Making Sense with Sam Harris - #291 — Where is Happiness?

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Arthur C. Brooks about what it takes to build a good life. They discuss the power of social comparison, the intelligence taboo, political dignity and ethical hierarchy, the Dalai Lama, the nature of love, fluid and crystallized intelligences, the strange case of Linus Pauling, the limits of identity, atheism and religious faith, fear of death, psychedelics, existentialism, St. Thomas Aquinas, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Arthur Brooks. Arthur's a social scientist who focuses on human happiness. He's a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School. He's also the best-selling author of 12

books and the creator of the popular How to Build a Life column in The Atlantic. He previously served for 10 years as president of the American Enterprise Institute. And most recently, he's the author of the book From Strength to Strength, Finding Success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life. And that is what we get into in this conversation. We talk about what it takes to build a good life, the perverse power of social comparison, taboos around talking about intelligence, political dignity, and ethical hierarchy. We talk for a while about the Dalai Lama and our mutual experience of him. The nature of love, fluid and crystallized intelligences, the strange case of Linus Pauling, the limits of identity. And then in the second half,

we have a spirited discussion about atheism and religion. Arthur is a devout Roman Catholic. I am not. And we get into that a little. We talk about the fear of death, psychedelics, existentialism, St. Thomas Aquinas, and other topics. Anyway, I enjoyed this. This is an example of the kind of conversations I'm having more and more over in the life section of Waking Up, but I'm presenting it here too, because I think it will be of general interest to all of you. And now I bring you Arthur Brooks.

I am here with Arthur Brooks. Arthur, thanks for joining me. Thanks, Sam. What a delight. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. Yeah, yeah. I know we know many people in common, but I don't think we've ever met. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of having met you anywhere.

I agree. I think that's absolutely right. I feel like I know know you though. I've listened to you so much. Well, um, I loved your latest book, uh, which we'll discuss the title of which is from strength to strength. And I think we'll focus on, on that for most of the discussion, but catch me up on what you, uh, have done. I mean, this will be relevant to the conversation about your book, but how do you describe your professional and intellectual history? What have you focused on? And then we'll get to the present. done the same thing year after year after year like a lot of people have in my profession. I'm an academic like you. I'm in the world of academia, but I came late to it. I started my career after being unceremoniously ushered from college at age 19 as a professional musician. I started as a professional classical French horn player. I went on tour for a long time through my 20s, as a matter

of fact. My parents called it my gap decade, and they were none too pleased about it actually my father was a college professor as was his father i just and i wound up in the barcelona symphony playing in the in the symphony orchestra there until my late 20s and then i actually went back to college by correspondence i didn't have enough money to or time to do it traditionally. And finished my bachelor's degree at 30 and started graduate school and got very interested in the social sciences, just the behavior of what made people tick and weirdly became an economist, started my PhD and became an academic for 10 years. Then left after 10 years, most of it at Syracuse, to be the president of a think

tank in Washington, D.C. called the American Enterprise Institute, one of the oldest think tanks and largest think tanks in the world. And after doing that for 10 years, I retired in my mid-50s at this point and came to Harvard, where I've been for the past three years teaching at the business school and the Kennedy School, where I teach the science of happiness, mostly to MBA students. Nice, nice. Well, I want to circle back to several of the transitions there. You and I actually have a slightly similar background in having taken the decade of our 20s off from the usual academic grind, only to return to it and sort of do things backwards, which is interesting. So when you were at AEI, what years were you running AEI? I took over AEI in the last month of the George W. Bush administration, and I finished in the

middle of 2019. So I came on the first day of 2009, and then I left in June of 2019. Ten and a half years. I forget. So were you running it when Ayaan Hirsi Ali joined, or was that... No, she was there. We were a coincidence for a while. She joined under my predecessor, and she was there with me, and then we did a lot of stuff together when she was a non-resident fellow. Okay. Yeah. So though my politics have always diverged considerably from AEI, I have a soft spot for the organization because it was literally the only foundation that would take Aion when she was really just desperate for refuge, leaving the Netherlands and incurring all of these security concerns around her apostasy. And the AEI saved her. And so I was incredibly grateful at that moment, being one of her friends. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's also, it's an organization dedicated to intellectual apostates,

sort of literal apostates like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but also just the intellectual apostates, sort of literal apostates like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but also just the intellectual apostates, weird people, people who think differently. Because look, this is what makes life interesting. And a competition of ideas really is fundamental to a free society. The idea of conventional thinking is antithetical to progress as far as we're concerned. And so I was really dedicated to that principle. I was looking for weirdos, quite frankly, people who are going to break up convention. Yeah. Okay. So let's start with your book and maybe we can start with the way you actually start your book. I mean, you have this anecdote that is kind of the founding inspiration and epiphany for your book. Perhaps you can tell that and link it up with these various transitions you have made in your life.

Yeah, I started the book by telling a story that had a kind of a foundational impact on me because it was about halfway through my time as president of this think tank. And it was a great job. I mean, I was working my tail off. I was traveling around giving maybe 175 speeches a year. And I was fundraising like crazy. I had to raise 50 million bucks a year. It was like, my job was like running for the Senate and never getting elected, basically, which probably is better than getting elected in the Senate. But about halfway through, five years or so through, I was having this mild existential crisis. You know, what does this lead to? What am I actually trying to do? I'm going to do my work and do it better and be more successful, I suppose, or at least create more impact and value for society as I saw it. But then what?

