Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 176: Arthur C. Brooks, Love Your Enemies

Episode Date: February 27, 2019

Social scientist, author and podcast host Arthur C. Brooks believes America has developed a "culture of contempt." He feels we increasingly view people who disagree with us not as merely incorrect or misguided, but as worthless, which is warping political discourse, tearing us apart as people, and even wrecking our health. In this week's episode, Brooks discusses his meditation practice, his relationship with the Dalai Lama and how we can bridge national divides and make progress as a society, all while becoming happier and more effective people. The Plug Zone Website: https://arthurbrooks.com? Podcast: https://arthurbrooks.com/podcast/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

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I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, I loved this conversation. In many ways it's actually a conversation about how to have conversations, less that sound irredeemably meta and academic to you. Let me just put this in context. It is my opinion, and I don't think this is super controversial, that one of the biggest problems in American public life right now is political polarization and toxic tribalism.

We're not talking to each other, we're talking past each other. Arthur Brooks has thought deeply about this problem and is actually doing something about it and giving people constructive advice in these tough times. He spent 10 years as the president of the American Enterprise Institute, which is a conservative think tank in Washington, DC. He's now a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He also has an excellent podcast,

the Arthur Brooks show, and a new book, which is called Love Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save America From the culture of contempt and in this Conversation we talk about how to disagree agreeably the danger of contempt and what it how corrosive it is both Interpersonally and on a macro level in our culture and his sometimes controversial relationship with his holiness the Dalai Lama Which is a fascinating thing to talk about. So a lot to get to with Arthur Brooks,

and we'll get to it soon. First, two items of business. The first item of business is that there's a new meditation up on the 10% happier app that is directly germane to the conversation you're about to hear. It's from Jessica Mori, a one of my favorite meditation teachers. And it's about having hard conversations.

It's called hard conversations. That's the name of the meditation, if you want to search for it. And this is a meditation you can listen to before you get into a difficult conversation, which I suspect I will be using on the regular. Now that I know it's there. So go check that out. The other item

business I want to get to is that a lot of you have reached out to me via email and text and Twitter about Sharon Salzburg, one of the most respected, experienced, intelligent, and awesome human beings and meditation teachers in the world. She's had a bit of a health crisis recently, so I want to read you what I think will be comforting words from her director of operations, Lily Kushman. This is a statement. It's very brief from Lily. I'm sharing the news that Sharon went through a major health emergency this past weekend. So that will have been, by the time you're hearing

this two weekends ago. She's now stable and on the path to a full recovery, she is receiving excellent medical care. And we are deeply grateful for all of the amazing work and dedication of her doctors, nurses, and hospital staff. It is truly remarkable. To take care of her health, Sharon will be taking

a few months off from teaching so that she has the time and space to heal completely. We will be updating her calendar of events to reflect these changes in the next day or so. And for those of you directly impacted by these cancellations, we thank you for your patience and understanding. I know how many of you have a profoundly deep bond with Sharon and that this message

is not an easy one to read. Rest assured that she will be back in action in no time and is surrounded by a tremendous support system during this time. So that's from Lily Kushman. I just want to say I don't have a ton of additional information other than to say that from what I've been able to gather from good sources, she really is on the road to recovery and in very good hands. So, Sharon, if you're listening to this, this difficult period, if there's any silver lining, it is that you should hopefully be more acutely aware of the ocean of goodwill that exists out there for you. Myself included, I and my family are sending you an enormous amount of love,

and I hope to connect to you soon. I should also say that there's an enormous amount of goodwill I hope to connect to you soon. I should also say that there's an enormous amount of goodwill coming specifically from the team at the 10% happier app where we all love Sharon and she is one of our founding teachers, her and Joseph Goldstein. So that's an update on Sharon. Let's get back to the show this week. As mentioned, the guest is Arthur Brooks. I just want to read to you a few very quick lines from his biologist

to get a sense of of where he's coming from. He is a bestselling author, a social scientist. He was until recently the president of the American Enterprise Institute. His path to politics was anything but typical. At 19, he left college to play the French horn professionally. He toured internationally and recorded several albums eventually landing in the city orchestra of Barcelona. In his late 20s he returned to the United States and completed his bachelor's degree by correspondence. He went on to earn a PhD in public policy focusing on micro economics and mathematical modeling. After completing his doctorate he spent 10 years as a professor of public administration. He is now an in-demand speaker. He's a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times, a frequent radio and TV. I should add podcast commentator. A Seattle native. He's been married for nearly three decades to his wife Esther and they live in Maryland. I'm not sure if that's actually true anymore. Now that

he's teaching at the Kennedy School and they have three kids. So there's some background on Arthur. Well, let me stop talking and let you get to him though because he has some immensely useful and interesting things to say. So here he is. Arthur C Brooks. Great to meet you. I've been following you in the times for a long time in the New York Times for a long time. And then I heard you went to Ezra Client's podcast. You were great. And now I'm listening to your podcast, which is even greater. Thank you, Dan. And thank you for having me and for the incredible success of your 10% happier project for the success of this podcast, but more importantly for the success of the social enterprise of making a happier human race. Thank you. I'm doing my best.

I know you are. I'm working on myself and by extension, hopefully everybody will love us. Yeah, it's a good and noble thing to do. Thank you. I appreciate that. So how did you get interested in, how did a nice center-right think tanker get involved in meditation?

I'm a practicing Catholic and a big part of the Catholic faith, something that's been central to Orthodox Catholic faith from, for about a thousand years has been the practice of the rosary. The rosary is what in the East you'd call chanting, but it's systematic prayer, it's memorized prayer. And one of the things that I was very interested in finding when I was a social scientist was that the brain studies, the functional MRI studies,

showed that the same part of the brain is stimulated when they looked at nuns who had said the rosary faithfully for many, many years, their brain scans looked just like the brain scans of Buddhist monks in Vietnam who had been chanting. What did this tell me? It told me that people can get incredibly good technique in the practice of meditation,

not withstanding the tradition that it comes from. So I thought to myself, hmm, I want to say my rosary, but I want to do it better. Now, I spent a lot of time in India for my work. And because I'm the president of the think tank, I'm the president of the American Enterprise Institute, and we have a practice and inform policy that's all over the world. And a big part of it is looking at India. India is one of the most interesting countries in the world if you want to understand democratic capitalism, if you want to understand human freedom and prosperity because India is better

every time you go. It's not perfect. It's the poor. But it's better every time you go. And so it's inspirational to actually see this laboratory of free enterprise. But in so doing, I've also gotten to know a lot of people Hindu and Buddhist leaders. I've become very close with the Dalai Lama who lives in Darum Sala in the Himalayan foothills in India. I've also gotten to know Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and I've been spending time of late with a man

named Sri Notcher Venkatteraman, who's a Southern Indian guru, who lives in the compound started by Sri Ramana Maharshi, one of the most influential gurus of the 20th century. And this is in the Hindu tradition. Exactly right. But both the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, which are of course extremely different from each other, bear certain similarities when it comes to the technique that they bring to meditation and so by learning Meditation techniques from the masters from the people who have been practicing it for in the case of the Hindus up to 6000 years I have become in I have to say the Hindu Masters have made me a much better Catholic

Well, tell me about how that would be well you know because you're your you're a meditator, you're Buddhist, that you become, not just more peaceful, you become closer to truth when your meditation practice is true and it is constant and it is disciplined when you meditate every day and you do it with sincerity and you do it with a heart full of passion and love. That's when your meditation is actually most effective. That's the same thing in every tradition.

But it turns out that some traditions are much more effective in helping people to attain that because they have it more centrally located in their faith that is certainly true in the Eastern religions. So when I'm with very serious practicing Buddhists and Hindus who are meditators, I find they tend to be more adroit meditators than Catholics are. And in learning the techniques and learning the way that they meditate and bringing it over to my own practice as a Roman Catholic, I find that it's, I feel closer to God. I, no, no, I am closer to God. No, no, I am closer to God.

What does your practice look like? What are you doing in your mind when you practice meditation on a daily basis now? Well, the Buddhists, the Tibetan Buddhists, which is the tradition I'm most familiar with, they don't allow me to talk about concentrated meditation, single point meditation, and what Catholics would call mental prayer, or meditation which is focused on a particular idea. These are different kinds of meditation, of course. One is actually thinking deeply about a passage in Scripture, thinking deeply about an idea

that we don't understand. The other is single point meditation, which is trying to take away with the book called the monkey mind, getting away so that the scattered thoughts, you can focus on something and attain greater peace to understand your integral self in a better way. The same thing is true in the way that I might pray as a Catholic. So when I'm praying my rosary, I'm focusing my thoughts,

I'm bringing my monkey mind back to where I want it to be, which is focusing on the Catholic Rosary's passages from the New Testament while praying the same prayer over and over again, prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary. There's other kinds of meditation that I'll practice each day as well, which is more dedicated toward thinking about something in sacred scripture, thinking about something that I'm puzzling over. Both kinds are absolutely, are practiced and encouraged in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, and both it turns out in the ancient Catholic traditions are recommended as well. And I've had some advances and some success, particularly since going to India a lot in both of these as well.

So when you sit, I don't know what time of day it is, but you say you're sitting in the morning, you start with the rosary? Yeah, I start with the rosary generally, because single point meditation is a really good thing. I don't know if in your practice, you probably find that in the morning, it's a better time to do it, it centers you better for the day. It really just depends on what my day is looking like or really, some people are not mourning people.

And for them, I would say, don't try to force it in the morning, because then you're gonna have a hard time. I'm not a mourning person, but it turns out that I have time in the morning. And so therefore, yeah, I mean, again, the key thing is discipline, a lot of these things. It's not having it crowded out. It's remembering what's important to you,

and my faith is very important to me. So therefore, I wanna practice my faith, and I wanna practice it in the most effective way that I possibly can, and so that means setting aside time for the same way that I do exercise. I'm always interested when sitting with people of faith, speaking as a sort of respectful agnostic myself.

As a economist, social scientist, who's got a demonstrated predilection for intellectual rigor, what is, what is that allows you to make the leap of faith to be so sure that there is a God? Well, nobody's sure. And that's actually the mystery of faith. People always talk about the mystery of faith, People I was talking about, the mystery of faith,

they never really pay attention to what that means. The mystery of faith is believing something or living as if you believe something, notwithstanding the fact that these are non-testable hypotheses. Most of the life that we go through from day to day, I mean, it's like I'm gonna take a left at the corner here, why?

