind of figured that I needed to get promotion in tenure by seven to eight years in. And to do that, I kind of just backed out the amount of productivity I thought I was going to need to have to get there in the meantime. And that actually worked. When you understand systems, you're a lot more successful. I mean, when you understand traffic, you're less likely to have an accident or get a ticket. And when you understand the rules of the academic road, you know what the expectations are, and you can design your work patterns to that. Now, what impedes that is if you don't like doing the work.

You know, the biggest problem that I see academics have is they come out of their PhD and they don't like writing articles. They just don't enjoy it. And so they put it off and they can't get to it and they think it's boring. and they go do something else, or they write kind of popular stuff or whatever. And then by the time their third year review or their tenure time comes around, they don't have enough of a record. But for me, it was a thrill. I was learning stuff like crazy.

And so it was not an onerous task for me to publish, you know, five, six, seven articles a year. And my goal was to hit 60 by my 10th year. That was the whole idea. Well, I mean, and I'll say it's just an add-on to that because I went through something similar. soon after I started my assistant professorship, I did something similar. So I did a study. I said, I want to go back and study past the tenure coming in my field of computer science. So what I went back and did was found natural experiments where you had two students leaving

the same advisor. So they had the same training and then looking at their time to tenure or even if they made tenure at all. Right. So I had two cohorts, fast to tenure, not faster, not tenured, coming out of the same training environment. And I wrote an essay about this early on in my blog days. And so I said, what's different? Let me quantify everything I can and say what's different. And I figured out, oh, the people who get tenure faster, it wasn't publication quantity, it wasn't so much topic.

It was the number of citations of their five most cited papers. And I realized, oh, this is what's important is you have to write these, in my field, you have to write these papers that get cited a lot. And what makes papers get cited a lot. Typically, you're making progress on a hard problem that people are working on because you've made progress on it and then people are going to build on you. And so it was both good news and bad news. Good news because there's clarity. Bad news because it's really, really hard.

And so that I further deconstructed, how do the real stars make the huge progress? And you could deconstruct it. And it was they spent a lot of time. In mathematics, your dad would probably tell you something similar. A lot of it is deconstructing what other people have done. really understanding in your bones how the proofs work. And this is very hard because people skip details in their papers. And if you do, then you can make progress.

And that is just really, really, really hard. And so at some point I had to make a decision. I can do pretty well here. I get 10 year early and do this and that. Be a superstar. I know exactly what that would take. And I don't think I had the stomach for it. I was like, that's just, it's so mentally demanding the deconstruction of these proofs.

You have to just do it hour after hour, day after day. So it's interesting when you deconstructs. It not only gives you the path towards where you want to go, sometimes it changes your path because you realize I don't exactly want to do what's required. Yeah. Or if you allow me to analyze you a little bit, Cal, because I know some things about your career as well. And what it really takes for that highest echelon is not just more intellectual horsepower or the willingness and ability to do that one thing for 80 hours a week for a little bit. while. You got to pay your dues for a long time. You know, anytime a band comes from no place, it's like an overnight hit. Everybody's talking about it. They've been out at a holiday

end by the airport playing, you know, doing as a cover band for 15 years. That's what's been going on. And you've got to do that work and do that work and do that work. And if you're interested in a lot of different things, beavering away at the margins like that is not something that's necessarily going to appeal to you. And you're, I mean, you're natural, public, intellectual, Cal. You want to be in the public talking about these things that can raise consciousness among non-scientists as opposed to simply raising consciousness in the ether of the scientists, in the rarefied atmosphere of the scientists themselves.

And that's going to make it hard, maybe impossible, for you to play, you know, Beatles tunes at the holiday end for 15 or 20 years, which is. deconstructing somebody else's proofs to see what's actually going on. It's a question of longevity in the trenches, which is hard for natural public intellectuals, I dare say. Is that fair? I think that is probably fair. Yeah, it is, it's a grind, and it's a really, it's a really long grind.

I mean, writing's the same way. You've experienced this as well. It takes a lot of writing before you can write things that large audiences actually like. You know, I got started early. I sold my first book when I was 20. I had this very long training period to actually get to a point where it's like, okay, I can sort of write something now that, you know, is good. So everything has trenches. The trenches are long.

Yeah. So then why did you, if we go to the next act, is now your think tank world here in D.C. So leaving academia, that's a scary thing for people with full professorships at R1 institution. So I'm particularly interested in this. Yeah. What was that decision process? It wasn't scary, actually. And part of the reason was because I hit my number.

I hit 60 articles, peer-reviewed articles. And I thought to myself, what is the, and that was around, you know, getting toward tenure. So I entered academia at 34. Around 44, I was looking around at other opportunities to, you know, create value as a social scientist. I joined up as a part-time kind of visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute there in D.C.

and I was spending a day a month, something like that, doing different policy ideas. And I was starting to write sort of trade books on the side. And so I wrote a book called Who Really Cares About Charitable Giving. It was actually quite academic, had a mathematical appendix and the whole thing. But it got noticed. President Bush read it and called me to the White House. And I started to get, it's not like it was some huge big hit, but it did change my perspective on how I could have a conversation. And I realized when I was looking at the next 10 years, I mean, 10 years is a good cadence.

Now, it follows the career trajectory of the so-called spiral. I didn't know it at the time. And I've gone back and participated in the research on it at this point. What you find is that most people think that they're linear, which is to say that they'll only change institutions or jobs when they're in the same field and have a better opportunity for more money, more prestige, more admiration, more, whatever. but a lot of people don't have that career trajectory. They have the spiral career trajectory, which is that they want a series of mini careers that make sense in their heads.

And sometimes you take more money and sometimes you take less money and sometimes you leave the industry. And when you're in academia, it means you've got to kick away your tenure from time to time. And after 10 years in academia, I was looking at the next 10 years

and said, that's another 60 articles. You know, and that's another 60. That's another more or less doing the same thing. It's doing my homework and turning it in. and I got nothing against that. Some of the people I respect the most in life have done that. But I thought, I bet there's a thing that I could do to take these ideas now and to start to make them more public and public policy.

My background is in policy. My PhD is in policy. I'd worked at the RAND Corporation in Policy, Syracuse University of Big Policy School. And the next thing, obviously, was a think tanker, so it seemed to me. And so I decided I was going to probably leave and be a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. And what surprised me is that they had a big crisis

or the fact that they couldn't find a president. It's an old think tank. It started in 1938, and it's one of the better known think tanks in the world. And their longtime president was leaving. They were out of time. They had offered it to a couple of people who'd turned it down. It was very hard to find a think tank president.