I mean, sooner or later, I'll get a shove or I'll get tired or something and stop. And, you know, what does this mean, basically? What's the cadence of it, basically? And around that time, I was on a plane and had overheard this conversation. Now, you and I as basically as social scientists know that our real laboratory is overheard conversations. It's the conversation on the plane. It's the people talking behind you at Starbucks. That's where the interesting ideas come from. And I heard a conversation of a couple, an elderly couple. I could tell by their voices. I could tell it was a man and a woman. And I assumed they were married because it was a pretty intimate conversation. And I couldn't see him. It was nighttime. It was dark. But I heard

the husband kind of mumble a little bit. And then the wife say, don't say it would be better if you were dead. And now they really have my attention. I mean, I'm just keyed in at this point. I'm not trying to eavesdrop, but I mean, who wouldn't be listening at this point? And then he mumbles a little bit more and she says, it's not true that nobody cares about you and nobody remembers you. And I'm thinking that this is probably somebody who's not like you, Sam, or the people listening to your program. This is not somebody who was super motivated. It's probably somebody who's disappointed because he didn't get the education that he wanted and start the business or get the jobs that he wanted. And now it's near the end and he's disappointed.

Well, we get to, we were coming from LA to Washington, a flight that was on a lot in those days. And we land in Washington maybe an hour, and the lights go on and we all stand up and I'm curious. So I turn around just to get a look at this, at the disconsolate old guy. And it's one of the most famous men in the world. I mean, this guy is rich and famous because of things that he did in the 60s and 70s. And he's very old, but he's super well-known. I mean, people recognize him. And as we were leaving the plane, he's right behind me coming up the aisle, and the pilot stops him and says, recognizes him, of course, and says, sir, you've been my hero since I was a little boy. And I turned around and he's beaming with pride. And I'm thinking to myself, so which is it? Which is the real guy? The one beaming with pride right now or the one confessing to his wife that he might as well be dead? And I thought to myself, you know, the world has a kind of a bogus formula for success,

actually, which is what I had been suffering under and which I just had witnessed. That if you want to be happy, you want to die happy, Sam, here's the deal. I just had witnessed, that if you want to be happy, you want to die happy, Sam, here's the deal. Work hard, succeed, bust your pick, bank your success, die happy. And it's wrong. It's not true. And we all kind of know it's not true, but I saw this in stark relief. And I started actually reading biographies differently at that point of great men and women throughout history to see if they died happy. And a lot of them didn't. And it sent me on this quest to figure out what was this curse of a lot of people who were very successful in life, that they tended to be very unhappy at the end of life. And what could somebody do to build what amounts to a happiness 401k plan? I was going to turn my

social scientist toolkit on the business of getting happier as you get older, and that's the book that we're talking about. And this curse is something you call the striver's curse. But the insight into the problem visited you earlier than is really the central lesson of your book, because your book, as we will see, focuses on inevitable changes that come with aging. But you kind of slammed up against a brick wall in music, still in your, I guess, your late 20s. Just maybe describe that and talk about what those implications were for you. Well, one of the things that I talk about in the book is one of the reasons that strivers, really hard workers, ambitious people, why they struggle and suffer often later in life is because what they're good at, they can't keep doing forever,

that there is inevitable decline. And I talk about the neuroscientific basis of that. I mean, there's very strong neuroscience and social science for why that is the case. But I also have some personal experience in decline. You know, I'd experienced decline, not the kind that comes in midlife, but I'd had a weird decline in my musical career that gave me a taste of how bitter it actually is. You know, all I ever wanted to be as a kid was a French horn player. I wanted to be the world's greatest French horn player, which is kind of a weird ambition, I realized. But nonetheless, it was my ambition. And as I went through my teenage years, it seemed like that was actually within reach or something like it was within reach because I was just getting better every year and my career was going well and I was playing professionally. And then something happened in my early 20s where I started getting worse and I couldn't figure it out. Now, this happens to people that rely on gross and fine

motor skills a lot. And there's a lot of possible physiological or even neurological explanations for it, but it's not well understood why some athletes, why they burn out early, why some classical musicians peak and decline early, but I was. And by the time I was 22, I was finding that things that used to be easy were hard and things that used to be hard were impossible. And I was noticing this decline all the way through my mid-20s. So I was trying desperately. I was going to the best teachers. I was practicing more and more. I took different jobs. I wound up in the symphony in Barcelona because I thought that maybe this kind of job, this kind of playing would re-spark my ascent as a French horn player. And of course, it didn't. And it really took a lot of, well, it took getting married to somebody who was

kind of my guru to help me understand that I was not a French horn player. I was a person. I was a human being that happened to play the French horn. That had never occurred to me because I was a classic success addicted self-objectifier, which is one of the things I talk about a lot in my book. What holds people back is that they're hopelessly addicted to success. And I was too, but, and it took somebody who really loved me for who I was as a person, as opposed to what I was professionally to help me do something else. What's the normal pattern of decline for a musician of that sort? The normal pattern of decline is that you would get better all the way through your 20s and into your 30s. So your technique would actually get better. And then you'd peak as a French horn

player or violinist or something. Ordinarily, your technique would peak in your late 30s, and you'd start to see pretty gradual decline through your 40s and 50s. And if you're truly a prodigy, even in your 60s and 70s, you can be playing very, very beautifully, but your best playing will typically be in your late 30s is what you find. And that had happened to me in my early 20s for whatever reason. There may have been an injury that had gone undetected or whatever reason. I just was, I guess I was just precociously in decline. And it gave me, by the way, Sam, it was a blessing because it gave me an opportunity to retool and go back to school and learn something new. But I was so tied to it that