Because my data tell me, which is the database in my head, the experience I've had coming to work, my car, showing me that taking a left at the corner here. Why? Because my data tell me, which is the database in my head, the experience I've had coming to work, my car, showing me that taking a left is usually faster than going right. For example, our life is empirical. What you do as a journalist is based on empirical regularities. That's called experience. But there are certain things that are non-testable hypotheses. There are certain things that where you might be wrong. And the mystery of faith is to say, I will, in this area of my life, suspend my disbelief

for something that I think is good and true and right. And this is what I want. And doing that is a little bit of war with yourself. And this is something I talk a lot about with his Holiness of the Al-Alamah, the idea of being a war with yourself is incredibly important. It sounds violent, it sounds terrible, it sounds unpleasant, but it isn't. But that turns out to be true mastery. But to say, look, if I don't see evidence of something, I'm just not going to do it. That's to be a slave to the stimuli in your environment, forever. And so to grab the mystery of faith in some area of your life is to say, no, no, no,

I'm gonna be in charge here. Yeah, but okay, I'm just trying to think if I agree with that because I have a hard time believing in anything I can't prove. Maybe that's because I'm a slave to the stimuli of my environment. Almost certainly I am. Nonetheless, I would still have a hard time subscribing to a belief system that was, you know, some books that were written in the Bronze Age and saying, okay, these are revealed wisdom from the divine creator and I'm going to live my life

according to this code. I respect, I mean, I'll have a lot of friends who are people of faith. Right. And I, so I don't say that with, you probably your grandparents were. Oh, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Not my parents, but my grandparents. Yeah, that's classic.

So you and I are more or less same age, you're a little bit younger than I am. And your grandparents, what is your family coming to the United States? In the early part of the 20th century. Okay, so they were in Russia, probably, or something. Yes, and there's like a like- In Ukraine. Yeah, the Ukraine, who knows? It was Russia, Ukraine, who knows at that time, right? Yeah, well, it depends what program was that.

Exactly, right. You know, and there's like, this shuttle is not that great. I'm out of here, basically, right? Yes. And they came to the United States and they were probably responsible for being at the center of a Jewish community. And part of ethnic Jewish life was the practice of the faith was living by the law. And by the time your parents came along, they said, I don't need it that much. And when it's a medical, I think we're disabused of any notions they might have had. Yeah. And then

Dan comes along and says, I want something a little bit deeper, whether you're practicing Buddhist meditation or whether or not you're keeping the high holy days. And then who knows what dance kids are gonna do? Who knows your son might be a rabbi? Right. I highly doubt it. He's only one quarter Jewish. I married out of the faith.

Still, I mean, never rule it out. He had that totally. Yeah, yeah. He could, I mean, never rule it out. He had absolutely, yeah, yeah. He could, he could, he could, he'll, I don't know, who knows what he's gonna, right now, I'm trying to just get him to stop pooping in his pants. No, I got it. But God's got a sense of humor. You know, it's a future of I,

it's your changing diaper. So what allows you, I mean, and why is it so important to, I guess I'm asking two questions at the same time, but you said before that it's so important to, I guess I'm asking two questions at the same time, but you said before that it's so important to be at war with yourself and you said you talk about this with the dollar line. What does he say to that?

Because I don't know, that doesn't sound very Buddhist to me. Well, to begin with, it's very Buddhist to say that it's the idiots paradise to follow if it feels good, do it. Because basically, if it feels good, do it is nothing more than a biological imperative to pass on your genes. That's why things, what you're pushed internally to do things is because of these biological imperatives, money, power, pleasure, fame. These are all ways that we, these are things that we try to accumulate, not because they're

going to make us happy and not because they're going to help other people, but because they make us more likely to, to, to probably get the species with our own genetic footprint all over it, right? And so to say, okay, there's a difference between being successful genetically and being a happy person. This is almost self-evident. I mean, you'd have to be somebody who's utterly unreflective to, to, to, to believe that that's not the case. I mean, the world around you tells you to use people, love things, worship yourself. I mean, the good life is to love people, use things, and in my view, worship God. That's the road to happiness, and the road to happiness

is different than the road to genetics, success. And the Dalai Lama recognizes that everybody recognizes that, who's actually reflecting on these types of things. So what that means is that if you're not at war with yourself, you're losing, how are you losing? You're not going to be happy. Look, I want to be 10% happier. So do you. How do I know that? Because that's maybe your show. You're not going to be 10% happier unless you have this little bit of truth that's working in your life, which is that you're happy. The 10% happiness means not doing the thing

and some of the things that you're being pushed to do when you're not thinking. That's what I mean by being in conflict with yourself in a very beautiful way. That's why we teach our kids to be at war with their selves a little bit in a beautiful way. It sounds almost as if it were unnatural, but it's the most natural thing ever. No, I buy everything you just said now that you say it that way. I just don't know how that gets you to believing in God. Hmm.

It doesn't necessarily get you to believing in God. It doesn't have to get you there at all. The truth is that we have a very imperfect understanding of the universe, you and I do. If we had a perfect understanding of the universe, we wouldn't be trying to figure out how to be 10% happier. It would be an exact science. It would be like turning on the tap and water coming out.

So all of us have been struggling for forever to actually figure out what the secrets are, what the equations are that we're trying to put in place. And by the way, there's nothing strange about this. Physics is an incredibly exact science. People thought that when Newton came up with his laws, these were the ones in eternal laws. Well, in terms of that Einstein invalidated Newtonian physics, it showed that Newton was wrong. It doesn't mean that he was crazy.

It didn't mean that you couldn't still use Newton's equations as an approximation of what's going on in the natural world. But Einstein showed that it was nothing more than approximation. And we will come to a point where we understand that Einstein was wrong too. That's where we're going to get. Well, the truth is we don't know about what the... There is a truth underlying the spiritual regularities of the universe. There is a truth under there someplace.

We don't know what it is. As a Catholic, I don't know what it is that you was a Buddhist. I don't know what it is. We're just doing the best that we can. Can't you just be comfortable not knowing it rather than assigning. Yeah, I could be comfortable not knowing. I just choose to, I just choose to act as if I did know. And it doesn't mean I'm right. I might be wrong. I might be completely delusional. So it's faith with humility. Of course. There's nothing. I mean, the humility is supposed to be central to the Christian faith. It's

supposed to be central. We got that from our that from our older brothers and sisters to Jews. I mean, that's actually part of being in harmony with what we believe is God's law, but it's also incredibly prudent thing to be. I mean, to be prideful, to not be humble about what we know is to turn our back on all of the realities that we face from day to day. Of course, I might be wrong. I've seen faith done both ways though. I've seen it done with a lot of dogmatism and I've seen it done with a lot of wisdom and humility. Yeah, absolutely. I prefer the latter. So do I. How did you become friends with the Dalama?

How did you become friends with the the dilemma? So It was a beautiful thing actually. I had a list when I was as president of eight. Yeah, I and for listeners We're not you know paying attention to the Washington DC think tanks. I like to say you know congratulations You know you're doing something with your life that's important to good But but those of you who do know something about eight. Yeah, I know that eight has a public policy think tank dedicated to mostly foreign policy and economics and social policy in Washington DC, making better, making politicians better off at making public policy.

They're describing as conservative. Yes, center right, but free, free enterprise oriented, American strength oriented, nonpartisan, I'm not a Republican or a Democrat. I'm just a guy who thinks that democratic capitalism is unbalanced, good for people. And that's kind of how my colleagues see it. But one of the things that we don't do is religion, spirituality, and I had a list of people.

I thought it would be so interesting to talk about the morals of Democratic capitalism with this list of people. And to get in front of audiences that had never heard that and number one of my list was the Dalai Lama I I love his writings I read his books. I admire him and And so I said huh, I'm gonna try to go to where he lives He has a monastery in Durham, Sala India and I'm gonna see if I get an audience with him And I'm gonna ask him to come to Washington DC and discuss this with me in front of an audience of You know on television and with an audience of politicians and the people who have power in the public policy system

in America. And it was interesting. I spent an hour and a half talking to him and he's lovely and sweet. At the end of the hour, he said, so you love re-enterprise? I didn't want to say, well, I don't want to say I love it. I mean, I think it's a pretty good system. But I said, I mean, like I'm, I'm on a waste time here. I'll say, yeah, you're holding this. That's right. And he says,

I, I am a Marxist. And I thought, ah, I came all the way here. Then he goes on. And he says, but I do not believe in the force government sharing. I believe in voluntary sharing is the basis of human morality. I said, man, it's exactly what I think, too. I don't care if it's called free enterprise or Marxism. I believe that sharing the bounty that we have that finding systems that That bring that lift people up at the margins of society that bring people together in unity that great great greater solidarity and brotherhood that can give us more love That's what I'm all about and and whether we call that

Whether we call that Marxism or free enterprise or or anything else. I want more of it and I said would you come and talk about this with me in Washington? You see me said yes and he came and we've working together ever since. But it was controversial when he came. Yeah. Yeah, you both took some heat for it. Yeah, well, I don't think, I mean, he's a dollar. Well, I mean, it doesn't take heat.

I mean, he's he deflects heat. He's like a, it's like a shield that deflects. He's like a dollar bomb. He doesn't take heat. He's deflects heat. He's like a shield that deflects he's like a spacesuit. Or like one of those superheroes, the more heat you send there in their direction, the stronger they get. That's unbelievable. I mean, everything helps in all of them. It's a great man. Yeah, so the vanity fairer, this really funny headline, said, why is it only a lot of visiting the right-wing American and the right-wing institute? The truth is because peace and justice and compassion

are his thing and he wants to talk about it with everybody. And that's a good thing. And this is the lesson, the non-spiritual, the policy lesson that all the drama brings to all of us, which is you gotta talk to everybody. This idea of de-platforming certain people, closing yourself off from conversations with certain people, disparaging certain people because of your preconceived notions of who they are, what they think it's a built-in mistake. I realize

that some people seem beyond the pale, but so many times we assume that and that we're wrong. I'm running a book right now called Love Your Enemies. And it's really dedicated to the spirit that I've gotten from working with his holiness at Al-Ilamah. I mean, the books you're working on. Yeah, I'm also working on books. It's like I've heard a think tank, man. Also, by the way, stepping down from the think tank and going back to the university next summer. Which university? Harvard. Okay. I've heard of it. Yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah, it's a small college in Boston And and I'll be I'll be more time to to work on multiple projects, but this this project love your enemies Basically is the wrong title in so far as the people who disagree with us

They're simply brothers and sisters who disagree with us. They're not our enemies And so therefore we have no reason not to love them. And that was a concept that I got from the dollar law of himself. I want to get into because you have this excellent new podcast, really talking about how to disagree agreeably. But before we get into that, let's stay on the economic tip for a second, because you talked about voluntary sharing being the basis. If the government is not involved,

how can we make sure that the sharing happens? Yeah, I mean, we can take it to the point where we say because voluntary sharing is this sort of a scenic one, none of moral excellence that we shouldn't have any welfare programs, and I think that's wrong. I think that's actually wrong

because we have public goods. We have preferences as a society where we don't want people to fall through the cracks or we don't want people to be too poor. What we're saying basically is we want to share, but we just don't have good mechanisms for doing it through alms giving, alms for the poor. So therefore, we've found an excellent way of doing it, which is government redistribution and welfare programs. The only thing that, by the way, that's ever made that possible

is the bounty that's come from capitalism. The first time in human history, the societies can be rich enough that we have an overflow that we can pay to support people we've never met through government means, which is the greatest achievement of capitalism, I think, actually believe they're not, is the welfare state. And we need to fund that. We need to fund it generously and seriously, and in a particularly

in a way that doesn't create incentives that demobilizes people and makes them feel not unneeded in our society. But is it orthodoxy in some quarters on the right that the welfare state is a massive fiery failure? Well, the welfare state, as we've configured it, certainly has problems. So what I would say, the orthodoxy on the right, if there is one, you know.