It's not a fun job, especially, in Washington, D.C. for a lot of people. And, you know, they were out of options. And I think that the last words uttered before offering me the job, a guy who had never supervised any employees and never raised a dollar. and this is a think tank based entirely in philanthropy. I think they basically are like, oh, what the hell? You know, give it a shot. If it doesn't work out, we'll fire them and we'll be fine.

Which was a little bit scary, but it also was incredibly exciting because it was the next phase in the, it was the next turn of the spiral is what it came out to be. I had been teaching nonprofit management, among other things at Syracuse. I had a big, I had a roundtable of nonprofit executives that I would be, that I was running. I was giving them. I wrote a textbook. Call have read a textbook and non-profit management. I'd never run a nonprofit. And I thought to myself, you know, I wonder if I could do this. I mean, I was just fascinated to know whether I could do public policy and be an administrator and kind of square these circles at the same time. And so when they offered me the job over the objections of my wife, who didn't want to move to Washington, D.C., I said, yeah. I said, yeah. So she said, okay, okay, give it a shot. And so I ran the American Enterprise Institute.

for 10 years and six months, 10.5 years. That was the second phase. And that was very interesting, I have to say. I wrote some books while I was there and I had a regular gig with the Wall Street Journal later in the New York Times. Once a month, I would write a column in those places about, you know, different public policies. And then more and more and more back to my social science roots. I was writing about human happiness in those venues, as a matter of fact. And I was also learning how to raise money. I had to raise $50 million a year. You had a major building project. I was hiring scholars. I had 310 employees.

And it was a, that was a lot. That was hard work. I have to say, that was very, very hard work. And so that was the next 10 and a half years, the next challenge, that was part three of the career. I guess if you're breaking into four parts, that's part three, right? That's part three, right? Yeah, okay. It is part three.

Yep, that's act three. That's, I mean, still fascinating to me, though. It's walking away from tenure. But it makes sense. You said, I did this 10 year chunk. Yeah. What's the next 10 years? So I'm assuming, the way you were thinking is, okay, here's a particular place to take my spiral.

Let's go to nonprofit management. Let's just try this. Let's actually have a policy impact. I'm assuming the other option you're trying to consider is how do I reconfigure my academic career for the next? A lot of that happens around that point. All right, I want to build a new theoretical framework. I want to publish the definitive book. I want to change the way.

I mean, it seems like this is what's needed for energy and academia is that 10 years in post-promotions, you need to either do something differently or within academia itself, you have to come up with some new grand project. So you weren't that scared walking away from tenure? I mean, I was pretty nervous. I wasn't nervous walking away from tenure because I knew, you know, I had a good research record and I was walking away from the number one school in my field, meaning that if I got fired from AEI, which was, by the way, pretty likely, that getting back into academia wouldn't be that hard. And the jobs that people were offering me at that point were, you know, either full professorships or administrative jobs. You know, when this was going on, a lot of places were coming and saying, how about thinking about being a dean, you know, policy schools? Some, you know, local, you know, people in the Syracuse came and asked if I thought I might want to run for Congress, which was kind of an interesting challenge.

There are a lot of weird things going. I went home with that one to my wife. She said, well, as you know, as Catholics, we don't believe in divorce. So, you know, that was the end of Congress. Yeah. Yeah, no, no, yeah. By the way, I would have lost anyway. Like, who wants this, you know, this mug for Congress?

It's like, we're not ready for bald politicians. But the whole point is that it was, there was a lot of stuff in the air because I knew that the spiral was turning and the universe conspires when the spiral is turning to give you options. Yeah. And if you don't take them, shame on you, right? I mean, it's really what it comes down to. So I knew that it was going to be fine, giving it my tenure. What I didn't know is if I was going to be ignominium.

humiliated by not being able to raise money or having some sort of revolt by the scholars or getting, you know, stomped in Washington, D.C. And I got to tell you, that was pretty stressful. And at times, it was pretty scary. Right. It's the end of AI. Within six months, the building's on fire. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I remember, you know, I got some bad press pretty early on. I had to make a lot of personnel moves just for the good of the institution and for our budget. I mean, it was, I went in on January 1st, 2009, in the teeth of the Great Recession. You know, we had blown a 10% hole in our budget in the last quarter before I came in. And I had to cut our cost structure by 16% in our first 64 days on the job.

And I hadn't run anything ever in my life. I don't run anything. And so the result was I was getting a lot of advice, you know, and people were, when you're running organization like that, a lot of people come out of the shadows and give you a list of the people that they think you should fire. everything. I had like 20 lists. And they were all, they were all orthogonal. I mean, it's like everybody's list had everybody else on it. And so this was completely unhelpful. And it was scary. It was tough. I got lit up in the press a little bit from time to time. But I got, I got to tell you, I got tougher. Yeah. Yeah. I'm probably making the publishing world seem easy now.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Academia, academic politics. Are you kidding me? No problem. No problem because no one actually cares. Yeah, it's the academic politics, the old joke is sort of like the intensity of the responses grows with the decreasing actual impact of what's being discussed. Yeah, that's an old Kissinger. That's an old Kissinger, Maxim, isn't it? It's about true. The more trivial it is, the more people are standing on the desk at the faculty meeting. So then we get your final act, actually this transition is maybe the one I'm even most interested in, which is where you leave the think tank world.

to essentially positive psychology, writing, some teaching. It's a significant change towards much more autonomous, sort of direct to consumer impact, meaning readers and students. All right, let's take a brief break from my conversation with Arthur to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. This is our friends at Notion. Now, you've heard me talk about Notion before. It is a software tool that allows you to combine your notes, documents, and projects all together in one beautiful space.

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Go there now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. That's Shopify.com slash deep. All right, with that, let's get back to my conversation with Arthur Brooks. Would you say the seed, because I'm just trying to read between the tea leaves, was the initial seed for this transition of leaving a think tank world, I'm going to write books basically full-time and also teaching the course of Harvard, was the seeds of this where you had started doing some regular writing for the journal in the Times, and it began to shift from the policy type stuff you would expect from the head of, you know,

from the public policy professor, the head of Enterprise Institute, to the positive psychology type, more directed people. Was that the seed planted right there? You could have another spiral turn coming up that was going to be much more just you directly interacting with people. Yeah, it was a couple of different things. One of them was that I had been working on the supply side of good ideas for a long time. And I realized along the way that it's much more powerful to work on the demand side. It's one thing to say, I've got 75 whizbangs, ideas about, you know, the carried interest provision of the Internal Revenue Code or and the new bomber force at the Pentagon or whatever and have people go, huh, what, you know,

including members of Congress. You know, and sometimes it sticks. But you get tons of attention if you foment a real hunger for a better life. And the way to do that is by talking about love and happiness. And I was a social scientist with a background in studies on love and happiness. So I thought to myself, I want to go back. Number one, I want to go to the demand side. Because what I want to do with the rest of my life is lift people up and bring them together.