I didn't even tell anybody I'd gone to college. I was ashamed that anybody would know that I was studying. And it was a real secret. The only person, literally the only person who knew was my wife and none of my colleagues. I remember one time in the music world that we were hanging around and there was this one woman, she's a pretty good French horn player, but she came and said, I got big news. I just got a full scholarship to go to medical school at the University of Miami. I'm going to become a surgeon. And after she left the room, we're like, see, she doesn't have it. Talk about a low status job, a surgeon. Yeah. If you're among French horn players, that's funny. It's questions of status are central here and questions of identity. I mean,

what you're describing is your identity was entirely anchored to this notion of you being an increasingly wonderful musician. And when that began to erode, you became increasingly uncomfortable for obvious reasons. described, one sense of identity, and this is something you point out in the book, is notions of success that can accrete around it are, for the most part, in relation to others. I mean, they're born of social comparison, they're born of notions of status, explicit or implicit, so they're positional, and yet there are multiple axes for these kinds of comparisons and status judgments. And so it's kind of, you know, we're both laughing when we describe the elitism of the French horn players looking down on lowly surgeons, but of course surgeons would return the favor. And there's, I think this has probably happened to you,

there are many contexts in which you find yourself in the company of highly successful people and witness various status games and witness what they do to your own self-concept. occur and combine and recombine in strange ways. You can be an academic who may feel, you know, kind of low status compared to, you know, some other academics, but higher status with respect to the variable of education around people who just have a lot of money, say, right? Right, absolutely. You know, and there are just at least a dozen ways you can kind of point the arrow of your self-regard so as to compare yourself to those around you. And it is really the lesson in the end is that all of this is fatuous and not the basis for a durable feeling of well-being or a sense that one is living a meaningful life. Absolutely. And, you know, we can even find stranger versions of it today. I mean, we talk about on college campuses or any place,

there are people who get their sense of identity and their sense of hierarchy of identity with respect to their grievance, their sense of victimhood. And so it's kind of like, you know, people will often say that college campuses are like the victim Olympics in some cases. And what that is about is, I mean, nothing to make light of because there are legitimate grievances to be sure. But to the extent that we say one group is more aggrieved than another group, that's the same thing as saying that a good French horn player has less status somehow than somebody with a PhD. It gets very exotic very quickly and is pretty unhelpful and pretty unconstructive for living the best life, I think it's suffice it to say. So in your book, you make much of two different types of intelligence and the time course of their decline. maybe we should jump into that.

Perhaps we should acknowledge up front that intelligence itself is a somewhat taboo topic. I mean, even to acknowledge that it is unequally distributed in the world is taboo. I mean, it's there for all to notice. world is taboo. I mean, it's there for all to notice. I mean, however you want to define intelligence, even if we admit that how you define it may be open to some cavilline, whatever definition you have, you have something that is implicitly hierarchical. And it's just, there is no definition that renders everyone equivalent. And yet it's strange that it's taboo to acknowledge that. I mean, it's not at all taboo to acknowledge that some French horn players are better than others, or some athletes are better than others. And yet to talk in any straightforward way about

someone being smarter than someone else, that makes everyone uncomfortable. Do you have a sense of why that is? Well, part of it is that we've made the mistake for a very long time of equating intelligence with moral superiority. I mean, how many parents will compliment their kids by saying, you're so smart? I mean, it's not you wouldn't compliment your kid by saying you're so smart. I mean, it's not, you wouldn't compliment your kid by saying your hair is so long. You wouldn't, I mean, it's just, these are, you know, if these are characteristics that actually, that vary not just on the basis of your own effort by, but by, you know, something having to do, for example, with your genetics, it's, then it's nothing worth complimenting for Pete's sake. It's like, your eyes are so blue. I mean, what a weird thing to compliment somebody for. I suppose that we could to admire that particular

quality, but to not equate it with some sort of moral superiority is really important. And yet, that's what people have done for the longest time. And if we think that there's an equivalency between intelligence and cognitive ability, for example, and moral superiority, then we're going to be getting into all of this confusion to begin with. Now, there's other ways that people have in our field, yours and mine, have talked about it that's less controversial. For example, in my book, I talk about the work of Raymond Cattell, who was a social psychologist in Great Britain working in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And Cattell was basically just noticing that there are two types of geniuses, one that blooms early and one that blooms late, and they have different characteristics. They have different

strengths that give them these genius characteristics. And then he noticed later that these genius characteristics exist in everybody in varying degrees, that you're really good at something early and you're really good at something later. So it's a lot less polemical than the way that we talk about, for example, IQ scores. Right. Right. Yeah. And this is the distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence that you talk about. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I just wonder if there's something more to it. I haven't thought about this much, but my own relationship to this concept strikes me as peculiar. So, for instance, at no point in my life did I ever think that maybe I should be a professional athlete. The sport I played the most, the team sport I played the most was soccer.

I definitely had enough exposure to soccer to discover in myself the aptitude that would lead me to be a professional soccer player. I think I started playing around age nine. I played straight through high school. I was certainly not a bad soccer player. And even in the context of, you know, a little school team, I think I probably thought of myself as a good soccer player. But then I went to college, when I went to Stanford, there was, you know, literally

not a single neuron in my brain that thought maybe I should try out for the varsity soccer team. Right. It was a good team. I think they even, when I was there, I think they beat the Olympic team. So it was a serious soccer team. And I don't even think I consciously closed that door. It's just I never even looked for a door. I mean, it was obvious that my abilities as a soccer player were so bounded that no thought need be expended on my future professionally as a soccer player. Right. And in no way do I feel diminished by that egoically. That just, that was not my

wheelhouse. But when I think about, you know, other things left unexplored of that sort, if I think, well, if I had applied myself more to mathematics, you know, could I have discovered in myself that I was really a great mathematician, right? Could I? I mean, I was obviously exposed to mathematics as much as I was exposed to soccer. Presumably, you know, I was exposed enough to have discovered whether I was going to be the next Alan Turing or Claude Shannon or Norbert Wiener, or you take your pick. I didn't discover that. And yet, I think if, you know, in my crazier moments, I think part of me believes that if I had just pushed into that area, if I had persisted, really the sky was the limit. There's no telling what I could have become in that area.