The right is not monolith. Yeah, it's a mess. It's like the left. I mean, that's the great thing about America, is that when you say right or left doesn't mean anything. I mean, what we have is our opinions, and we have our neighbors, and we have conversations. We also, unfortunately, have our neighbors and we have conversations. We also unfortunately have our biases and tribes. Yeah, totally.

And that is particularly a problem right now. But one of the beautiful things about the United States is that people have a fun jability in their views and they change. I mean, I'm really ideologically very different than my own family. And my parents were different than their parents. And it was no problem. We all love each other and we always got along. Although as you talk about in your podcast, there have been moments where your

parents were worried that you might be voting for Republicans. Yeah. Yeah. It's like deep, deep, you know, secret, you know, family. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. But but it never created a problem.

Right. It was just sort of why are you doing that? But it wasn't you can't come to Thanksgiving. So to the extent that there's some orthodoxy in the right It's the same as orthodoxy on you know thinking people on the left Which is that everything in these public policies hasn't been perfect and it has had some some side effects that have been really deleterious And I get an example we've spent 23 trillion dollars on on welfare programs since Lyndon Johnson kicked off the War on Poverty. Now, the War on Poverty was kicked off on April 24, 1969, 1963, when he went to this place

called Aynes Kentucky, a little town in Kentucky. And he said, he was the master. I mean, this guy was great. He had all these photographers from Life Magazine and writers from Time Magazine with him, and he went up on a guy's porch and he said, tell me your story. He was a guy who said, you know, having a job in five years, I got eight kids, I got a first grade education, and he was poor. His kids were malnourished. And he walked off the porch and he said, today I declare a war on poverty. Our goal is total victory.

And man, you would have cheered because it was great. And it was a time of promise and he came back to Washington the guy he put in charge of the war on poverty was Sergeant Shriver was JFK's brother-in-law and incredibly great American a guy who just you know he had a love for the poor he had a belief in America is totally patriotic and he said that the goal of and here's the here's the crux here's where conservatives and liberals can agree the goal goal that we're on poverty, he said, is dignity, not doles. And that should be the goal that we still have today. But the problem is that it's not that there are too many doles.

It's just that we've executed a lot of these programs in a way. We have 80 welfare programs, depending on how you account them. And a lot of them are internally in conflict. A lot of them have created incentives for people to not work and have created dependency. That's not created dignity. If we believe that we are a brother's keeper, that we should be lifting people up, that everybody deserves dignity, then they need to be needed. We need to do it differently.

That is not to say that we need to get rid of welfare programs. Maybe that's insane. We need to do it better, remembering that we need dignity. We should demand dignity for every person. So what about Medicare for all? Medicare for all is a policy that's ruinously expensive and as configured, which is to say, basically a single-payer system, a law, Canada, or Spain, or UK, or something, would be hard to execute given the fact that even those programs that they're modeled on aren't working very well. So the idea of Medicare for all is a slogan.

It's a kind of a bumper sticker. What we want is better Medicare build the wall. It kind of. Yeah, kind of. And it makes people insane when they talk about it a little bit, you know, on the right, they get all really angry about it without thinking about it. On the left, they say, well, if you don't like it, it means much you hate, you must hate poor people in their health care. If we have a commitment to making sure that

people have adequate and health care, they have access to adequate health care and everybody does, I believe that we have way better ways to get that done than something like Medicare for all, which should be illiterious for not just economic prosperity, but would lead to two and three tier systems that we probably wouldn't like. So what would be the way to get it done? I didn't bring you in here to have a big call. Yeah, but I'm, but I'm, but I haven't answered. And the answer is go to aai.org.

I mean, that's why God created the American Enterprise Institute is to actually answer questions like this. Actually, that's not part of my theology. That's a slogan too. But AEI, my think tank was created to answer exactly those questions, you know, and so we have, we have 280 scholars and staff dedicated to saying, here are the seven things that you need to do, not to zero out healthcare for poor people, not to claim that poor people shouldn't have healthcare like rich people do, but to do it in

ways that are compatible with market mechanisms so that we can do it without, without ruining our budgets, without, while it's still affordable, and at the same time working with markets, so that we can continue to have a really innovative healthcare system that serves everybody. As somebody who's described himself as center right, curious curious what's your view on Donald Trump? Did you vote for him? Um, I, yeah, it's a, I'm not a Republican and I don't actually do work on politics at all.

Um, I, usually I don't talk publicly even about how I vote. Um, I have, I don't think I've voted for, I don't think I've ever voted for anybody who's won. Presidency is a matter of fact. No, no, that's not true. You're a big Michael DeCoccus. Yeah, no, that's not true. I did vote for Michael DeCoccus. I did vote for Michael DeCoccus.

And I thought he was a very fine man. I still do think he's very fine. Now, it's someone to play in the other day. I think maybe somebody who looked like him. I voted for George W. play in the other day. I think maybe somebody who looked like him. I voted for George W. Bush twice actually, and I was proud to do it, and I think he was nobody's of perfect president,

but I really admired him as a person I still do. A lot of people do. But the truth is that the politics of it are not nearly as important to me as what I do in public policy and what I do in my work outside, where the work that I do on happiness, the work that I do on spirituality, the work that I do on human flourishing is not political at all either. It's funny, you know, when you do work in a think tank in Washington, DC, politics is

like the weather. Ideas are like the climate. And when you're on 501c3 think tank in Washington, DC, you should be doing climate work, not trying to read the weather report. But you still subject to it. You as an individual. Oh, I have a point of view. Rained on. Yes. So I have political views for sure. But professionally, where my passion is, and where my professional life is, is I'm a nerdy client, a climate scientist, and all the people who are working with me at AEI or nerdy climate scientists, it's a beautiful place to be. So I'm more asking you as an individual, you know, somebody who's interested in human

flourishing and all these philosophical and contemplative issues that we're going to be talking about today. Yeah. all these philosophical and contemplative issues that we're gonna be talking about today. I'm just curious, given I know you're focused on climate, but on the weather, how do you feel about what Donald Trump's doing in Washington these days? You know, it's the, some of the policies and some of the personnel I like, you know, is a central right guy.

I mean, I certainly like Brett Kavanaugh. I think he's gonna be a great Supreme Court justice. I like recording this on a day when he's on day one of his hearing. Exactly right. And there's no, I mean, this certainly like Brett Kavanaugh. I think he's gonna be a great Supreme Court justice. I like- Recording this on a day when he's on day one of his hearing. Yeah, exactly right. And there's no, I mean, this is not exactly controversial. I mean, I'm a guy who likes a lot of the things that Brett Kavanaugh said. We'll see what kind of justice he turns out to be

because that's kind of how you play the game. And that's great, actually, because he should be able to think for himself and judge cases for himself. I think he'll probably be confirmed. I think it's great. I like a lot of what the administration has done with respect to deregulation, because I think it's helped to set the economy free. I don't think that that is single-handedly responsible for the economic prosperity that

we're seeing today. I think that the economic trends started during the last couple of years, the Obama administration. So I don't think that Obama was unilaterally bad or completely wrong on the things that he was doing. I think that the economy was on the upswing and it continued and maybe accelerated a little bit when Donald Trump took over because of his economic policy. So again, I'm not an absolutist on either side of this kind of thing. And so I'm in favor of a lot of the things that he's doing along these lines.

Nobody who's thinking about politics in America today is gonna look at any politician. I know a lot of liberals who liked Barack Obama a lot and they didn't like a lot of the things that he was doing, didn't like a lot of the things that he was saying, and it's normal. It's normal. I think it's actually good to have a new one

to view of these particular politicians. I think it's actually good to, it's healthy, to be able to say, I didn't vote for that guy, and I like some of the things that he's doing, or I did vote for that guy, there's a lot of things I don't like. If we're not saying those things, I don't think that we have a nuance

than a few of politics. So you're saying, I didn't vote for Donald Trump, but I do like some of the things he's doing. Yeah. I don't think most people in America are, well, I don't think we hear from a lot of people in America right now who are expressing new wants to views. I don't know that most Americans don't hold them,

but the nature of the dialogue right now is not, nuance is not one of the words I would use to describe the dialogue in America right now. Yeah, that's right. And a big part of that is that the dialogue is being driven by people who are interested in manipulating Americans for their own money and power and profit. That's what's going on. And I'm talking about the media and I'm talking about certain, especially salient voices

and politics today. It basically says, if you don't come down on this tribe or on that tribe that you're wishy washy, you actually need to define yourself, you have to show sufficient moral outrage for the other side. Now, I think that's not a majoritarian position at all. I think that most people are tired of being used and manipulated by interests that tell them that they need to be hostile toward their fellow Americans. You know, I think it's shocking and squalid

that we can't love our neighbors even though we disagree with them. I think it's crazy, as a matter of fact. And fortunately, by the way, I read the data, I think about 70% of Americans agree with me. I think that seven and 10 Americans, they're about, let's give her take, six or eight, I don't know, refuse to hate their neighbors.

And they're looking for an alternative. Now, they will scratch the itch. It's like poison ivy. You know, turning on cable news at night to get really, really fired up. They will. They'll read their favorite columnist in their favorite paper who says

that the other side is filled with naves and fools. But, you know, deep in their souls, they know that it's just simply, simply not true that there are people who can make millions of dollars and become very famous and very powerful By getting people to fight each other, but I think that is I think that we're actually ready for more peace Well, you've been doing wonderful work on this and you've got this at this point as we record this relatively new podcast The Arthur Brooks show in which you've had like the name, by the way, it's like I had to get Sachi and Sachi.