That's what I want to do with the rest of my life. I want to use science and ideas to lift people up and bring them together. It's a purely personal and very ethical and moral mission that I have for what my life means, quite frankly. That's my mission statement, literally, is that's how I wrote my mission statement. And the best way to do that I thought is go back to my roots as a social scientist to dedicate myself to creative work and to work on the demand side. And I thought, well, what does that mean? How do I do that? And it seemed to me that that meant kind of a combination, once again, as a system of three parts to it.

Number one is I want to teach leaders. I want to teach. I want to foment this demand on the side of leaders. I want to make them hungry to have a better life and to become teachers of a better life as leaders themselves. At the best place I can and to find the best possible future leaders. The second part is I want my work to be public facing. In other words, I want my research to be public facing. Because, you know, I knew perfectly, based on my own research, that at that point I was 55 years old, that I wasn't going to be doing the best bench science.

I was not going to be pouring stuff into test tubes or for, you know, my field that's doing, you know, natural experiments and analyzing huge data sets, large data set econometrics. I'm not going to be able to do that as creatively as younger people. I'm going to be able to do public-facing work where I recognize patterns, tell stories, write lucidly. That's what older people are better at. and I wanted a public audience. So I wanted to have become a professor of practice where practice didn't mean telling war stories in the classroom and then taking academia to the masses.

That's what I wanted to do for the writing. And the last part is I wanted to be out on the road doing public-facing work. I wanted to be doing workshops and speeches. And I figured I could do that on, you know, the teaching part per se is about 20 hours a week. The research part is 20, 25 hours a week. And the last part I could do on 15 or 20 hours a week.

can make it part of a public intellectual profile that maybe a university would value. So that's when I went out and I talked to a bunch of universities. I talked to 10 universities. I said, I'm retiring as president of AEI. How does this sound? And a bunch of really, really good universities said that sounds pretty interesting. And I decided it was a good idea to get out of Dodge, leave Washington because, you know, it's not great for me to be walking up and down the halls of my old institution saying,

don't fire my friends, you know, that kind of thing, you know, because the new guy needs space to do it. And he's doing an outstanding job, by the way. He'll be the best president of places he's ever had. Guy named Robert Dore, you probably know him. But I needed to get out of town. And so I went to a place that's kind of interesting and a city that's kind of interesting. And literally one of the very greatest universities in the world, which was Harvard. And they, they split my time between the Kennedy School, which is the policy school and the business school, which trains obviously executives.

And in the business school, I created my happiness science class called Leadership and Happiness. And on the Kennedy School, I created my lab, which was the Leadership and Happiness Lab. And between those two things and the writing, speaking, teaching,

it's kind of worked out more or less the way I saw the architecture. And it's been incredibly exciting. I have to say, I'm by far the happiest in my career at this point. Interesting. So this was more systematic than I would have guessed.

So you knew at some point 10 years were going to, sunset the presidency. Yeah, I told them. I told them at five years in. They said, so what are we talking about? 20? And I said, no, we're talking about 10. So they deferred all of my comp to 10 years and six months, all of my my pension, all of my, all of my retirement at AEI to 10 years and six months. So that last year was a big check, I have to say, but it was the last check and it was that by design. Interesting, interesting. So then you were surveying the landscape and saying, how do I leverage what we would call like career capital?

And you're saying, well, I have the academic background. Because of that, you knew about things like professors of practices, that like these positions actually existed, these full-time non-tenure line positions. It's all just intricacies of how, I don't know if that's the situation you have, but I'm assuming that's what you're looking for. Yeah, yeah, totally. I was looking for something as kind of an industrial tenure, which is to say, five-year rolling contracts, so you can count on something, you know exactly what you're looking at,

but that would value the public intellectual portfolio and see it as something that's really useful to the university. So I'm not doing any work on the side. You know, everything is of a whole. You know, the work that I do out, you know, giving talks to different groups at universities and, et cetera, community groups, it actually feeds into the work that I do at my academic lab and gives me ideas that I'm using in the classroom, et cetera, et cetera. I'm also getting, you know, creating pathways for my students to be able to go, you know, into businesses in different places with their happiness expertise. Yeah, so you came in, so this is exactly what I'm going to do. I'm not just teaching and I'm not doing research in the traditional lab sense.

I am going to be writing and speaking and it's going to be a book every so often. It's going to be my regular columns. This is going to be my contribution. And so, you know, there's a term for that, a book I wrote a long time ago, actually a decade ago. So good they can't ignore you. I had this term I borrowed from Derek Sivers where he said, use money as a neutral indicator of value of your plans, It's basically see if someone will actually give you money for this thing you have, this idea. And that's actually the best feedback on whether or not it's good or not, as opposed to just people saying, oh, that sounds great.

You should do that. You should quit and write a book. That sounds romantic. You essentially did that. If this was a good idea, these universities would say, yes, we will actually hire you on a five-year contract. We want you to come and do this. So you have full confidence. So you go.

And then this succeeds really well. So you're, I mean, I know Love Your Enemies, your book Love Your Enemies maybe came out right after you left, but I'm assuming you, that was something you made. That was AI. That was during the eight years. Yeah. So from strength to strength, this is your first big test of the, let's do a big public facing thing. The book explodes. It's a huge, huge bestseller.

Everyone's talking about it. It sells a ton of copies. So what bring us behind why that book succeeded. What was the ingredients coming together? We have a lot of aspiring writers on my audience. What made that book so successful? Well, good luck. I mean, you know perfectly that there's a lot of serendipity that goes into it,

that goes into book publishing. And, you know, if you're thinking, well, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to leave academia and then I'm going to go and write a thing thing or whatever. I'm going to go write a huge bestseller. Well, there's a lot of books out there and most aren't. And a lot of really successful authors and a lot of really great books aren't. aren't successful by market measures. It's great.

I mean, probably all of your books have been bestsellers, but you're pretty unusual in this ways. I've written a number of books that, let's just say, weren't bestsellers. Then I thought that they were really good ideas, including a book on The Science of Happiness in 2008, before I left academia the first time. Everybody thought it was going to be a big deal,

and it was not a big deal, right? And so there's a lot of serendipity that goes into it. But I've been looking at the market niche when it came to the happiness world that was just simply not being filled. And that was people in the second half of their lives. How can you design the second half of, how can you work in the first half of your life and design the second half of your life

using the principles that I was able to see in big data sets in all the behavioral science and the new neuroscience that was coming out because I've had to retrain myself in neuroscience in a huge way. You can't be a good social scientist today and not know some neuroscience. Just you can't do it. And when I got my PhD in 1990,

Nobody knew any neuroscience. So, you know, I've had to go back, and I've been studying neuroscience very seriously for the past five years so that I don't have authority in it. I'm not writing research, primary research in it, but I'm a really good consumer of that research for my column in my books. And I went and I said, look, what is it about the second half of life that we need to understand? What are your natural strengths? How can you be a striver, a hardworking person, not burnout, not become frustrated, not go in decline. and not to feel empty alone when you actually have to stop your 9 to 5. How do you do it?