Now, it takes me about 10 seconds to convince myself that that is almost certainly bullshit, right? There's no way I was going to be the next Alan Turing. Just statistically, it's as likely as me being the next LeBron James or some athlete who I never for a moment would think I would stand a chance of being. And yet, it doesn't feel that way. Intelligence is the sort of thing that you feel like it's very hard to admit to yourself that there is a scale and you are at a certain point on it, again, define intelligence in as piecemeal a way as you want. Give me, you know, a hundred different forms of intelligence. Take your pick. You are not the greatest at that one, very likely, right? And yet it's, there's something about that that's hard for people to admit. And it does feel diminishing in a way that just

acknowledging that you weren't going to be a professional athlete isn't. I don't know what to compare this to. It's a little bit like, as writers, we've run into this. This is an old saw of writers that basically everyone imagines that they should write a book. Everyone imagines that they have a book in them because everyone's a language user and everyone does some writing and it's, you know, you're constantly bumping into people who think they should be writing a book, whereas you're not bumping into people who think they should be playing the French horn at the highest level. And so maybe intelligence is something like that, where because everyone is using it all day long, it's very hard to think about it being bounded in a way that is invidious to oneself. Yeah. We also have a society that is increasingly giving returns to intellectual ability. I mean,

we have a very complex society and this is, you know, it's one of the things that virtually guarantees that you're going to do well if you're, you know, if you have strong intellectual gifts. And so the result of that is that it's a better thing to have than good lips for playing the French horn. I mean, it's like, and if you're going to have a kid and you say, oh, you got two choices. The kid is going to be really gifted intellectually. The kid's going to have an unbelievable embouchure to play the trombone or the French horn or something. You'd be nuts to say, look, little Johnny's intellectually pretty mediocre, but man, he's got good technique on the trombone. There are very few people that would take that. Maybe my parents would have taken that.

I'm not sure. that would take that. Maybe my parents would have taken that. I'm not sure. But the truth is that it's just that intellectual giftedness is highly fungible across modern society, which has been in more and more and more rewarding that. And a lot of people are, you know, putting moats around their castles for that too, making it into a harder and harder society. And, you know, this is what it really does. I think it comes down to a question of we all have to recognize the radical equality of human dignity, notwithstanding our differences of all different kinds. And to the point that we can't quite recognize that everybody has the same dignity, then we have to be very uncomfortable with differences that people actually have, I think. Yeah. I think there's a distinction between human dignity and the political equivalence between people. All people are created equal. That's a political statement. That's the world we want to live in. And yet we know that there are some people who add much more value to society than others. And again, this is just a, you know,

whether you want to talk about this in absolute terms or if this is just a contingent fact of what a society happens to value, you know, you're going to find certain people who cater to those desires and demands more than others. And so in a hostage crisis, it is natural to want to rescue Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr. before you rescue, I don't know, somebody who has and will do nothing of special value for anyone else, right? And more resources will be expended upon trying to rescue that person, presumably. Now, we don't want to live in that world. We want to live in a world where we're impartial, or at least there's a pretense of impartiality, more or less across the board, where doctors work as hard as they're ever going to work

to save the life of anyone. But as you say, intelligence is this magical property that is incredibly fungible. It's just so useful across the board. Almost anything we want either depends more or less entirely on intelligence or at least it's safeguarded by intelligence. things, or at least several more things, that are arguably as important or more important. We'll talk about a few of those things, but there's certainly a dissociation in some people between intelligence and wisdom, and certainly intelligence and a capacity for ethical engagement and love and compassion. It's the love and compassion and wisdom side of things that wants to build a more egalitarian view of the situation. But I feel like we can't lie to ourselves about there being a kind of ethical hierarchy as well. I mean, to make this absolutely clear,

there are people who create net harm to society. You know, we put certain people in boxes for the rest of their lives because they're so despicable and dangerous if you let them out of the box, and yet we also give them competent medical care when they need it. How do you think about the situation

of moral worth and dignity versus the kind of gradations of benefit to others that I just sketched? Well, all of these are incredibly nuanced ethical questions that we're trying to live out day to day. And I think it's interesting that we can explore these things in the context of what we want for ourselves and what we want for our own kids. So, you know, we tend to prize certain things, certain characteristics above all other things. And, you know, in the hierarchy of what we want for our kids, we want our kids to be really successful. We want them to be really smart and we want them to. But if I gave you two choices, you know, you have a son or a daughter who is a psychopathic genius or one who is of moderate ability, who's benevolent and loving and kind.

I know which one you'd choose. Yeah. And a hundred times out of a hundred. And what you've just told me is those are competing characteristics. And in point of fact, benevolence, love and kindness is probably more important as far as you're concerned. And that's an important value for our society to start prizing and be more overt about as far as you're concerned. And that's an important value for our society to start prizing and be more overt about as far as I'm concerned. That's one of the things that I think that we could all probably agree on that would cool a lot of the tensions around a lot

of these conversations. What are the human values that should be and actually kind of are more important to us than cognitive ability, than, you know, academic performance. And the answer is the extent to which we can behave ethically and in a loving way toward one another. And that the sort of benevolence across society that we can and how we can foster that more in young people. And so that's a lot of what I've dedicated my work to doing, you know, as an academic, for example, you know, when I left my think tank, I was discerning what do I want to do the rest of my life? And I decided that I was going to spend the rest of my, I was mid-50s, 55 years old, and I said, I'm going to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using my intellect and using my ideas. Because I think that those