It's very innovative. Very innovative. Well, it definitely, you know, it's honest, let's say. It definitely, and I've been listening to this show. Well first, I spent in preparation for meeting you. I re-listen to your excellent interview with Ezra, and then I've been halfway through this first season of your show.

So I feel like I've been living with you for the last couple of days. It's a really, it's quite a lovely, it's very well produced. Thanks. Vox Media does a very good job with the podcast, and it's a new experience for me. I mean, you've been in broadcasting your whole career, and you have a little comfort. I mean, just everything that you do, it makes it feel like you're just born with a microphone and you're, but for me, it's a little tricky because the mean, just everything that you do, it makes it feel like you're just sort of born with a microphone and you're, but for me, it's a little tricky

because the idea of reading something and having it sound conversational, that turns out to be really super hard. I was wondering because you do sound kind of conversational, but I also thought it was too clean, not too red. So you're doing a good job. Well, I appreciate that. And I think it got better over the course of the first season,

which is eight episodes, it got easier. It's just reps. You know, I used to make my living as a classical musician. So the whole, yeah appreciate that. And I think it got better over the course of the first season, which is eight episodes. It got easier. It's just reps. You know, I used to make my living as a classical musician. So for the first 12 years of my career, after I dropped out of college, I was a French Whomplier. And everything about classical music is pure technical domination that you get through reps. And so the result of that is I learned how to get a new skill. And the way to get a new skill is to slow everything down to the point that people can't

recognize what you're doing. And that means if you have to say something, if you give a speech and you're going to read the first three lines of it, do it so slowly that people can't even recognize what you're saying, and that will give you a set of synaptic skills too well. And then reps, you're reps, go to your reps. I recently relearned how to swim, and I had to do this. Yeah. I break the stroke down how to swim really, and I had to do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd break the stroke down to its component parts.

Exactly right. Do these weird drills, and then it become then it somehow gets baked into your neurons, and you do it with that. And the same thing is true, by the way, from meditating. Yes. The same thing is true. It's all reps and going slowly. Yes.

I mean, you're watching your breaths, and this is how technique actually works. So the same thing with actually learning how to do a podcast, same thing with a new job is getting mastery actually comes from the ballistic movements that come by bypassing your medial prefrontal cortex so that you can go from what you see to what you do without saying, okay, now I'm going to put my hand here. If you try to swim that way, you'd sink and drown. It all falls apart. It all falls apart.

And so, and that's what you're doing. Me right now, you're interviewing me right now with complete ease. You're not thinking about it at all. I mean, it's like, it's, it's as if, because this is what you've been doing for years and years. I am having the problem that you were actually sufficiently interesting that there are about 73 things

I want to ask you and I'm trying not to forget them. Oh, okay. So that is, that's the lack of ease. If there's any lack of ease, that's what it is. Well, I'm not, I'm not ascertaining it. And so, but with the podcast, that's what I've tried to get as the reps. And you know, we're, we've now gone through the first season, it's finished and we're going to start planning out the second season and what the theme is going to be in the second

season. I don't know yet, but it's going to be in this realm of people getting along, people loving each other more. I'm especially interested in this concept that we have of love and the fact that we have a love deficit in our country. I'm looking at these data down there blowing my mind. How do you define love? Well, there's of course a bazillion ways to do it, but there are some that are really,

really obvious. And one thing that's really been amazing me have laid is looking at the data on people in their 20s today in romantic love. Okay, so that's a pretty easy one, right? It's got physiological implications to it that we can see in FMRI studies and, you know, hormone levels and brain activity, but more importantly, just how you feel. And we all know what that feels like. And these studies show that people are significantly less

likely to be in love who are in their 20s today than people when you and I were in our 20s. Man, I wanna know why. Because that's a big attenuation of human happiness. If you wanna be 10% happier, love in 10% more is a good way to get there. I didn't fall in love romantically, I don't think it's in my 30s.

Did you not? That's, and it was only ever with one woman who's today your wife and she's listening to this. Yeah. And that's, that's, that's absolutely true. But she won't listen to this just for the rest. She won't listen to it. No, my wife won't be listening to this either

and it's absolutely true too. I never, I fell in love with my wife and almost overnight when I was 24 years old within seconds. I'm convinced. We didn't speak the word of the same language. The language is, oh, she's Spanish. She's Spanish. She's Catalan. So she's big Spanish and Catalan. We met in France at a concert. She was in the front row of a concert that I was playing. And you were trying to focus on the French horn and... Yeah, because no, no, I had like a complete mastery. So I was focusing on the girl in the front row and and she's smiling at me I'm like that's weird

man and I went to the doctor and not one word of English and I thought to myself it's weird so crazy I thought I'm gonna marry this girl and I went home and I told my dad he might as a Seattle I'm from Seattle call him I said dad I met the, I'm gonna marry and he says that's great when Queen Meatery's I It's she's got a few problems She doesn't speak English. She doesn't live in America and she has no idea. I mean I'm marry or and I don't want like a restraining order And so I just went I started this project this sort of startup project of Trying to convince her and I wound up having to quit my job and move to Spain and take a job in this in the Barcelona orchestra to show enough commitment that I could close

a deal. That sounds both amazing and also a little crazy. It's insane. It is insane, but look, I mean, everybody who's listening to us who's an entrepreneur knows that that's exactly the story of people who start companies. It's the same story. Why? The point is, and this is this is something that I've been thinking about of late and writing about a little bit, your life to start up, your life is your enterprise. All of these resources under your disposal, each one of us has to think about that. That's the reason that it's so alarming to me when I see less romantic love for people who are in their 20s, which is the most entrepreneurial period of your life. When I see less romantic love, I see less

interpersonal startup activity in people's lives. Less passion. Yeah, less passion, but it's the same thing, but where you're gonna start a software company or you wanna start on biotech or whether or not you wanna get this person to marry you. It comes from the same entrepreneurial impulse in a lot of ways. That's the life and life. It sounds crazy to you and me, but look, you've done something crazy. Tell me. Tell me the crazy

thing that you did to get your wife to love you. What did I do to get my wife to love me? That was crazy. It was pretty boring. I just took her on a bunch of dates. I think in some ways, I probably did a lot of stuff that was to self-destructive and tried to drive her away in some ways, because I wasn't, I was less evolved than that I am now, although I'm still doing lots of dumb stuff. I don't know that I did crazy things until actually the best version of me, I don't know if it's crazy, really came out once we're in relationship. We had to deal with challenges together, and

I got forced to stretch beyond the selfish mode, when she got breast cancer, or when we had massive infertility struggles. Yeah, and probably closer together. Absolutely. And I, as somebody who's really, truly, I think, wrestled with selfishness on a big level, had to get out of my own way to be of service.

Yeah, it's interesting. That's not an answer to your question, but that's very good. That's a very good answer to my question. It's a perfect answer to my question service. Yeah, it's interesting. That's not an answer to your question, but that's very good. That's a very good answer to my question. It's a perfect answer to my question, because entrepreneurs, when they talk about the key moments in their enterprise, they never talk about early success. They always talk about what they did when there was threat. So a guy really admire, and like his Bernie Marcus, he started at Home Depot.

And when Bernie Marcus tells you the story of Home Depot, he doesn't talk about the first billion. He talks about when he opened his first store on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, nobody would come in. And so we had to have his kids out on the street, handing out one dollar bills, just so people would walk in the store. And how his wife wouldn't let him shave alone

because in the bathroom, because he had a razor blade, and you never know what was gonna happen. I mean, these are the stories that entrepreneurs actually tell and the things that made them strong and the things that helped them learn. The truth is that your strength is your weakness and the weakness that is exposed,

which is your selfishness and how you deal with it in these moments of threat are what create the strength in the enterprise. The enterprise of Dan's life is his family. That's your startup too. And these are these pivotal moments. You just told me that Bernie Marcus story of your little home depot of your marriage. And these are the things that are really, really important.

This is the maker break things that make you an entrepreneurial person. Yeah. It's so interesting. It's such a, it's such a, and maybe I'm reading this incorrectly, but somebody who is both, I don't know, talking about you here, a contemplative and a conservative, you say, center right, but let's just say conservative. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, sounds more mullifluous. And mullifluousness is really part of being 10% half year. Absolutely. We got to do it with style.

To see that the entrepreneurial impulse, one of the cornerstones, if not the cornerstone of a democratic capitalism, can be wrapped up in love. It's such an interesting thing to think about as a contemplative conservative. Yeah, you know, this is, look, if you're not doing it for love, it's not worth doing it. If it's not actually about other people,

if it's not generative, it's not good, it's not worth doing. I mean, one of the things that conservatives in America and around the world, but the conservative movement in general has failed at, utterly, is remembering the why of why you should be conservative in the first place.

I mean, the reason I became interested in the free enterprise, the reason I became interested in democratic capitalism, is not because I took an economic class. I said, she was. It turns out that socialism tends to create less of a consumer surplus. I don't care.

I didn't care. The reason is because, I actually have pivotal experience. When I was 19 years old, I was on a concert tour in India. And I was on a plane that had an emergency landing in Madras, Chennai. And I spent, like, I didn't expect to.

I spent days walking around the slum. And I had this big effect because I was, you know, a 19year-old kid and it was 1983 and I saw poverty like I'd never seen before I mean starving kids lepers people dying in the street and It was it was it was a time of sort of formative time for me and I came back and I thought You know this is a time when people were seeing pictures in the National Geographic magazine of kids with flies on their face and just ended bellies. And the question is, why do we have so much and other people have so little? And I kind of went on a vision quest

to find the answer to that and what could be done. And I have complete openness. Look, I don't have any economics background in my family. I don't have any right wing ideology. I don't know. Nobody has ever been in business. My father was a professor. My mother was an artist. My grandfather was a professor. I mean, I come from this line of not capitalists.