What's the secret on all these things? And I wrote that book, and the reason it was relatively popular is because people wanted that. People needed that, and it didn't exist. You go do a thing that isn't out there at this particular point. I designed the book the same way that I would of a startup that, you know, in biotech, you don't go, like saying, I'm going to make a new non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, you know, a new, a new kind of ibuprofen. You go out and you say I'm going to start a company that makes a large molecule drug that tries to take on a disease that currently doesn't have a cure.

I mean, take a big shot. But the whole point is that people want it. Once again, there's demand, but there isn't supply on that. That's the way to write a book. And so that's what I did. And that's probably the reason it was fairly popular. Yeah, it's always that combination. A topic that people really want to hear about plus the right person to write about it. You've got to have, you have those two things you have it. I mean, I guess David Brooks sort of had indicated with the second mountain, you know, a few years earlier, like, okay, there's people thinking about this. But the second mountain was not nearly as beat by beat pragmatic. Like, here are the elements to go into this and here's why they matter.

And let's get into the science of it. It was a little bit more philosophical, I suppose, for a David Brooks. Yeah. I mean, there's two different ways to look at a startup or a book or anything that's a new creative endeavor. There's sort of the conventional entrepreneurship, which is to say there's a ton of demand, but there's no supply, so I'm going to go create the supply. And the other is that there could be demand, but people just don't know it yet. That's even scarier.

I mean, that's the iPhone challenge. So, I mean, Steve Jobs said, hey, hey, I see this thing in my hand? You don't know what it is. It's a computer in your hand that does everything. People are like, I don't want it. And like, yeah, you do. Trust me. And that's a really scary thing to do.

That's when somebody writes a book that nobody knew they need. in the first place. And that's the, those are the, you know, that's the, the, the seven habits of highly effective people or how to win friends and influence people or the Bible or, you know, these things that that go so stratospheric that you can't believe it. From strength to strength was a book that people were asking for that had never been written by a social science, by a scientist, basically. And so, yeah.

And how important was the being the right person to write it piece? So beyond just your, your story. included a big shift in middle age, the shift away from the nonprofit, but also the fact that you're at Harvard and the fact that you had these regular columns. I think this sometimes gets underappreciated when people think about how you have a cultural impact, really working to get the right cultural foundation from which to then do the things. I said, did you have that sense that how important was that foundation of brand names that was there to sort of get you over the hurdle of like, who is this and why are we listening to it?

Or the platform for sure. It's actually more, that the platform is really important, but for I think a slightly different reason. And this is a super important question that you're asking, I think. There are a lot of people that want the public intellectual life, but they're kind of auto-didacts. And one of the things that I'm doing all day long is recommending that people go get a PhD. I'm doing it all day long.

And again, I'm not using everything I did in my PhD every single day, but here's the thing. One of the things that's most important about the intellectual life is that you need a long period of time to think. Why? Because you get much better at thinking. And life doesn't give this to you. Look, I mean, your whole career is about, you know, serious deep work. You know, and part of the reason is because we're so unbelievably distracted. But even if you have periods of, you know, deep work over the course of your day, you need months and years to just not. your head against the wall, solve problems, reason things out, be befuddled, because you become a much better clear linear thinker. I mean, whether you're doing English literary criticism or, you know, linear programming, that's, you know, the PhD has really no substitute in our culture for becoming incredibly expert at something and thinking for a long time. And that's one of the reasons that, you know, if you can do that and then leverage that into a serious body of work. that a university will take seriously, and on top of that, a really great university,

then that creates a platform and a brand, but behind it is this non-adodidactic truth that you need training. We just need training. Yeah, you got to get used to it. You have to, I mean, from strengths to strength, right? You have years of thinking about that. Then you have this article, what was it, maybe 2019, where you have an Atlantic piece that's trying out the ideas. Right. That goes really well. That's another piece of this. writing for major publications, I've definitely found this, gives you a chance to stress test ideas against reaction as well. So you have years of thinking, and then you're testing, and most of the ideas, yeah, I write it, I put it out there in a long form article, it's not really doing

something. And then you occasionally get something that really seems to create a frision of energy. And after all of that, you're like, now I think I have something I'm willing to write a book about. That's a long process. That is a long process. It's a really critical point that you're making for anybody who's trying to do this, that you and I have the same process, obviously. The way, when I write a book, it starts off by me talking about an idea. And so I talk about an idea. And what I usually have is I do about 175 speeches a year outside the university. So I do a lot of public speaking.

And I always have, you know, three or four real stump speeches, but there's always a bunch that I'm trying out. And they're based on a bunch of different ideas and a lot of things that I'm reading and I put them together. I murder board a talk before I take it out on the road. road so that I have reps on it and so I know which jokes work. I know whether the beginnings and the endings work. A lot of that I learned from being a French horn player, slow everything down, watch your tapes, get people to adjudicate the performance of the thing before you're doing it in

public. Memorize the beginning and memorize the ending. So it's not extemporaneous because there's not so much throat clearing when you're nervous, et cetera, et cetera. Then I'll talk about something for usually six months and then I'll write something that's not a 1,200 word piece. It's usually a 7,000 word piece based on all the things that I've been thinking about by talking about it. I learn by having conversations typically. That's the kind of learner that I am. And I write, I beta test it in the long piece where the stakes are low. I mean, who cares if not that many people read it?

It'll just drop off the leaderboard of the Atlantic or something quickly. But if it lights up, if it's a big deal, then I know it's something big and then I start digging into the book version is the way that that works. But that's a long process of internally cogitated. of exposing ideas to external scrutiny, of fermenting the ideas in a productive way so that they actually get better in the age a little bit. And you can't, you know, you know, it's like, hey, I have an idea for a book and I wrote it.

No way. That's the recipe for a terrible book. This used to be my, the thing I was known for earlier in my career as a professor, they would often invite me to come to dissertation boot camps, where doctoral students work on dissertations. You get together, kind of motivate each other, and you have some speakers come in, and they would have me come speak. And the thing I'd always get mad about and was, and this was maybe a futile battle,

is that all the other speakers, all the terminology was all focused on writing. You got to make sure you write, put in time to write, get your pages every day. You've got to keep writing. We've got to help each other writing. And I was always coming in and saying, well, what about thinking? I mean, you need to be thinking about thinking. Do you have enough time for think? How do you think?

Where do you go to think? We don't talk enough about thinking as a, as a, as a, you need to be thinking. a standalone term. This is something crumudgingly, I guess, academics like us like to think about. But we don't think enough about thinking. And it's different than writing.