are higher values than the other things. Yeah, yeah. Although I would just point out that there's an implicit hierarchy even there. I mean, I think it's obvious that some people are more compassionate and wiser and more loving than others. For sure. That's a domain in which any one person can grow, and there are methods by which one can grow across all of those variables. But there's no question that there are ethical prodigies in the world. At whatever point in life, they fully embody those abilities. And I mean,

you mentioned a few in your book, and I think you mentioned in your book that you actually have had some direct connection with the Dalai Lama. What has that been about? About 10 years ago, when I was still president of AEI, I started thinking about the people that I wanted to have deep conversations, ethical conversations about big issues of the day with people whom I really admired morally, people whom I admired spiritually, people who are adroit. And really, the person on the top of that list is the world's most respected religious leader, who is the Dalai Lama. And so I got in contact with his team and with some of my colleagues at AEI. They granted us an hour with him in Dharamsala in his monastery in the Himalayan foothills. And it was an arduous journey getting up there for sure. But it was just sort of magic as soon as we met. We started talking, having these big ideas. I

invited him to the United States. He came, I interviewed him. We wound up writing together. I interviewed him many times. We've become friends. He's a beloved teacher and friend, and I've learned a great deal from him. I mean, he has a completely different spiritual tradition than me. He sees the world in many ways very differently than me. But what we agree on is this inherent dignity of all people. He reminds me, it's interesting, because he's Tibetan, he's not American. You and I are Americans, and we see things inherently a little bit differently. But he'll say, remember, you're one in seven billion people, by which he doesn't mean that I'm a speck, that I'm insignificant, but that we're all part of – I mean, I know that you practice meditation in a very serious way.

So the concept of emptiness means something to you. And the whole idea is that there's this koan in Zen Buddhism. What is the sound of one hand clapping? It's almost a cliche at this point. But really what it is, it's the answer to a question, who am I as an individual? I am the sound of one hand clapping. The truth is that I as an individual with my ideas don't mean very much until my hand clapping comes against the hand of Sam Harris and we have this particular conversation. And it's the Dalai Lama who's helped me understand that my dignity, that doesn't mean very much until it actually meets that your dignity together. It's the togetherness that really

matters a lot. That has been one of the most valuable relationships in my intellectual and my spiritual development. Yeah, it's been many years since I've seen him, but I did have some very nice concentrated exposure to him in my, I guess, late 20s. The most substantial was I was invited to be part of a Buddhist group that was arranging his tour of France for a month. And these are people, these are some friends who had been on three-year retreats in Tibetan Buddhist retreat centers in France. And so they were organizing his tour, and it was this

fairly arduous tour where he was basically changing cities every 24 or 48 hours for a month. And so you're packing and unpacking and packing and unpacking. And we were his security detail. Unlike in America, he was also given the French equivalent of a secret service detail as well. But we were the buffer between the real bodyguards and the rascal multitude in France. So strangely, we got into much more conflict with the people than the real bodyguards did, because they just used us as a buffer. But it was a really interesting experience because I got to see what he was like in all of these transitional moments with large groups of people again and again and again, in a situation where I had to be, you know, like my job was to be paranoid and to be, you know, scrutinizing every room looking for a threat.

And, you know, his job is to be Mr. Compassion and just beam love and good humor at everyone. and just beam love and good humor at everyone. So it was actually, it was a strangely toxic role to be in because it was just, you know, rather than stay on his channel, you had to be the jerk on some level. And I got to be a jerk with very poor language skills so that, you know, I didn't even have enough French to be diplomatic. So, you know, I'm telling people... There's not enough French in the world to be diplomatic, Sam.

Yeah, right. And the French, I notice, often aren't very diplomatic. But I was, you know, telling people not to move and back up and, you know, just, you know, kind of barking orders at journalists. And it's amazing how rude people can be. I mean, literally, there were journalists who at some point, you know, physically grabbed him and turned him, wheeled him around in order to get a photo of him. It was completely insane. But what I saw in him was just this ability to, almost without exception, not miss anyone. I mean, he would be exiting a hotel and there'd be a dozen or more people just gathered to watch him go because he was such a celebrity. Again, he's a bigger celebrity in France than he is in the States,

at least at that point. And he would just make, you know, it could be, you know, almost instantaneous, but he would make a connection with basically everyone in the room on his way out. And he's just kind of the ultimate mensch. You know, I guess I could be projecting somewhat on him, but I actually don't, you know, I don't hold him out to be, you know, at the top of the pantheon of meditation masters in Tibetan Buddhism. I mean, in fact, you know, I studied with some of his teachers and, you know, so I've met the people he looked up to and, you up to among Tibetan contemplatives. So it wasn't that. It was just that he was just such a kind and well-integrated person in the way he engaged everyone at every level of society.

It was just so admirable. And again, some of it could be innate, but you look at how he spends his time, it's not far-fetched to believe that a lot of it has to do with the training he's engaged. For sure. And I love him. And it's interesting because the model of that kind of kindness and goodness is really quite different than that which we're used to. The Dalai Lama, he's unattached to everything, including to people. He's not attached to people. He often talks about his cat. He loves his cat. He loves his cat. So it seems. And so one time I asked him, so what's your cat's name? And he looked at me like I was asking him a bizarre question. Like I was asking him, what's your left shoe named? You know what? He says, no name, cat. And the whole point is that there's this, there's love and then there's attachment and love and attachment are not the same thing.

And this has been hugely instructive for me because, you know, I have traveled with him as well. I wasn't, I wasn't, you know, doing bad cop like you. Um, I've been in the, you know, the, the nice situation of actually being able to be, you know, with him and interviewing him and, and, and just being with him when he's been on tour. But I've noticed the same thing that he has this, this, this love, this universalism in the love that he has for everybody. And part of it is because he is, universalism and the love that he has for everybody. And part of it is because he is loving and unattached at the same time. I think this is a standard that's very hard to attain.