And I found through what I thought was a sigiostudian openness. And I think a search for, that it was the free enterprise system as instantiated in globalization and free trade and property rights and the rule of law, and this idea of entrepreneurship and human freedom that had been spreading around the world. As just as I had seen that kid in National Geographic magazine who was gonna die,

people all over the world for the first time had been able to see Dan Harris and Arthur Brooks in the way that we live. And they said, I want that freedom and I want that stuff. And they grabbed it. And here's the thing, here's the pivotal piece of data. Two billion of my brothers and sisters

have been pulled out of poverty since I was a kid. For the first time in human history, that is the humanitarian miracle. And I want the next two billion, and I'm dedicated to getting it. That doesn't mean that I have to be just like a warrior for unmitigated, sort of, iron-randian capitalism. It means that I have to recognize that the Franger Prize movement has done that and that I as a moral person am obligated to find a way through basic human morality

and spreading it in a sustainable way and recognizing that there are market failures and that we need regulation and it's not perfect to find the best way to share that with more people because they're my brothers and sisters And it's the only system that's been able to help people by the billions Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or

In court. I'm Matt Bellas. I and I'm Sydney battle and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the

infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. I was trying to get you to plug your podcast and you took us on this fascinating

digression, but I'm going to get you back to I'm going to be your publicist. Let's talk about the 10% happier. I hope so. At least. The first season you really honed in on something that I think my listeners are going to care about a lot, which is how do we talk to our fellow Americans

and humans about things when we disagree deeply? And I'm just curious to hear you talk about what you've learned and how we can, aside from listening to your podcast, which I hardly recommend everybody do, how can we operationalize some of the lessons that you've learned? Well, the first thing to recognize what's making it hard for us to talk to each other. And the answer is not that we disagree. The agreement is great. Disagreting is nothing more than competition in the world of ideas.

Competition is great in economics, and it's great in politics. It's also great in the world of ideas, and that's called disagreement. Nothing wrong with disagreements. Countries based on disagreement. This is America. There's nothing wrong with even getting angry sometimes. I mean, you know, being married to a spaniard, I've had like 10,000 arguments over the past 30 years.

I mean, it's just, it's no problem with that. And my friend, John Gottman, who's a social psychologist, he's University of Washington in Seattle, is a world's leading expert in marital reconciliation. He shows in his work that, that anger is not correlated with separation and divorce. What is? It's when you take anger and you mix something in on top of it, which is disgust, which

is this idea that people are sort of, they're horrible. And it's a disgust mixed with anger creates something. It's like putting ammonia in bleach. It creates something called contempt. Contempt is the conviction of the other worthlessness of another person. That's how Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th century philosopher, described it.

And when you basically treat people with contempt, anger's hot. Contempt is cold. You get a permanent enemy. So to say, how can people talk to each other? How can they disagree, which is what the podcast is all about? The first thing is to not do the one thing that makes it impossible for us to talk to each other, impossible to disagree with each other in a productive

way. And that's why treating each other with contempt, to treat each other with mockery and eye rolling and smirking and snark and all the stuff that characterizes the current debates of the day. That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Really? I bet it isn't. I mean, the truth is, somebody says something you disagree with will then... Great. Bring it on.

There's nothing wrong with having people disagree with each other. And when you can recognize that it's actually okay for people to disagree with each other, you can take an even more radical step, which is to say, I want people to disagree with me because I might not be completely right. I want to test my ideas. And if I'm wrong, I want to know first, not last. So therefore, I don't want to silo myself. You know what else? He is crazy, crazy.

This is beyond the pale. I don't even want to get 100% of what I want, but what I'm asking for. I want somebody who disagrees with me to get something to, because I know in my life that it's better when everybody walks away happy. And that's the basis of a society where we can work with each other and where we can disagree with each other

and we can fertilize each other's opinions and ideas and where we actually are less mediocre and where we're more excellent because we're working on each other, we're showing each other different angles on, but just, just, might be the truth. But contempt is a naturally occurring mental phenomenon. So it will happen, it will come up in all of us and to the point beating yourself up for feeling contempt, what is, how can we recognize that contempt is arising but not be so carried away by it that we then express it

and kill any potential for fruitful discussion? That's a beautiful question, and it's a very Buddhist question. You can tell that you're Buddhist, and so you know that what I'm going to answer, the answer is fake it. The answer is fake it. You know, this is the key thing. You know, when you're sitting in meditation,

and especially when you're a beginner, it's really hard. It's brutal, isn't it? That is hard. Of beginner, it's really hard. It's brutal. Isn't that a fact? Of course it stays hard. What do you do? You, you, you act, you pretend you fake it. You know, you, you don't beat yourself up because your, your mind is, you got the monkey mind. You know, you don't beat yourself up because you stopped counting your breath.

You just bring it back and your pretend as if it was good all along. That's what you do. And the same thing, by the way, I mean, it's when when John Gottman, the guy referred to him a minute ago, when he talked to his couples and they say, I just don't love my wife anymore. What should I do? He says, pretend you love her. Pretend you love your wife. And yeah, no, it's, that's the reason that that's an expression is because it's actually true. It's interesting, there's a body of research on smiling. There's a physiologist in the late 19th century on the Induxin who traveled the whole world in an anthropological study of the human smile to see whether it's culturally based or

whether it's physiological, innate in the human musculature of the face. And he found out that, sure enough, there are 19 types of human smiles and only one is associated with true human happiness, the douche en smile. And you know how you see it is with the orbicularis-occupied muscles around the eyes. So if you see somebody who's got crow's feet, that person has been smiling with true happiness. This is Dan Nerf's goal. It's to be 80 years old and have a really super pronounced crow's feet because we've been smiling with true happiness a lot in our lives. That's what you want.

That's why you get kind of laugh when you see somebody with really pronounced crow's feet because that happiness is infectious. Okay. Why do I bring that up? Because when you simulate a duchess and smile, there's a way to do it, by the way, which is to put a pencil in your mouth that's sticking out. Okay. When you do that and then force yourself to smile, it forces up the ubiquitularisocular muscles and literally your brain will perceive that you're happy.

And you will be happier because you've fooled your brain into it. That's faking it till you make it, man. That is a scientific basis of what Buddhist teaching has been for thousands of years. And it is the same way that we're supposed to live when it comes to contempt and brotherhood and solidarity. You don't feel it, it doesn't matter, suck it up. So what I gleaned from your podcast was, if you're sitting, or one of the many things I've gleaned as far as I'm only halfway through,

is you're sitting around the Thanksgiving table and your voluable uncle says something that you find obnoxious about the state of American politics right now, that the move, even though you may feel contempt, is to say, tell me more about why you believe that. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's exactly the same. The way to think about it is, you want to fake love.

Say, what would I do, or how would I want somebody to be behaving toward me? I mean, it's nothing more that the best way to fake goodness is the golden rule. And so to say, you know, if somebody disagrees with me, I'd want them to probe a little bit deeper rather than attacking me. I'd want them to say, huh, you know, Arthur Brooks just said something I disagree with. Wonder what he meant. I want to what he meant. I mean maybe I maybe I missed understood or maybe there's an angle I could get on something or or maybe he's just completely wrong. Let's dig in a little bit deeper That's what I want when people really disagree with me I want them to ask me to tell them more and so that's the same thing that I do

So that's the key thing is to ask yourself look when when somebody is is driving to nuts Say if if you were driving that person nuts How would you want them to act toward you and then, and then turning the tables? The other thing to keep in mind, and this is important, things have been really, really helpful for me in my practice, is to see the contempt that other people treat you with as an opportunity. Dalai Lama taught me this one. It's really great, because I asked him one time, we were making this documentary film that's

coming out next spring, in the spring of 2019. How about what? It's about how people pull themselves out of poverty. It's people how people build their lives called the pursuit. The pursuit, basically a prosperity, but in the broad sense of human prosperity. All over the world, we're in Islam, in India, we're in a little town, in Kentucky, and we're in a homeless shelter in New York City. It's great experience. Beautiful actually. And I was with the Dalai Lama for the last scene because it basically says

you know capitalism you hear it's terrible for poor people. It's like a great for poor people. It's dangerous for rich people because it can lead to materialism and greed. So how do you fight that? We're talking about this in the Dalai Lama. In between takes when we were having this conference that we were filming, I said, I'm writing this article and I'm thinking about this thing and it's contempt. What should I do when I face contempt? He said, express warmheartedness because contempt is an opportunity to change a heart when he met with my heart. So this is the thing. Everybody listening to us should say, I want to, you want to be 10% happier?

Look for contempt. Look for people treating you with contempt because you have this opportunity to treat that contempt with warm heartedness and so doing change your heart. So when you react with contempt, it gives you nothing more than scratching an itch, which is inherently unsatisfying because you're going to be hungry again. It's going to itch more, it's going to bleed. It's going to, I could torture the metaphor, but you get the idea.

I mean, you make the point on the podcast that expressing contempt is bad for the expressor of the contempt. You'll be less happy. You'll be more depressed. You'll even look uglier. And there's a lot of research on this. There's a very, very good social psychology that actually finds that when people are expressing contempt, they're perceived to be less physically attractive to other people.

And so there's just, there's nothing good about this, but here's the good part. If you can get the discipline of saying, I have just been treated with contempt, that is my opportunity to become happier and more beautiful. You'll do it. And you'll be grateful for it. Thank you. Thank you, God, for giving me this opportunity to, and by the way, you might change the second heart too.

Now where is the most efficacious way to induce this experiment? The answer is 100 times out of 100 these days, social media. It's not the Thanksgiving table with your obnoxious uncle. It's to go on Twitter for one second and to say anything. You've called Twitter a content machine. In the worst of cases, it's a content machine and a lot of the time it is the worst of cases. Really problematic. It's a great thing for expressing ideas. We're recording this the day after Labor Day and on Labor Day, I put a 10-part meditation on the dignity of work. And it was so satisfying because it got a good reaction. It got, you know, people saying, yeah, this is, you know,

the dignity of work, people feeling the dignity that it comes from being needed is something that we all should do. And so it can be a real force for good, but often it doesn't say anything that's even remotely Political that where you express your point of view for that matter Just say something you like about a movie and people will you know They'll tell you you you hate children and eat puppies or something. It's just the worst right How you gonna react? I mean how are you gonna react? You're gonna say oh yeah, no you you hate kids worse You can actually answer contempt on social media with warmheartedness and see how it makes you feel.

It'll make you less interesting to people who like to gossip and who are in the contempt mill, but getting out of that, getting off of that hamster wheel is something I very much, I very much recommend to people who are in the practice of trying to become some non trivial percentage happier. Have you heard of a group called Better Angels? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. For sure. I'll leave it to you to describe who they are. But I'd be curious to see once you do that, whether you go over there or not. I don't know where they're located. They're here new or they're all over the place. Actually, Better Angels is all over the place. Yeah.

So I actually did a story on them for nightline. Yeah. And they're so I'll answer I'll do the first part. They they are, I think they're decentralized. Their founders are all over the place. Asidiously equal in terms of representation on their board and everything else in terms of reds and blues. So their board is 50% red, 50% blue,

founded by one blue, one red, and their goal is to quote unquote depolarize America. They're named after the famous Abraham Lincoln appeal to the better angels of our nature. And they hold these little sort of encounter sessions all over the country between reds and blues and their approach was designed fittingly by a marriage counselor. Very interesting guy, based out of Minneapolis, if I recall, and he actually says that dealing with people who disagree politically

is harder than dealing with couples on the brink of divorce, because at least couples who are fighting have some prior commitment to one another. Yeah, we have kids in common, or something, right? There's a reason there's some stake. Right. Now, by the way, people who. Yeah, or have kids in common or something. Yes, there's a reason there's some stake. Right.