And the whole culture of writing online sort of instruction is all about pages. Yeah, you know, I think first, talk second, then write third. Yeah.

And then I write short form first, medium form second, and long form third. And so when you get a book that I write, it's been in there, it's been rolling. The problem with it is that by the time the book

comes down. I don't want to talk about it anymore. I don't want to talk about the next thing. But then, of course, you're on tour, and then you're on tour for the next year. So I'm, you know, from Strength to Strength came out in February of 2022, and I'm still talking about it, you know, because people are saying, can you come talk about that book? But, yeah, I mean, these are pretty nice problems out. Yeah. Well, okay, then that brings us where we wanted to get to from the beginning, which is the newer

book, Build the Life You Want. This is co-authored with Oprah Winfrey. What's this step? I think for most people, this is completely mind-boggling. They assume, you know, Stedman showed up at your house with, you know, Oprah's favorite thing, like some sort of trumpets blaring, but I'm sure it was probably much more prosaic than that. How did this come to be? And this is also for you pretty quick.

This is breaking your two-year rule. And I'm assuming when Oprah comes, you break your two-year rule. So how did we get from from strengths to strength is out? It's doing well within a year and a few months after that your new book is out. So yeah, that was, so I have a column in the Atlantic at this point. You know, during the coronavirus epidemic, I wasn't able to go out of the road. I had more time for creative work at home, you know, in the silence of my head where I have, you know, the sounds of screaming children, et cetera. Ever since my kids moved out, I have it inside my head, it's supposed to outside.

And I thought, well, let's try some new things. And I've been friends for a while with Jeff Goldberg, who's the editor of the Atlantic. And he said, why don't we do a happiness? column on the science of happiness. You know, you write these longer form pieces. I said, okay, so we started this column and it was really popular. You know, it's 12 or 1,300 words weekly on a different topic. And so it's kind of like writing a lay version of the literature review part of an academic

article on a different topic every week, which is an incredible challenge, but it's super interesting. I mean, it's like, I can't believe, I mean, today I just turned in a column about why you might not want to be the boss. You have a, the evolutionary psychology says, rise in the hierarchy, rise in the hierarchy, get promoted, get promoted. And that's an imperative from Mother Nature for you to get more mates and survive, but it's not an imperative to get happier because Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happier.

Here are the costs based on natural experiments where people are promoted or not and what actually happened to their emotional life in the two years after their promotion. And I said, if you tend toward anger or loneliness, don't become the boss fight Mother Nature. That's what I wrote. I turned that one in today. It's for nine weeks from now. I'm about eight or nine weeks out of my column.

And I give suggestions and I live out the suggestions, et cetera. Super interesting. So I'm putting that column out there. And we get about 500,000 readers a week on that column. And I don't know who they are. I don't know who they are. You know, I found out from the editor that, you know, some, you know, former president reads the column. Cool.

That's great. But it turns out that one of my regular readers during coronavirus when we're all locked down was Oprah Winfrey, who's super interested in ideas. I mean, she's a high caliber intellect, and she's very interested in all kinds of ideas and interested in the science of happiness. So she's reading it when the new book comes out from Strength to Strength back in February 2022. She read it when on the first day it hit the market and called me up. This is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, and I'm Batman, right? I mean, it turns out it's Oprah Winfrey. She is called. Yeah. I mean, she went her team called my team, et cetera. But we so we wound

up talking, right? And she said, we think about things in much the same way. Why don't you come on my podcast to talk about your book, which we did. And we were like a house on fire. Her mission is the same as mine. It's just different means of getting at it. Lift people up and bring them together with ideas. Lift them up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love. That's what we want, right? I mean, a better society, happier people. It's beautiful. And so we decided, why don't we team up on something? We kicked around a bunch of different ideas, texting back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And finally she says, you know, if I had my show, she had a show for 25 years, an iconic show that was on from the time that I was in my early 20s on national television.

And, I mean, it really brought people together. I mean, millions of five, 10 million people a day watch that show. And what she would do is she would find somebody who had a bunch of ideas she thought was interesting and have them on the show 30 times and launch those ideas into the zeitgeist. She said, if I had my show, I'd have you on 30 times. But I don't have a show. So I don't, I host. a book. You know, we do it that way where, you know, we write together this book on the Science of Happiness that's kind of a conversation between us and I'm putting in the connective tissue and then we'll read it for the audio version. And I said, cool, that's awesome. And so basically I went back, we wove together a bunch of stuff that had been in columns, but it was

fundamentally about the neuroscience and social science of emotional self-management, how you treat what's going on inside your head with the same seriousness as you treat your job. Because most people think, you know, there's nothing I can do about my feelings. My feelings happen to me. That's actually completely wrong. It's a missed opportunity to have a much happier life. It's the single biggest mistake that people make is thinking that. So we tested a bunch of these ideas. We murder boarded the concepts. I wrote the book chapters and we passed them back and forth and she edited and added stuff, et cetera, et cetera. And we published that book in September of this year, September of 2023. Build the Life you Want, the Art and Science of God.

getting happier. And it was, Cal, it was a total blast. I got to tell you, working with Oprah Winfrey is as fun as it sounds. Now, I already gave a rave review of this book on the show because it, it's so connected to the way that we talk about the deep life here, which is identify the different areas of life that are important and give each of those attention. I think that approach, which was the exact structure of the book. Well, let's talk about work, but let's talk about faith. Let's talk about family. Did you start in this murder boarding process? Was it a situation where you started with 10 or a dozen candidates for these are areas that

are really matter for paying attention to and then it narrowed down as you begin to develop it or after three years or two and a half years of doing the column? Was it, you know, a 30-minute conversation where you're saying it is clear that these are the five things. Like, I mean, I can see I've been doing this. What was that process like finding the buckets you told people to focus on? The first, yeah, so I had a concept of what I thought it might be. And then we got to, Oprah Winfrey and I got together at her place.

She lives in Southern California. And we got together for a period of time together where we just stayed, you know, I stayed in her guest house. And we took our meals together and we would just work on the work on work on the structure of the manuscript and we would test ideas. And we had, you know, people from her team, people from my team saying, no, it's not going to work. That doesn't make sense, et cetera.

And so that was the, that was the basis of the original. idea. Then, as I started getting into the writing, as you know, when you're right it, it's not the same. When you're right it, it's not so easy. Because it turns out the things that made sense in your head don't make sense on the page anymore. And so that's when I started passing out ideas and doing kind of internal murder boarding with my students. You know, I would try out ideas in my lectures. I would ask students for feedback because my graduate students, my MBA students at the Harvard Business School, they're phenomenal. They're smart. They're interesting, they're interested, they're curious, it's really great, asking people that I was

pretty familiar with, you know, that people I had worked with, especially junior people at the American Enterprise Institute to help me out with these ideas as well, she was doing the same thing. Then we got back together and put together kind of a mega manuscript and started down-selecting ideas so it would be the right length. The right length for a book like this, it's about the same length as most of your books, around 60,000 words. And the reason is you want to keep people's attention enough that they can read the whole book in a weekend and they can absorb the idea.