It's a really hard thing for me to attain, you know, and it's made me reflect an awful lot about how I try to live my life in many ways. One of the things that I find in my own research as a social scientist is, you know, I study a lot the satisfaction problem. I mean, the satisfaction problem, we call it the Mick Jagger problem. You know, I can't get no satisfaction. And the truth is you can't keep no satisfaction. That's the truth. That's, you know, the homeostasis problem, the hedonic treadmill problem. Anybody who listens to your show knows about all about all these ideas that you, you try and you try and you try and you, you think that the new car smell will last forever, that the marriage will give you permanent satisfaction. Nothing does. And the reason is because Mother Nature just doesn't care if you're happy. And she wants you to pass on your

genes and doesn't want you to be satisfied. She wants you to run and run and run, to strive and strive and strive. And the answer to it really comes from detaching love from attachment. answer to it really comes from detaching love from attachment. That's the really important thing, because if you think of something as the be-all and the end-all, that you conceive of something as your permanent source of satisfaction, you will always be disappointed. It's okay to love and be non-attached at the same time. How do you do that? Well, that's the trick, isn't it? attached at the same time. How do you do that? Well, that's the trick, isn't it? Ultimately, that's not a question of having more. That's a question of wanting less. And that's one of the, really the great moral lessons that I've learned from the Dalai Lama and something I'm trying to,

that I'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to instantiate in the way I live my life. Yeah, I think you need to unpack what you mean by love and differentiating a few components, I think,'s a term that is usually translated as loving kindness from Buddhism. The Pali Sanskrit is metta. And it really is just the wish for others to be happy. The wish for them to be free of suffering is the compassion variant of that. And for that wish to really be tuned up to something like its maximum, a few things have to be purged or kind of burned off as impurities there. And one is the sense that you want something from the other people, that your happiness is in any way predicated on getting something from them, right? Or that your happiness is in any way competitive with theirs. So another aspect of, another variant of it is called mudita, which is a sympathetic joy, which is, you know,

the antithesis of envy, right? So we've all noticed this ghastly quality of mind where, you know, something good happens in the life of a friend, right? They have some great professional success or, you know, something great happens and you find in yourself a limit on your capacity to actually be happy for them, right? Because you feel somehow your happiness has been diminished. for them, right? Because you feel somehow your happiness has been diminished. I mean, this is just a ghastly quality of mind. Oh, it's the worst. I mean, envy is a deadly sin for that reason. My father was very funny. He used to say that, son, remember, it's not enough to win. Your friends have to lose too. Right. Yeah, yeah. I think there's, isn't there a Gore Vidal quote around there, which is just incredibly ugly? I forget what it was.

It's like, every time one of my friends succeeds, I die a little bit inside. I think that's what he said, right? Something like that, yeah. But, you know, there's a Western tradition that gets at this in the same way that is a little bit easier for most of us to understand. And that comes from Aquinas, who was really paraphrasing Aristotle. So Aquinas, of course, in the 13th century, in the Summa Theologica, he was really reintroducing, he was a Neoplatonist, but he reintroduced Aristotle to audiences. We probably wouldn't read the Nicomachean Ethics today were

it not for St. Thomas Aquinas. And Aquinas defined in Aristotelian way what love means, which gets at exactly what we're talking about here. He defined love as to will the good of the other as other. I mean, this could have been right out of the mouth of the Buddha. As a matter of fact, he was really impressed and really influenced by many Eastern teachings. And so when you read Aquinas, it's pretty Eastern. But to will the good of the other, this is not about sentimentality. This is not about feelings, which is really important. You know, when I teach happiness at the Harvard Business School, the first day of class, I say, what's happiness?

And they start talking about that feeling I get when dot, dot, dot. And I say, wrong. Happiness has feelings, but just like the Thanksgiving dinner has a smell, that's evidence of happiness. Happiness has to be something more tangible than that, or you can improve it. There's not much you can do about it. You shouldn't be taking a class in it, for Pete's sake. very related to the Buddhist ideas that we're talking about here. Do you love somebody? Well, then will their good as that person? And then you're on the road to perhaps becoming a bodhisattva. Hmm. Okay. Well, I want to get back to Aquinas and related topics there, but let's go back to intelligence where we left it. We did not actually describe the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence and the use to which you put these concepts in your book. So tell me, what are your thoughts on that topic? So Kattel, Raymond Kattel, the social psychologist,

great British social psychologist, noticed that people, they get better at things through their 20s and 30s, that kind of 10,000 hours deal where they have focus, the ability to work hard, a lot of working memory. And almost anything that you can get good at from being an air traffic controller to being a French horn player to being a college professor, a researcher in particular, that requires innovative capacity to crack the code, to solve problems, that's fluid intelligence. And that gets better and better through your 20s and 30s. And weirdly, it tends to peak in your late 30s or early 40s, and then it tends to decline. And he noticed this, Cattell noticed this, that these abilities tend to decline. Now, if you're really a striver and you're really good at what you do, and most of the people listening to us right now, they're good at something. They're really the only ones in their 40s who are going to notice these declines. And the way that you notice it is what people in the management world call burnout.