Now, by the way, people who are politically polarized do have something in common if they live in the same neighborhood. Yeah. And their kids are goofing around together. And part of the reason is become so hard is because we have come apart in the words of Charles Murray or a Bob Putnam at Harvard. I mean, there are a lot of people who've talked about the fact that we're utterly geographically polarized nation.

Self-storted. Totally. And so if you live in the Upper West Side Manhattan or Palo Alto or someplace, you're very unlikely to have a really close friend who's a Republican. You don't know anybody. You can be an Upper West Side of Manhattan not ever encounter somebody who voted for Trump.

Exactly right. Exactly right. And that just didn't vote for Trump. Anybody who is sympathetic to traditionally conservative policy, so even the stuff that I, the relatively mild things that I say are anathema to a lot of people who just never mixed because they, and you tend to be, by the way, pushed toward your polar extreme when you're only around people like you. And as such, you can't see the common humanity with people.

And again, these are just political opinions. And yet, they seem like the biggest gulfs. And that's why these marriage counselors like John Gottman and why the founder of Better Angels has found that this is such a hard bridge to make in America today. It is because, and I've heard you talk about this before, Steve, this will not be new information to you. but we are self sorting geographically and then also in our terms of our media. So you live in these echo chambers, both physical and virtual. And so you're just never, we're never challenged. Many of us are never challenged.

And we're not looking for a challenge, I think we ought to be. Sure. But the one of the principle rules of better angels when I'd be interested to hear your view is never try to change somebody's mind. Right. Really all you're trying to achieve

and this is their term, which I really like, is accurate disagreement. Yeah, that's right. And you notice that they don't say it's less disagreement either. One of the big mistakes that we make is thinking that the answer to bad disagreement is less disagreement.

That's exactly wrong. Again, competition's great, but we need a better disagreement. And better disagreement means that just because we're competing with each other doesn't, or just because we're disagreeing with each other, doesn't mean we have to hate each other. And the thing to keep in mind on disagreement is the metaphor to keep in mind sports. So the Yankees don't want to blow up the Red Sox bus on the way to the game because that's not competition that shutting competition down and we're rhetorically doing something like that when we try to make somebody on that who disagrees with us or we're siloing our media we're only talking to people who agree with us and we and we we we vilify or demonize people who disagree with us what we're doing is we're blowing up the other teams bus and that's what better angels is trying to solve they're trying to get the teams together and to disagree fairly with you know be good sports and shake hands and you know the one thing that the Yankees and red socks agree on is that baseball is awesome

and they agree on that a lot more than they disagree about, you know, whether that was in the strike zone. I mean, that's really important. I mean, it's like, you know, if the red socks picture, they're in Boston, the Fenway and the red socks picture throws it up in the stands. And the umpire says, actually, I'm going to call that a strike because we're in Boston. The Boston fans will say, you're a moron. That's wrong.

They actually want rules. I think I've heard you talk about the narcissism of small differences. Yeah. Yeah. We agree on so much, but we're just so focused on the places where we disagree. Yeah, exactly right.

And so, but remembering that the key things that we agree on, the moral consensus around which that we're basing our disagreements, make our disagreements that much richer and that much more important. And that's why they raise the stakes for disagreeing better and competing better. How much optimism do you have

that we as a country can survive this current spasm of toxic tribalism? So optimism is like shoveling through the barn and saying, I know there must be a pony in here someplace, right? I am hopeful. Why? Because hope means something can be done and that Dan and Arthur can be part of the way that it gets done. We have agency in it. Optimism thinks it's going to be fine.

I don't know if it's going to be fine. I don't know if it's going to be fine. I mean, I actually do think that America is going to be okay, but I'm more hopeful than anything else because I think that we have the solution. I think that most Americans, and again, by my empirical reading of the data, a big majority of Americans actually want things to be better and they're waiting for the aspirational leadership that will make it so. And I strongly suspect in the coming years, if we push this, if we work together, if we're part of the agents for the change that we want to see, if we, if we're as sigius about refusing to hate our neighbors, that, that, that leadership really will emerge.

Because each one of us ultimately is a leader. Each one of us is a leader in our families and our communities and, and, and, and democracy like the United States, the political leadership and the, and what we see in media, these are demand-driven phenomena. You know, what we really want will filter up. And so we can make it so. I'm very hopeful actually about the future. I think that we're the lack of rigidity in political ideologies, creating all sorts of

discomfort and things that I really dislike right now, but it also creates an opportunity for us to say it's a new day. Man, I was talking to a dear friend who's sort of center left like I'm center right. We were remarking to the day. If you'd asked me five years ago, what do I have in common with this guy at the logical, I'd say, how much? If you asked me today, I'd say all the important stuff. That's a new day.

One more question on this. In terms of giving advice to people who are interested in being good citizens, being part of the solution, one advice that I'm tempted to give, but our mutual friend, Ezra, if I recall, when I had him on the podcast, he disagreed with me, but I still think it's the right advice, aside from avoid contempt, which I think is wonderful advice, is to try to get out of your own ideological ghetto and to try to consume some media that will challenge you. So I would say media diet diversification is really important.

Now Ezra pointed out that a lot of people, this advice is given to people that people, it doesn't work. I don't know, maybe he's right about that, but it feels important to me, there's a great, somebody put on Twitter, if you're only following people you agree with, you're doing it wrong. And I think it's important to follow people you disagree with,

to listen to podcasts of people that you disagree with, and to do it on a consistent basis to your ideas or challenges. You agree with that or disagree? Well, the question, as there is talking about, is the studies that show that people, when they're simply exposed to a non-curated opposing points of view, they have an extremely strong averse reaction to it. And it's sort of an aversion therapy that happens. And the result is they build up even stronger antibodies to it. And you can imagine that. I mean, if you're a really hardcore progressive and you just flip on Fox News, it's going to bum you out even more.

You're going to say, it's true all these terrible things I've been thinking about because I watched the 8 p.m., 9 p.m., 10 p.m. lineup and it's like, I can't believe what these guys are saying. It's just as bad as I thought or if you're really, really strong conservative and you just flip on five minutes of morning edition on National Public Radio or something in the morning and you're like, I can't believe what those guys are talking about. It's everything I thought more, or MSNBC or something like that. So, I think that it's important not just to get outside your silos. I think that it's more important to have relationships that help curate your experience outside your silos.

You need to make friends who disagree with you. You need to basically find people that you trust who say, explain this to me. Tell me what you're listening to and tell who disagree with you. You need to basically talk to find people that you trust who say Explain this to me. Tell me what you're listening to and tell me what you hear. So one of the things I recommend Given that we live in self-sorted silos. How do we make those friends? You know everybody's got there's somebody Everybody's got something for one thing. It's important that One of the great advances of the past 50 years in American society is this understanding the diversity is king I mean diversity has just improved our experiences so much where we live and we work in environments where men and women work together. People have different races work together where people who speak

different languages work together. I mean, it's like diversity is, I mean, I live in a multiracial, multi-ethnic home and it's a great source of joy, and I'm smarter and better for it. And that's what people didn't realize that. I mean, that was a weird way of thinking until relatively recently. So we get that, but one of the things that we're trying to resist is ideological diversity.

So step one is demanding that we work in places that have ideological diversity. Workplaces are really important to us. And so I know that super important to you in media. I mean, you're simply not in ABC News. It's just not going to have something where everybody is a hard-core progressive. It's not going to happen because that would be a bad product.

But universities need to do this. Universities need to do a much better job of getting conservatives on faculty. And some are. I mean, I'm going to Harvard. And that's great. I can't wait. But other universities need to do a better job too, because diversity matters, ideological diversity as well.

And people need to figure out the diversity matters to them socially. It's not like you literally can't find anybody who disagrees with you. You're not trying hard enough. I think it's inconvenient, it's uncomfortable. And that's the point. Go out and do it. And so make a friend, make more friends, and say, I want you to help me understand.

It's so funny because when you have this experience, it's so unbelievably enriching. Nobody actually gets a friend who disagrees with them politically and says, you know, I have this friend, he's a great guy and all that, but it was not an enriching experience for me because the guy voted for Trump. I mean, it just doesn't, doesn't happen that way. On the contrary, they'll say something like, he's such a great guy, he voted for Trump,

but he's such a great guy. You know, that's what they'll, they'll kind of make excuses for it, which is to say that it's a really enriching experience. So take, make the effort to do it because life gets better. If you, anybody's listening to us believes, believes that diversity is just an inherently good thing for the human spirit, then take that to its asymptote, take it to the max, and do what's the hardest for people in America today, which is people who authentically think differently than we do.

If you're super religious like me, be buddies with an atheist and say, tell me when you see this thing, what do you hear on my side? And I go to your side and say that thing that I hear that's really bumming me out, what do you hear? And it'll be like, and it's like, it's like somebody taking you through his home neighborhood. And it's, it's like, I never saw that before. Or, you know, I went a higher to guy one time to take me to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. And it was an art historian, a Chinese art historian. And, you know, I've been through it before. And it's like, wow, that's a block of jade. It's really beautiful. And it's from the Qing dynasty.

And it's great. And then he would take me through and he would say, what the person was thinking and what was going on. on is a completely different. So let somebody Curate that for you and it'll open up a whole new world. That is a true secret of happiness You're writing one of your many projects is you're writing about the second half of life. Yeah, I'm firmly in the second half of my life I think at least but maybe I'm going in the second half of my life, I think, at least by maybe 40, 47. Yes. I don't know, you might not be in the second half. I wouldn't, I wouldn't.

By the actual real charts, you think. Yeah, the actual real charts are in your favor. I've really been going to live up north of 100. You could, you could. I mean, it's like, you should say, and that thing is, anyway, I take your point. You might be at the border. So I'm nonetheless highly invested in whatever you're learning.

I want to know what you're learning. And one of the things you said to me in the elevator up here is that ambitious people can't answer the question, what are they trying to do? And somehow that's related to the second half of life. So I'll take it to you. So, have you just generally comes not from attaining the object of your heart's desire, not getting

it, not getting there, but it's the gradient in getting there. It's becoming better, becoming more successful on your own terms. And if you're doing it wrong, it's your denominating your success and money, power, and pleasure and fame, right? And if you're doing it right, it's in glorifying God and serving your fellow man. I mean, that's really, if that's the current, you gotta get the right currency.