There's a lot of research on this. If it takes them three weeks, by the end of the book, they're not going to remember the beginning. And that's a problem. And most people will drop off. I mean, there's all that literature out there about, you know, nobody finishes books. You know, you want people to actually finish the book.

And so more than 60,000 words is going to be a problem. The original version of the manuscript was closer to 100,000 words. And we just started murdering parts of it, just kill it, kill it, kill it, kill it, and cutting it down until we had the essential, the essential part where the fat was stripped out. That was the book. Well, and then my final question here is I know we're short on time.

My audience has a real hunger for exactly what you're doing in that book, which is let's get systematic in thinking through our life. Are you picking up this exact same strong signal from your students, from the audience that are reading this book? What is your take on what it is right now, sort of post-pandemic, late 2023? What is your take on what people are hungry for? in terms of their life at this moment. People are hungry to feel like they have control over their own lives and their own feelings,

their own emotions. And they feel like they don't. They feel like they're being managed by their own emotional processes, managed by the outside world, managed by the distraction industrial industry that you talk about really compellingly all the time. They're feeling like they're being managed and they're feeling out of control. That's one of the reasons that you see such an uptick and generalized anxiety and clinical depression. I mean, the symptoms of clinical depression, if you believe this, are up by about 4x since the beginning of COVID and are not dropping at this point.

It has everything to do with the fact that we're being exogenously managed. And the whole point is it doesn't have to be the case. And so that's the big idea from my class is if there's one word that characterizes my class, it's metacognition, which is thinking about. thinking, which is awareness of your own emotional processes. When you are aware, consciously aware of your subconscious processes, when your prefrontal cortex is paying attention to your limbic system, you have power. You have practically unbridled power, but it doesn't come naturally. You know, we're very reactive creatures. We want our limbic system. It flies out of control. It does all kinds of crazy things all the time. It delivers us emotions constantly. And people are

manipulating our limbic system. When you understand the basic neuroscience and social science of how emotions work, then you can actually develop a repertoire of techniques from meditation to prayers of petition, to journaling, to therapy, to walking in nature and grounding yourself, et cetera, et cetera. And always using the techniques of deep work, by the way. No joke. Your stuff is completely, as you know, complementary to this. You can, in this metacognitive state, you can manage your emotions so they don't manage you. And then you have power of your life, power you never thought you had. So this is intended to be a compliment for many of the techniques that people think of in the self-improvement literature of how to structure their day, how to structure their work,

how to structure their life. This is how to structure your feelings in your mind alongside of all that. Which is, and I'll say for my listeners, one of the really cool and distinctive parts of build a life you want is that right up front you're talking about metacognition. Right up front, you're talking about emotions and feelings, which is a big change because this field tends to to be very action focused. Like, well, you need to make this plan and then execute this plan. And it's all about mechanistic. And that's something I loved about the book is that it's very aware that your emotions,

your thought patterns is everything when it comes to your perception of life, the actions you take. So it's a very aware book. So I know we're short on time. So I want to point people towards the right places to debate in more of this wisdom from Arthur Brooks. The two books we talked about mainly was from strength, the strength and build the life you want.

Your column, that's still running in the Atlantic, right? What is that called for people who are looking for it? How to build a life. How to build a life? By the way, the life you want is Oprah's show, internet show. So how to build a life plus the life you want is like those two products had a baby called, called, you know, build the life you want. So how to build a life is by call them every Thursday morning in the Atlantic.

Excellent. And then do you do what about online? platform, social, etc. I do. I'm on social. I'm on Instagram and I'm on Twitter X, whatever it's called. What I do is I use it as a way to put out content

around this subject. I'm not on it for my edification or to find news or to have conversations or God knows not to get into fights with other people. I'm using it to broadcast. What I think are really good ideas to edify other people as well. And then I have a lot of stuff on YouTube. I have a lot of, you know, Oprah

and I just dropped three video casts on YouTube that are on YouTube and actually on the Starbucks app of all things, which is kind of an interesting thing. So you can sip your venty dark roast while watching me and Oprah talk about the limbic system if that's your, that floats your boat. It's 100% what I want to do. Well, this is great. So Arthur Brooks, thank you very much.

And thanks for coming on the show. This was fantastic. And thank you. It may seem like we didn't talk a ton about the details of the last book, but it's all we talked about because your life, I think, and the way you're thinking is just this fantastic case study into how a really thoughtful, intentional person shapes and reshapes their lives. I think it's going to be very useful to my audience. So thank you again for coming on. Thanks, Cal. And thank you for the work that you're doing. It's really enriched me an awful lot.

I mean, the system's thinking for my own life when I see somebody who thinks the same way and it's thought more deeply, even about those details, it's been really helpful. So that's the reason you've got a big audience that includes me. There we go. We feel seen. All right, thanks, Arthur. Thanks. All right. So that was my conversation with Arthur Brooks. I thought that was fantastic. learned a lot. Interesting guy. Really interesting,

thoughtful guy the way that he has crafted his life. And I particularly appreciated that little detail, Jesse, about him spending time. The way he wrote that book

with Oprah was to just go live in her guest house in Montecito. We've got to find a way to co-author a book with Oprah. That just sounds awesome.

Yeah. Just a lot of like cozier sheets and well, good-smelling candles. That'd just be fantastic. Lots of places to read didn't do deep work.

Exactly. I love it. Just be like me and Stedman, just reading books. That's all I know about Oprah. Dr. Phil comes by every once in a while and we just like chat. Yeah. All my Oprah knowledge is from like circa 2004, basically. Anyways, thank you, Arthur for coming on the show.

Definitely check out his new book, Build the Life You Want. So we have a third segment here in honor of the holidays and in honor of Oprah. My list of my favorite completely unnecessary. and embarrassingly geeky things of 2023. First, let me just mention one other sponsor that helped make this show possible. That's our friends at Rhone. Here's a thing.