So you find that your dentist, for example, when he's, let's say, 43, weirdly starts taking Fridays off to golf. It's like, why would you do that? Do this trivial kind of hobby instead of doing something that you love, like being a dentist. And the answer is because humans aren't happy when they're not making progress. The mathematicians will put it that all of happiness is in the first derivative. All of happiness is in getting better. The status, this is a reason, by the way, Sam, that it's very easy to lose weight, but it's very hard to keep weight off. Because when the scale's going down, you're motivated and happy. And when you hit your goal, the reward for hitting your goal is now you never get to eat the things you like ever again for the rest of your we're wired. Progress is everything. And so what happens is that people get very frustrated and angry and desperate and afraid and sad when they're on the downslope of

this fluid intelligence curve. What Kattel also pointed out is there's a second intelligence curve behind it that doesn't reward the same things. It's called crystallized intelligence, and it's based on all the things you know and how to use the things that you know. So your working memory is a lot worse. Your innovative capacity is worse. Your speed and your ability to solve problems is worse. But your wisdom is higher. Your pattern recognition is higher. Your vocabulary is higher. Your teaching ability is higher. And so what you need to do, if you want to use that, is actually start doing the things that favor that increasing intelligence. The great news, incredible news, is that crystallized intelligence increases through

your 40s and 50s and even 60s and stays high in your 70s and 80s. So there's a guy at University of California at Davis, a guy named Dean Keith Simonton, who's the world's, I mean, you've, I don't know if you've had him on your show. He's phenomenal. No, I've read fluid intelligence, like poetry, where you're just inventing stuff with words, that that has a half-life around age 40, where you've done half of your lifetime work around age 40. When you think about it, you know, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, their best works were written in their late 20s and early 30s, and both guys lived into their 80s. Now, if you look at something that loads on crystallized intelligence, the body of knowledge and how to use it, like historians, they're basically just teachers.

You have to have the New York Public Library in your head to be able to be a historian. Their halfway point is about age 65. So if you're a historian, take care of your health because your best books are probably coming in your 80s is the point. And that's the difference between a career that loads on fluid and a career that loads on crystallized. Now, our job, you and me, is to be walking in our 40s and 50s from our fluid intelligence curve onto our crystallized intelligence curve by manifesting what we do in different ways. Probably that goes from writing mathematical theorems, which I was doing, to writing a column in The Atlantic and teaching at Harvard,

you know, writing mathematical theorems, which I was doing, to writing a column in The Atlantic and teaching at Harvard, which I'm doing now. This podcast that you're doing is like a master display in crystallized intelligence because you're teaching with this particular podcast. This is a good thing that you're doing to favor what you're naturally getting good at in your 50s. One likes to think, I mean, there's some skills that, or some kind of career arcs that leverage crystallized intelligence much earlier, right? I mean, or it's not so much about fluid intelligence. And then there's some careers where to move from fluid to crystallized is really just, it requires a fundamental change of career, right? I mean, you have to admit, you've hit the ceiling and now you're declining.

And you're not going to be, I mean, there are examples of this in science. You single out Linus Pauling as one example of somebody. I guess this wasn't so much synonymous with a diminution in his abilities, although that could have been at the back of it. It was more just he, in his attachment to his own status and influence, he kept jumping on to one more lurid misuse of his abilities after the next until he finally landed on mega doses of vitamin C. I mean, we should probably, I mean, for people who don't know the Linus Pauling story, I mean, it's like, Linus Pauling, of course, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the nature of the chemical bond, which was just, I mean, if you don't have to be a chemist, I mean,

his work in chemistry changed a lot of, changed our lives in all sorts of ways, esoteric and not so much. And then later on in life, I mean, look, the fluid intelligence curve is the fluid intelligence curve. He won the Nobel Prize for work that he did in his 20s. They all win for work that they do in their 20s and 30s. They win it much later, usually, but it's for work that they do when they have this maximum amount of this incredible ability to focus and to use their unbelievable cognitive ability to greatest innovative ends. Well, later on in his life, just to, I mean, he's like the man behind me on the plane, or like so many other people. He's frustrated,

obviously, and perhaps to keep the limelight or for whatever reason, he got more and more involved in activities that were really ostentatious and probably ill-advised. I mean, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the limitation of nuclear arms, but he took the Lenin Prize in the Soviet Union around the same time, and, you know, for, you know, the Lenin Peace Prize, really. And then later, he went on to kind of a pseudoscience of massive doses of vitamins. He thought that vitamins could cure virtually all mental illness. He was also very interested in eugenics and the idea that you could find the propensity to commit crimes and is moral and appropriate, but also scientific today. And you would say that he's a person who was just desperate, desperate to stay on the first curve, and he could have done a lot better by getting on the second curve. And so one of the things that I talk about in my work these days is how I can do it, how you can do it, and how everybody can do

it by thinking about what is it in our lives that's more fluid and what's more crystallized. So I talk about startup entrepreneurs. They're much better later in life as venture capitalists because they have perspective and they're teachers. But they're not going to be sitting in a room 16 hours a day writing code, having people slip a pizza under the door. It's just not going to happen. If you're lawyers, for example, they're star litigators, ninjas, kind of like soul cowboys early on. And then later on, they make better managing partners. You know, people are better as crack employees earlier, better as managers later.

For people like you and me, you know, we write the most innovative theoretical papers early in our academic careers, but we're much better explainers and teachers later on in our career. And each one of us can find our own crystallized intelligence curve. But if you don't, woe be unto you. If you stay handcuffed onto that fluid intelligence curve, you're going to write it down in the basement and feel aggrieved for the rest of your life. How much of this is an actual difference in these subtypes of intelligence, and how much of it is just energy and ambition and life circumstance. I mean, so many people delay having families. I guess this is not so true if you go back far enough in history. But now it's certainly true that there's a period in your 20s and even early to mid-30s where if you're playing an academic or entrepreneurial game and waiting for pizza to be pushed under the door, you very likely don't have kids. And again, you've got endless energy just to burn the candle at both ends.