But to be sure, it's when you see that accumulation, when you see that success happening, that turns out to be the real driver of happiness. The problem is, if you're a very successful person, if you're Dan Harris, you got a great career, right? The problem is, there's the physics of success, which is that what goes up must come down. Just this. And just as the gradient gave you unbelievable satisfaction, the downside of that gives you great frustration. So there's this body work by these two socials as I call it as the

UT Austin, University of Texas Austin, a couple. And they're doing work on the burden of high achievement. They find is that the people who are most frustrated later in life, the people who tend to be the most melancholy, who tend to feel most like failures, they tend to be the high achievers. Why is that? Because they've actually seen the downward slope. If you never do anything, man, there's no downward slope.

And so you don't feel like anything ever came down, but coming down, it's just terrible. It's horrible for people. The question is, what do you do? What are the strategies for that? Because it's like, sorry, even if you didn't want to do that, Dan Harris isn't trouble, because you got a big career, well-known guy.

I mean, it's like everybody eating college and they want to be like you. They want it. You're journalists. I mean, it's a tough profession. They want to have what you have. You got it and you enjoyed it all the way up. But at some point, you're not going to have it. How do you avoid becoming 10% less happy?

How do you tell me, please? Yeah. Okay. There's, there's good strategies and bad strategies. Here's the bad strategy, raging against the decline. So I mean, I've tried that. Dillon, yeah, man. Dillon Thomas is, you know, rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It was my favorite poem that I was in high school because I was, you know, wearing a lot of black. And I thought it was so cool because he drank himself to death at 39. I mean, what could be cooler than that? And that's a terrible strategy. He wrote that for his father when his father was dying. Rage against the dying of the light.

That was his advice to his own father's terrible advice because you can't avoid it. So the only answer is to embrace it. Strategy number one is that the curve that you're on that where you're in decline, the second half of your, second part of your professional life, is only one curve. That's generally related to what psychologists

call fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is your cognitive speed, your processing capacity, your problem solving ability. It's your sheer cognitive horsepower. And it tends to decline in late 30s, 40s, 50s, really, and decline. Right? That's not your only curve because you have a second intelligence curve, which is called crystallized intelligence, which is based on your stock of wisdom.

It's actually a virtue. Nobody ever says the virtue of brains. They always talk about the virtue of wisdom, however. So crystallized intelligence is a stock. It's what you know and how you're able to use it. And that increases through your 40s and 50s and 60s and it stays high if all goes well until you die. So what does it mean? That means you need to jump from activities that favor your fluid intelligence and in your business and the business of a lot of people who are listening to us is based on high fluid intelligence. It's exploiting their high fluid intelligence.

You need to jump from the fluid intelligence curve to the crystallized intelligence curve. How do you do it? Fluid intelligence is all about innovation, right? It's all about being an innovator with your life and in your career and doing something better and different than other people do. Crystalized intelligence is all about instruction. What you need to do is you need to go from being an innovator to being a teacher. And there are cases all throughout history of this. One of the cases I love the most is my favorite composer is Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach was maybe the greatest composer who ever lived. But what people don't know about Bach, I mean, he was the master of the high baroque, which was the thing in the late 17th century. When Bach was coming into his own, he born in 1685, and by the early 1700s, the high baroque was what everybody was listening to, and he was the innovator, he was the master. But here's crazy thing that happened.

His son, Johann Christian Bach, changed musical styles and classic, the classical period of classical music took over. And it was a different style and Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, the father couldn't do it. His son was ringing in this new style and leaving his father behind. And his father was, it's like the equivalent of writing disco or something. It was like nobody wanted to listen to it anymore. So what did he do? He could have raged against the dying of light. He could have become depressed. He could have like a failure and quit No, no, no, no. He actually dedicated the rest of his life to recording in text form the highest that had ever been thought and written in the hybrogue for posterity.

He became a true teacher. He wrote a work called the Coonservugo, which is the art of fugue, which he said, somebody's going to look at this at some point. They're going to say, ah, the Hyboroke. He believed in that. He put his whole heart into it and he taught it to his children and he taught it to the students of Thomas Kierke in Leipzig, where he was the cantor, where he was the teacher. And a hundred years after he died, Felix Mendelssohn, the German composer, dusted off the art of fugue and said to his friends, dude, you've got to hear this. This is... And the hybrote became the thing again, and Johann Sebastian Bock became the rock star

composer that we still know today. He was right. And he was happy when he died because he went from fluid to crystallized intelligence. I don't feel ready to switch. You're not ready to switch yet. Here's the point. You have to actually build your crystallized intelligence is naturally building. There will be a point in which you're going to have an opportunity when you feel like

you're raging against the dying of the light when you feel like It's not happening when it's not making it for you anymore. That's your dead giveaway Mm-hmm. You need to be thinking so so so when you think about it like you're 47 years old you're when you're 57 years old Maybe you should be teaching into school journalism Maybe you should go to academia or or at very least you should be thinking about how people can share the fruits of your knowledge. How you can pass it on. This is the key thing. You find in any profession, I'm thinking lawyers, for example, great lawyers that cut their teeth by being just the hot shots, they cruise through these cases, they

can figure stuff out, they know how to use K-slau better than anybody else. They're being taught by older lawyers who can't do what they do, but who used to be able to do it. The managing partner of a great law firm is basically the master teacher. He's the, the Himalayan master. He's the guru in the cave, right? And, and what is he done? He's actually, he's, he's managed to move from the fluid intelligence that made him to a star to the crystallized intelligence that made him the grand eminence of his law firm. So why did you say that ambitious people don't know what it is that they want. Ambitious people often think that they will be finally happy when they get to the peak, not understanding that what they want is to go up the mountain. So that brings to mind something I heard the writer Sean Acore, say, recently,

do you know Sean? No, I don't. S-H-A-W-N first name, A-C-H-O-R. He wrote a book called The Happiness Advantage. He's a trained positive psychologist at Harvard. Right. And he, I don't think this is his formulation, but he talks about it a lot. He says, happiness is the joy we feel moving toward our potential. And when I heard him say that, it meant exactly nothing to me. And over time, in the last couple of weeks, since I heard him say this, I've been ruminating on it. And it's starting to make a little bit more sense in ways that I'm not sure I can articulate, but it's interesting that inherent in that definition

is that you never get there. It's always about the pleasure of moving toward the potential, not arriving and then resting on your laurels indefinitely. We are a species oriented toward progress. Progress is incredibly satisfying, just this. But you can't fall for the fallacy that you're ever going to, you have to have progress without falling into the illusion

that there's an endpoint. Yeah, well, the key thing is you have to, you work with intention, but without attachment to the object of the intention. And again, you're the Buddhist. I mean, you understand that that- I'm a master of a master. I'm not a master.

I'm not a master. Who is a master? There are masters. You know one. And when you achieve that, you'll finally be happy. Exactly. So the point is that we have to go in a particular direction, otherwise we would be going in circles.

We would be directionless. It's a detachment from the object of the actual achievement per se, understanding the progress toward that is what's giving us the innate satisfaction. That's why we're wired to understand. That's why we're wired to, in a way, there's this Western understanding of the human psyche, which is always wanting to be better. It's an American thing in its way that, you know, the nation of strivers with a little bit of Buddhism, which is the cherry on top, which is to say that when you actually get there, that's not the point. It's getting there that is actually the point. The striving per se actually gives you the satisfaction

and actually that's what moves society forward. I mean, this is what we want. I mean, we want to every kid to get a great education, every kid to have proper ambition, everybody to have, when you say, I want every kid to be able to achieve his dreams, what you're not talking about is, is, articulate your dreams and get there because you know what, we're so rich, you tell me what your dreams are in a lot of cases I can just buy it for you but with your kid I mean your kid is still in diapers, but you know my kids are grown up and You know, I don't want to give them what they've got. I mean my kids are and they are earning their success And that is the most satisfying thing to watch is watching them earning their success getting better at what they do

And I want that for me too. I want that for you too, Dan. But I bring you happier. I totally agree. It makes sense, but I keep falling into this. I mean, the Buddha had a term for this. It's called suffering. I keep falling into the trap of never enjoying the process

and just figuring that as soon as I get this book done, this whatever done, then any of these fields or whatever. Yeah, there's interesting Robert Wright, social psychologist, he wrote the book, Why Buddhism is True. And former guest on the show. It's a wonderful book. It is a wonderful book. Yes.

And he talks about the fact that evolution in psychology wires us to think that things are going to, the thing, the achievement per se is going to give us greater happiness than it will, and that the happiness will be longer lasting than it is. Why? Because we should be for the human race to propagate itself and for us to make human progress. We have evolved to be creatures that live under that illusion. We live under that illusion. Right, we live under that illusion. Otherwise, we wouldn't do anything, right? Okay, so what we need to,

you and I, as sentient beings, who are supposed to be more evolved than simply acting according to every impulse, like a snail or something, we should be able to recognize that illusion and so be free. So what you're talking about, we're talking about the first noble truth of Buddhism, is that life is suffering. And actually, it's better translated to life as dissatisfaction, because the word Sanskrit, well known, dhukka, dhukka means dissatisfaction. What it basically means is you're going to get that and you finally get

that and it's like, that's not that great., right? That why we have rock stars with drug problems. Yeah, that's why we have all of us with tons of problems I mean, that is the essence of why we self-medicate in any particular way whether it's working too much or whether it's Some sort of a bad habit or it's even the bad habit of ill humor all the time Which is kind of like a drug problem in its way. It's because of dukkha. It's because of dissatisfaction that comes from that. And to free yourself from that is to understand that it's not that the achievement per se is not meritorious. It's the attachment to that achievement is the source of our discouragement, it's the source of our frustration per se. And finally being able to let go of that while still enjoying the trajectory and relishing the progress,

this is one of the great secrets. Weirdly, we all know this for our kids. We all understand this for our kids. It's like, is your son walking? Yeah, he's three. He's walking. He's walking, okay. He's just like not toilet trained yet, right? Because it's a boy and he'll be like, till he's three. He's walking. He's just like not toilet trained yet, right?