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My favorite completely unnecessarily and embarrassingly geeky things from 2023. So the idea here is instead of talking about common sense or useful, things that most normal human beings would say this makes sense and I should have this. I want to talk about the weird, almost embarrassingly geeky things that I really buy that are unnecessary and I grow to love. The type of things I talk about on my classic deep or crazy segment where I asked Jesse, was this deep that I bought this or is it make me a madman? And so I figure there's six of you in the audience that are going to actually resonate with these

suggestions, but it's good. We need to celebrate the idiosyncratic and geeky. We have to celebrate sometimes going all in on getting deep in ways that's entirely superfluous. All right, so I have five things, Jesse, and I have them all with me. Yes. So if you are listening, you might want to go check out the video here. You go to the deeplife.com slash listen. Look for episode 280. At the bottom, there'll be the videos from the episode. You can get the video for the whole thing. You see me talk to Arthur, but come on, this is the main thing you want to see. I will show off my five completely unnecessary embarrassing and geeky things. All right, number one, I'm going to go grab this.

This is my unnecessary hipster keyboard. This is by NU-F-E-N-U-P-H-Y. I've got to look up the title here. Let me hold it up so you can see it. This is a Newfee Air-78, Air-75. What this is is a mechanical keyboard. So the keys actually have a physical switch with a spring. So you press it down and the spring pushes it back up again.

This is what keyboards used to be like until Apple and others introduce these membrane-based keyboards where you press down as just squeezing rubber and making a connection. These are the old-fashioned. Clickety-clack. So I'll do some by the microphone here. Clickety-clack keyboard. You can type much faster on these because you get a return on the finger. So you press down and it pushes your finger.

finger back up so you can move it and get to the next key faster without having to pull it up as quickly. I got this in part because, you know, the problem, we've talked about this before, but the problem with the current generation of MacBook errors is they switch to a cheaper plastic on the keyboard and I wore away, I wore away all of the numbers and all the letters on my keyboard. And I really frustrated me, so I wanted a better keyboard. This is really high quality plastic.

It's not going to wear away. I spend so much time writing and not just casual. I'm usually writing like emails, but hard writing, like New Yorker articles or chapters for my books or my newsletter. And I don't know. It's completely unnecessary, but I feel much more definitive when I'm typing on this. Like I'm, you know, thinking harder. I don't know. I love it.

Completely unnecessary. My hipster keyboard. Did you have color options for that? It comes with, this is the color options it comes with. It also has cool lights that come on when you type. You can replace any key on this, though. So it comes with a tool. You can pop the key caps off and put any key caps you want.

They snap back onto the switch. So people super customize these. And you can replace these over time. I love it. I don't know. I really like typing on it. All right. Number two from 2023.

We've talked about this on the show before, but I will show it off. My remarkable two digital notebook. All right. So this is a, it's a notebook, but it uses the same sort of, of e-ink technology that you might see on a Kindle. I'll show this for those who are watching. Let me do something thicker here. So you write on this, and as you write,

it shows up on the screen like you're writing on paper. It has, they've really worked on the feel of it so that it does have the same drag, more or less, like paper. So it has a very paper-like feel. You can create endless notebooks on here, endless pages, endless notebooks, and the whole thing is constantly syncing with the cloud. So everything in here is available online. You're not going to lose it. So it's like having a stack of 20 notebooks with you just in this package, wherever you go.

I have used this as a replacement for basically all of the notebooks I use for keeping track of ideas or scratch paper for working on ideas. I think I have well over a dozen virtual notebooks stored in here right now. So some of these will be idea notebooks. I'm working on an article or a book, and I just want to have a place to keep ideas. Some of these are my computer science-related notebooks where I'll actually work out math. If I'm working on a theory paper,

there's a place for me to store and always go back and find that math. I can and I have just gone into the cloud grabbed sheets from some of these notebooks as PDFs and sent them to collaborators. Oh, look, this is what I was talking about. I also use this for a lot of planning, a lot of the planning for my media company,

strategy, ideas. I've replaced my moleskin where I used to keep ideas about just living a deep life more generally that now exist in here virtually. I've been using this for a while now, and I really like it. I like the experience of writing on here. I like having all my notebooks in one place. I otherwise was using too many notebooks. Now, I say this is under my completely unnecessary area and embarrassingly geeky list because it's really kind of expensive. I mean, it doesn't really make sense for most people. By the time you get the tab, You get the cover. You get the advanced.

You have to pay more for the stylist that has an eraser built on. This was $500 easy, all in. Which is pretty crazy for a notebook. For someone like me, yeah, why not? Because my whole life is ideas and technology. And it's cool. And I'm a first mover. I don't know if I can really recommend it unless you just have that money

lying around. But I've really enjoyed my remarkable two experience. All right. As we move down this list, by the way, Jesse, things are going to get increasingly geeky and increasingly less relevant to people. That's the way this is going to work. So be prepared. If you already find yourself a little bit alienated, this is going to get worse.

All right. I want to show my third favorite unnecessary and geeky thing from last year. I'm holding it up here. This is a sure MV7 microphone. This is fantastic for anyone who, wants to get into the audio games. Let's say you want to start a podcast or you just want to sound better when you are on Zoom meetings or maybe you're a guest on some podcast. What Sure has done here has taken a lot of the same hardware that you have in the classic Sure microphones. I don't

know. What are these called? The SM7s. What are the, it's on there somewhere, Jesse. Yeah, SM7B. So this is like the classic microphone, a lot of podcasts. U.S. It was also, it's used in the music industry. I think Michael Jackson's Thriller album was recorded on these. It has a lot of those same actual hardwares. But what it also has built into it is all of the digital electronics to convert the analog signal to a digital signal and to do some mixing on it. You can have the volume on here.

And so what comes out of here on the other end is a USB cable. So it does all the digitization inside the microphone itself. So you can then plug this into any laptop as any other sort of external USB microphone. Getting a lot of the sound quality you would have from a high-end sure mic without needing an extra mixing board to take that signal and make it something that the computer itself can understand. The other thing it has, which I really would have appreciated early in podcasting, is a monitor headphone output. so that you can hear yourself, you can hear yourself in your ears, you can hear other sound in your ears. This was a real problem I had early in podcasting was figuring out how to get monitoring so I could hear myself in my ears. You get that automatically for here.

It mixes what you're saying with the audio coming back from the computer. So if you're hooked up to Zoom, you can just select this microphone as your speakers. And so you can hear audio from your computer. You can hear yourself mixed in. So you hear what your levels are. Anyways, it's just a fantastic way to get into higher-end audio without needing any other equipment, this straight to your computer. As people may or may not know, otherwise things do get complicated. So like here in our Deepak HQ, this is just a classic microphone.

It just has an analog signal coming out of here. So this goes, Jesse and I, we both have our mics have to go into a large standalone audio processor, which takes that signal and conditions it and does some compression on it and works with the EQ mix. and we had to have an audio engineer set this up. That signal then goes into a relatively complicated mixing board. So I'm in that mixing board. Jesse's in that mixing board. Our sound effects are in that mixing board.