How much of that is a variable here that could be confounding how you're thinking about this? Well, in the literature, as you can imagine, that's a big discussion. There is a work of both psychologists and neuroscientists that suggests that some of it is structural in the way that the brain works, but no doubt some of it is just the cadence of life. And part of the part that I find especially provocative and interesting is that I think that a lot of people, by the time they get into their 40s, have stopped falling for Mother Nature's tyrannical little trick, which is you're finally going to get that thing that you've always wanted, and it's going to be endlessly satisfying until the end of your life.

After a while, you start saying, actually, that's not true. The new car smell isn't going to get that thing that you've always wanted, and it's going to be endlessly satisfying until the end of your life. After a while, you start saying, actually, that's not true. The new car smell isn't going to last. If I get that thing that I want in my career, if I invent the theorem or get the patent or get tenure or whatever your thing is, or become the greatest French horn player in the world if the things had gone my way, that it's actually just not as satisfying as you think it's going to be and not for very long. And so that you start tempering your expectations that that has to be part of it too. No doubt these are separable things, but they're complementary to each other. They exacerbate each other and they make it impossible for you to be able to be this kind of fluid genius that you were early on

on the basis of, man, I'm going to work till I drop. What are your thoughts about identity here and the normative degree to which it can be diminished or appropriately linked to something in your life. I mean, I know you touch on this in the book, but I don't think there was a moment where I clearly understood whether or not you and I view this in the same way. I mean, just to give you my view, it feels to me, and this is, you'll detect the Buddhist influence here, that the sanest relationship to identity is to basically have none, right? Or certainly to have none that is crystallized to any sort of point of being inflexible or, you know, when challenged, becomes a source of suffering, right? It's just like, there's no version of a self-concept. Actually, you do at

one point invoke the term, actually the Buddhist term, mana, which is usually translated as conceit. And I think you talk about it in the mode of just social comparison, right? Like comparing oneself favorably or unfavorably to others. And I mean, the insight here for me is that there really is no comparison to others that is a psychologically healthy basis for satisfaction. I mean, so like if you're comparing yourself unfavorably to others, well, obviously that hurts, right? You know, you're feeling diminished by proximity to others. But comparing yourself favorably to others also is just a very petty, morally impoverished place to be, you know? I mean, just how much does, do you want your sense of well-being to be predicated on, you know, looking down on your friends? You know, if you're noticing that you're smarter or richer or better looking than your friends, I mean, like, in what does your friendship consist, right? If that's what I believe philosophically, is that you just, you want

the fumes of identity to fully dissipate, and it's immensely freeing on some level not to know who one is in the world. I mean, it's not that you want your, you want to be able to function, you don't want to have a kind of aphasia with respect to how you navigate social roles, right? I mean, you need to be able to say the appropriate and civil things on cue. You want to know, you know, how to dress for dinner. But to wear whatever self-concept you have as lightly as possible so that it really is just not the place from which you're relating to the next moment of experience. That's what seems optimal to me. Is there any way in which you disagree with that?

No, there's no way that I disagree with that. I think that's exactly right. But I also will point out that that is not human nature. And that brings me to my sort of overarching point, which is that Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. Mother Nature has other goals for you. The great crossing of circuits in the human mind, as far as I'm concerned, is that we

want to be happy and we have urges for money and power and pleasure and fame. And the only way that we're going to know if we're successful along those dimensions is by comparing ourselves to other people. And we have brains, by the way. I mean, you can oxygenate your ventral striatum as well by having favorable social comparison as you can by taking methamphetamine. And you can get that, and it's a real reward, and people will be stuck on it, but it will not bring you ultimate happiness. Because happiness is not something on which we're sorting. Mother Nature is not actually giving us this imperative, this evolutionary imperative. That's the important thing to keep in mind. And I think that that is entirely consistent with Buddhist teaching, also with

Christian teaching. The idea that if it feels good, do it is not the best way to live your life. It's actually a foolish way to live your life. And that you need to be in charge. You can't let your feelings manage you. You should work to manage yourself and to manage your feelings. And, you know, there's interesting because other traditions look at it in a slightly different way. One that I find especially useful is, you know, the Hindus, they talk about Atman, which is the best way to think about it is in English, in the Western tradition is that there's a difference between I and me. So I am an observer of the world. Me is an understanding of myself reflected through what Sam Harris thinks of me right

now. And most people are all me and no I. Atman is the ultimate I. And the Hindus believe that only Atman can be in communion with Brahman, which is the Godhead. You can only really have a full communion with the universality of the true nature of things when you're just observing as opposed to understanding yourself in the reflection of what everybody else thinks. And boy, oh boy, I mean, that's the reason that people say that, for example, Zen Buddhism isn't a philosophy or let alone a religion. It's an attitude. It's eyeness. It's outward-facing observation of the world. And I think that this is a really important ambition for all of us, if we want to have the best nature, notwithstanding the fact that it's not very natural.

Okay, well, so we've landed on this topic of religion, and no doubt my blasphemy or reputation for blasphemy will have preceded me. Really? I'd never heard. Are you an atheist? I didn't know. You can anticipate we might disagree about a few things here, but I'm just wondering, there's probably some useful venting of our different perspectives here that we could is, on your view, faith the right gesture given our spiritual opportunities here? Why does this perhaps describe what your relationship is to faith here? Obviously I know it because I've read your book, but the audience won't. And then tell me

what you mean by faith and why is on my account, faith is, in the usual sense, something I think we need to overcome as opposed to something that is the spiritual center of the bullseye. So tell me what you mean by faith and what your faith is at this point. Faith, I'm talking about it in different ways as a Christian and then I do as a scientist. So when I do my work, when I say faith, it's simply, it's an abbreviation for living in a trance. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content,

including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. Thank you.