Because it's a boy and he'll be like, till he's nine. Yeah. Yeah. So when he takes his first step, you're like, yeah, it's not like, cause you think he's going to be in the Olympics. He's like the worst walker ever. He's completely uncoordinated. He's terrible. He's terrible. Yes. He's completely terrible. That's not the point. You're enjoying the progress per se. And he's enjoying the progress per se. He's cracking up, he's digging it, right? We understand that for other people and we somehow forget that for ourselves. And if we can get that through our heads, then we have this, and again, it takes years and years and years of practice and progress, you're, like, you're a meditator, you've studied with the masters. I have a little bit too,

and we're still working on that. That's the project for our lives. What a pleasure. It's been the sit and talk to you. Thank you, Dan. I love being with you. And thank you for having me on this perfect show. I knew I was going to have a good time doing this. You too. Thank you very much. Great job. I appreciate it. Thanks. As I said, I really love this conversation. I hope you did too. Just a reminder, go check out his podcast, the Just a reminder, go check out his podcast, the Arthur Brooks show, and check out his new book, Love Your Enemies. Arthur Brooks, really glad we had that conversation. I suspect more to come from him. So let's get to your

voicemails. Here's number one. Hello, Dan Harris. This is Amy and Denton, Texas, a super cool town that you should visit someday. I saw a meditation your book 10% happier after hearing you and Sam Harris on the Joe Rogan podcast in April of 17. I'm very new to the practice and I really want to thank you for speaking and teaching about meditation like you do because I was a super skeptic like you and swear words help. On a side note, my 13 year old son read your book and half the time I listened to the audio version. And he loved it too. And again, I think this is where words really help.

Finding meditation and yoga and minimalism. In the last year and a half, I've really brought some positive changes to my life. And it thankfully caused me to take a hard left and the way I spend my time, how I see the world, raise my kids, who are 13 and 10, and how I exist. My question is, how do you work still in such a cut throat profession after a while on your journey of enlightenment? I know you guys say, one is enlightened or not, but I think it's a journey for me. You know, on a spectrum upon which one grows and progresses.

If you met me five years ago, I wasn't even on the spectrum. I do gravitate towards living in black and white, so it's hard for me to work in such a competitive field that I do with medical sales and feel good about what I'm doing. I mean, the business call it the Golden Handcuffs. I try to find a deeper meaning and tell myself, I'm helping people when most of the time I feel like I'm just feeding the beast. I thought maybe it was like that for you or that you know what I mean at least, you know? How do you do it?

Thanks, Dan. Hope to hear your thoughts. That was a great voicemail. I really appreciate it. Now I want to go to your part of Texas. I do love Texas. Um, I just want to react to two things in there. First, the swear words.

I'm glad your 13-year-old son liked it. Not everybody likes it, so good to get some positive feedback on that, because I occasionally get negative feedback. And I totally agree with you about the spectrum of enlightenment. Look, I've been pretty clear about my stance on enlightenment. I'm agnostic. But even if you're a hardcore Buddhist practitioner, it's viewed as a spectrum. There are stages along the path. So you're spot on there, and I think I certainly

unabashedly and continually subscribed to the 10% view with the caveat that 10% is a bit of a joke, but that marginal improvement happens over time. And so I'm really psyched for you that the last couple of years, since you said 2017 that you've been checking this stuff out and that it's making a difference, I'm really happy to hear that. As your question, so I'll talk about my personal view

about my own career, et cetera, et cetera, in a second, because I think, to cetera, et cetera, in a second. Because I think, to my mind, there are two things here. There's waking up to the fact that you might not feel good about what your profession is. And then there's having a different view toward how you're going to show up in the work. I'm not, hopefully, that's clear. But let me say a few more words and hopefully these words will be clarifying. So if you're through the process of meditation and maturation

and cogitation, waking up to the fact that you are in an industry that you just don't feel good about, well, I think first of all, that's a positive thing that you're waking up to that. I would not urge you to make any sudden moves that would put your family and financial jeopardy. But I think it's a positive thing to start reflecting on, and over time, you might see other opportunities in other directions in which you can move responsibly. So I don't, you know, I just want to stress if you're feeling like you've got golden handcuffs and you're truly constrained. I personally, this is just my opinion here,

I would not counsel you to just do something reckless to leave a career that could somehow leave your family and die straights financially. But the process of thinking deeply about what else you might do, I think in my experience, is really constructive. So that's just one person's view. As it pertains to me, so yeah, TV news is a very competitive field. I, however, don't feel that I don't have doubts about the importance of what we do, especially now. I really feel that TV news, the news in general, is an incredibly important endeavor.

So my doubts have never been about this field of endeavor, about this profession. Really it's more been about my own attitude within it. And so it's much more of a personal critique and how, yeah, let me edit that slightly just to say, there are things about the culture, specifically the way the culture at ABC News was when I arrived 19 years ago, that also put my in eight, sort of cutthroat, hypercompetitive, super-anxious, those innate capacities of mine on steroids. Happily though, the culture at ABC News has changed dramatically and I think it's probably for a variety of reasons.

I too have changed, in part because I'm keeping up with the culture that I think is vastly healthier than it used to be. And because I've got this thing in my life called meditation, which has been really useful, not to mention having married well and getting older and wiser, I hope. I still am really excited about when I take the escalator into ABC News every day. I still have some of that excitement, much of the excitement that I had as a 28-year-old kid walking in this building for the first time 19 years ago, almost exactly 19 years ago. But my attitude about how to exist within this environment, that has definitely changed. I find myself getting caught up much less frequently in feelings of sort of being competitive with my colleagues or people from other networks, feeling jealous, feeling shot and Freud.

I mean, some of that definitely still happens. I'm not a perfected being or anything like that, but I waste a lot less time on that and spend a lot more time on enjoying the substance of the work. And in recent years, I've really thanks to just good management here and been able to focus on things that I really do enjoy. In particular, I love doing We Hain Good Morning America because it's really fun. And I love doing big substantive stories for nightline and that's really my mandate here is to go out and find stories, big

investigations, I've been doing a lot of stuff on the violence and drug trade in Mexico and in recent years so that that's been really interesting for me. So that kind of work is really exciting and I think focusing on that as opposed to looking around all the time at what somebody else is getting has vastly improved my inner life. Long answer but I really liked your question so I said a lot. Let's go to the second caller. Hi Dan, this is Ryan from Los Angeles. I had a question about achievements in meditation as a very achievement oriented person. I noticed some of the apps and tools that kind of exist out there will give you run streaks and kind of these shiny icons and notifications to tell you how much you come in a minute

you've done and how many days in a row and all that. And I see a lot of irony in this because the mindfulness has kind of taught me to be getting not so hung up on my achievement and just enjoy things for what they are and not worry so much about this thing I'm going to get at the end and that you know each thing doesn't make you feel any different. You should just be more in the moment. So, but it is nice to have a character run after and kind of something to be held accountable to. So, even though you know we should just notice the inherent benefit in that we get from actually just meditating, not getting those achievements. So anyway, I just wanted to kind of throw that at you and see what you thought because

I find myself missing a day or two and then I want to keep the street going and then I get bombed out. If I miss a day and then I kind of will miss a few days because I'm so bombed out that I miss a day anyway. That's kind of my question and my thoughts on that. Thanks for your books and for bringing meditation kind of to the mainstream and demystifying it. Really appreciate everything you're doing. Thank you, Ryan. Another great question. Okay, so let me approach this from two levels. The first level is, I'm speaking now as mindfulness

entrepreneur, I guess, somebody who is involved in operating one of these meditation apps. So, I have mixed feelings about streaks and giving people shiny icons, etc. for keeping up their meditation practice. But overall, I think it's good to provide it for those who like it because, and I've talked about this many times so I won't say too much on it now, but behavior change and habit formation are incredibly difficult. And at the end of the day, I think it would get people to have an abiding meditation practice. If getting them to establish this practice involves providing some dopamine hits in the forms of streaks or little digital rewards on your phone. I am not entirely against that. I think I can see the case for it,

but I do think it needs to be done thoughtfully. And I know this is a discussion we have not infrequently inside the confines of our company on this issue. Let me approach it now from another angle, which is as an individual, because I think that's really what you care about more. Look, I think it is an individual choice. I am somebody who I use, I track a lot of things like my calories,

and I only started doing the calorie tracking recently when I switched over to being a vegan and I only started doing the calorie tracking recently when I switched over to being a vegan and got made myself sick at first. And so I started working with the nutrition as to encourage me to track my calories. And it has made a difference in terms of keeping myself healthy while also staying away from things I don't really want to eat.

So I know what it's like that I can get a little crazy about tracking and Looking for streaks and rewards and whatever sort of dopamine hit that you may get from these various apps that track various parts of our behavior etc. So I think it's something that that You should you should play with and if you notice yourself getting crazy then re-examine and it sounds to me like there's a little bit of Mental misogoss creeping in for you here where you get discouraged because you let the streak go and then you you know Say screw it. I'm not gonna meditate for a couple of days

And so it's creating a whole sort of inner conversation that may or may not be helpful So in that case you might want to experiment with, you know, not tracking anymore. And just reverting to what you described about, you know, the meditation for the sake of the meditation. And if you find that that's introducing a whole level of, if that's making your practice slack in some way, if you're, if you're slacking off as a consequence, then maybe dip your toes back into the streak and see if you can manage it more successfully. But you're just going to have to play.

It's an individual thing. I know from our users, some people like this stuff, some people don't, some people are like you and me or on the fence, but aware that it can make us crazy. And I just think it's a process of experimentation. And it is, it just goes back to what I said before about the fact that we are not wired for success when it comes to the setting up of healthy habits. And so we've got to play with lots of ways to get us there.

Hopefully that's helpful Ryan. I really appreciate the question. I'm sorry, I don't have some sort of pound the table, dogmatic answer for you on this. But I think it's more complex than that. Alright guys, thank you for listening to the 10% and a half year podcast. I'm not saying that in a perfunctory way, I am and our team is incredibly grateful to all of you who listen.

And in that spirit, let me just make an ask, if you can take a second to give us a rating or a review or post about us on social media, that all that stuff helps us in the standings on the various podcast players out there, in the rankings, and that means that more people will discover us and hopefully get interested in meditation and mindfulness and make a saner world. So, if you can take a second to do that, I appreciate it, if not, no worries. I also want to thank the team. We've got some fantastic people working on this podcast, including Ryan Kessler. He's okay. He's not the best, but he's okay. I'm looking at him through the glass right now.

I don't want to say too many nice things about him. But Ryan Kessler, who is awesome actually and produces the show, big thanks to Ryan, also Samuel Johns, from the Tempest and Happier Side, who does an enormous amount of really hard and fantastic work, and he's both he and Ryan are new to team, and have been just, like, I think, really helping our game in many, many ways. And Lauren Hartzog, who I haven't met, because she's based in Arizona, but has been doing a lot of great producing

and editing on the show. So Lauren, I look forward to meeting you. Thank you for all of your hard work. Thanks, everybody. Again, for listening, and we'll be back in one week with more of this stuff. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with 1-3-plus

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