The calls are in the mixing board. And that's all set up. And then that mixing board creates finally a digital signal, which is what goes to our computer that we can then use to record multi-track on the computers. This replaces all of that equipment. That's not going to be as good quality. I mean, obviously having professional audio processors with gating

and compression and going through a high-end mixing board where we're tweaking the HQs. This is going to sound a little bit better, but the gap is not big. So if you want to have really good sounding audio, I think this is just a really great invention, the MV7. For the price of one of these microphones,

you have a whole setup. So I think this made podcasting accessible. Yeah. Like a good sounding podcasting accessible to a lot more people. It makes the cost of that from $700 to get started down to $250. So anyways, I love this thing.

I use it for all my Zoom calls. I use it when I give virtual talks because it looks weird to have this whole thing when you're giving a talk to a business. So I just use this and the audio. No one knows is the difference. All right. Let's get even more esoteric, Jesse.

Let me grab my next thing here. We're going to have people running to grab this off the shelves. This here is a mount for an Arduino nano microcontroller. So, you know, I like to build microelectronics. I do sometimes with my kids. Next door to the studio, I have a maker's studio, have a maker lab,

or I have a lot of my microelectronics stuff. This year I was building a custom light controller for Halloween lights. I wanted to control addressable LEDs using my own custom code, so I had to build a waterproofed controller, and I was running it off of a microprocessor. It's hard to build stable circuits on microprocessors.

all these, you know, how do you connect all the different cables to them in a way that is going to be stable? The sense you can move around the whole apparatus and it's not going to fall apart, you don't want to just put a breadboard in a waterproof box. So I came across these great mounts for Arduino. I have a whole box of nanos. You can get them sort of cheap knockoffs for like eight bucks a pop. And what you can do is stick the, the nano into these connectors inside, and this breaks out every one of the connections to the nano with a screw block, where you can just put a wire end in here

and then screw down the bolt in the wire. So you don't have to solder your microcontroller into some sort of proto board where now it's permanently in there and permanently solder to all the different wires you want to use. You can get almost as stable as a connection, just screwing them into the screw mount. You can just tape or glue this mount onto whatever your object

as you're building, but you can take that processor right out of here and use it for something else. And if you need to switch around the wiring, you can just unscrew it and switch it around. So this has been useful for my projects. I'll even know what it's called. I just found this probably on Amazon. Were you soldering this stuff before? Or I was just having like a breadboard or something and it would all come out. This is the first time I needed one of my projects to be deployed in the wild, right?

I'd like bring this home and set it up and be able to move it around and reprogram it and this. And it worked. my light controller stayed functional for the entire Halloween season. Speaking of lights is my final completely unnecessary and embarrassingly geeky thing from 2003. I don't actually have the thing because it's in use right now. But this is my BN link six outlet seven day digital timer steak with six foot cord. So I really like lighting displays for the, we have like a winter wonderland display right now for the holiday season. We had a Halloween display.

Until this year, I would run my displays, and they're complicated. I did the counts. And by the way, all my plans for the displays are on my remarkable. There's a notebook for it. I did the count, and I think I have like 25, in the current display, like 25 different wiring elements. So wires, splitters, adapters, 25 different elements. We live on a corner, so we have a lot of frontage.

I'd like to have light coverage for everything. And I like the lights to come on automatically and come off automatically. So before I had two separate circuits, and each of the circuits was led through a light sensor that could see when it got dark and then would have a timer for how long to stay on after it got dark. But this was crude because it was only intervals of two hours, and the sensors would come on at different times depending on exactly where they were in the yard, because when they would detect it's dark, is different. like if you're in shade, it might be a little bit earlier than if you're not.

And so I finally got a more higher-end controller for all of my circuits for my light displays where you have a fully functional digital interface self-contained, right? So none of this, like connecting to a phone, Bluetooth nonsense. Self-contained digital timer that controls all these relays. So now I can exactly program when I want the circuits to go on, when I want them to turn off this time on, this time off, back on it this time, back off on that time, different days of the week, I can do it differently. This really made a difference.

I now finally have full control over exactly when my lights go on and exactly where my lights go off. Nice waterproof box staked up off the ground. So completely unnecessary, Jesse, and embarrassingly geeky, but also one of my favorite things from the last year. Does anybody have better lights than you in the neighborhood? Yes, there's some good lights. There's some good lights in the neighborhood.

I think Halloween, see, the thing about Halloween without giving too much away is that we have more, we have a narrative to our lights with actual text that you read. So no one else is doing that. Because we have so much frontage, we bring you on a Halloween journey. There's a sort of a story that unfolds with different vignettes. For the holiday lights, I have more work to do. Yeah. So people have some good holidays. So you're still working on it.

I think next year I have some key upgrades. I definitely have some key upgrades in mind for next year. They'll have to write down in my remarkable. Maybe I should have had my programmable, or here's my sixth thing I'll add to here. The programmable LEDs I started buying, they're so cool.

You can control every single bulb on these long Christmas light stands from a microcontroller and make them do whatever you want. So I had like really cool alien lights that I was using for our Halloween narrative where they were sprinkling.

You see it was purple and different green lights would kind of sprinkle in and there'd be more and more green. Then there'd be a chase that goes, chases all the way around and resets it all back to set it all back. You can program whatever you want.

It's really cool stuff. Look, I don't want to go on a soapbox here, but I have really strong thoughts, especially for Christmas lights. Like what I think is good and what I don't think is good. My sons know this because we watch this ABC show sometimes where they have a competition for Christmas lights. I do not like, I hope I'm not alienating people here. I do not like this new setup

where you permanently install all of these programmable LEDs all over your house and on all like the windows and doors or what have you and then you use this computer software to synchronize them to music and you have the moving head DMX lights on your roof and it's like a show and it always plays you know that whatever that Siberian Trans-Siberian Railroad like do do do-do do do to do and all the lights are doing things and the headlights are moving I don't like that.

I think light should create a transportative experience. As you're like walking near by the house, it sort of brings you into a different type of frame of mind aesthetically. I don't like the shows. I think the shows are showy. I don't want to see dancing gingerbread men projection mapped on your house while music plays or something. I want, you know, it brings you into like, oh, I'm now in Santa Claus's Village or something like that.

I have a lot of thoughts about this. You'll hear about them all in my new podcast in 2024. Light Talk with Cal Newport, and we just go deep on decorative lighting. And it's mainly me just being very cranky and giving long, somewhat inappropriately profane dialogues about what I don't like in light displays. All right, Jesse, there's enough nonsense for now. People have to get back to their in-laws house and hear some more. annoying conversations with their relatives. So thank you, everyone, uh, for listening.

We'll be back next week with a new year's, our first episode of 2024. I'm excited about that. So definitely be ready to listen to that. We'll get back to basics. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the deep questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter,

which you can sign up for at Calnewport.com. each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at caldneyport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week. Thank you.