The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Conversation with Arthur Brooks — The Pillars of Happiness

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Arthur Brooks, a professor at Harvard University and the co-author of “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” joins Scott to discuss the state of happiness in the US, how to improve your own happiness, and the role religion or some other spiritual means play in one’s life.  Scott opens with his thoughts on Elon Musk and his obsession with litigation.  Algebra of Happiness: being the parent.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 290. 290 is the country code belonging to saint helena in 1990 nasa launched the hubble space telescope nasa discovered the largest penis in the galaxy except they told me that wasn't appropriate for my resume so i didn't get the job go, go! Welcome to the 290th episode of The Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Arthur Brooks, a professor at Harvard University and an expert on leadership, happiness, and social entrepreneurship. He's also a columnist at The Atlantic and co-author of Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier. We discussed with Arthur the

state of happiness in the U.S., how to improve your own happiness, and the role religion or some other spiritual means play in one's life. I really enjoyed this conversation. This guy, there's so many happiness people out there. As someone who has written a book on it, that was a pretty weak flex. I know most of the people in happiness, and this guy is a real deal, very practical. Anyways, a fruitful conversation. All right, what's happening? The dog is headed to the great state of Texas. I'm headed down there for South by Southwest. Super excited. Going to see the whole team. We are doing a live markets recording at Atlassian, which I'm super excited about. And on Sunday, I'm doing a How to Be a Man with Liz Plank from She Media. So obviously, Liz is going to tell us how to be a man. Anyways, I love Liz Plank. She does Feminist Fabulous. She used to work at Vox

and just, I don't know, I like the way she kind of talks about femininity in a sort of a thoughtful, philosophical way. Anyways, and I'm sincere, if you are going to South by Southwest, and if you see me, come up and say hi. I like that. People are generally disappointed when they meet me. They think I'm going to be more interesting. This is a character I play on podcasts,

not actually how I am. Here, I'm charming and irreverent. In person, I'm intense and quite introverted. So if I don't seem that friendly, it's not because I'm not enjoying meeting you. It's because you're seeing the real dog that's been hit by a car, a little bit scared, doesn't like people getting too close to him.

Is that wrong? Is that wrong to speak sort of cynically about animal abuse? Owner of two dogs, owner of two dogs. Anyways, what else is happening? Lawsuits and Elon Musk. Elon is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman, claiming the firm has not stuck

to its original mission of benefiting humanity. Well, OK, I'm not sure that Disney's original mission was involved Star Wars or Hulu. So I'm going to sue them. And if that sounds outrageous, it is no less outrageous than what Elon is doing. There is no contract that exists between OpenAI and Elon Musk or his vision of what this organization should be. He made a play to take it over. He lost, and he took his ball and left. In the meantime, he's been trying his own AI, or he's been developing his own AI efforts. Remember the bullshit where he called for a pause in AI? And why do you think that was? Because he's so concerned with humanity? No, he was going full speed ahead on his own AI efforts and wanted everyone else to slow down so he could catch up. And guess what? He isn't. And this is

the bottom line. He sits up at night pacing. I don't know what the man does and thinks, Jesus Christ, I could have controlled EVs. I could have controlled space and I should have controlled AI. And he's so pissed off. I know. I know. I'm going to get into the business of litigation as harassment. And that is what this is. It'll be dismissed. It is ridiculous, literally insane that any judge would even entertain this. And I don't think they are. I think this will be dismissed pretty crisply. But will it affect OpenAI? Sure, it will. Absolutely. Why? Because OpenAI is very busy, and the senior executives there are going to have to go through or endure discovery. They

may have to testify or answer or respond to subpoenas. This will be a distraction. They will have lawyers counseling them all over the place about what they can or can't say. They will have to get involved in a PR war with Elon Musk and his millions of cultish stans. This is an enormous distraction. And generally speaking, it's bad for the economy and it's bad for business. I have found that there is a myth around rich people being evil in general, in general, and this will give me, you know, cause some shit. I find character oftentimes, oftentimes is correlated to extreme wealth. Most of the extremely wealthy people I know, especially the ones who are self-made, are good people, even above average on character. Why? Because the only way, in my view, to get

really, really wealthy for 95% of us is to establish allies along the way. Greatness and great wealth is in the agency of others. And if you're an asshole, other people don't want to see you win. They're not rooting for you. They don't think of you when there's opportunities for you to get involved in. They don't think of you when they think of, okay, let's give him or her the benefit of the doubt if you're an asshole. So in general, I find very wealthy, very successful people are also, generally speaking, high character people. They can become very insular. They can surround themselves with yes men and yes women and kind of lose the script, if you will. And that's what the universe wants. The universe doesn't want any one individual

organization to control the universe because a kind of genetic variance in the species is super important, or diversity in the gene pool, I should say. That's why we are attracted to people who don't look like us or behave differently than us. By the way, you don't want to marry someone who has the exact same attributes as you. You want that peanut butter and chocolate of diversity. As a matter of fact, there's been studies done on kibbutzes where people on the same kibbutz don't fall in love with each other. Why? Because there is literally an instinct saying, do not mate with your brother or sister or anyone that close to you. But there's a lot of intra-kibbutz marriages. Just a kibbutz five miles down the road, there's a lot of romantic relationships that establish because they're different. They're more mysterious. Remember every time in elementary school, a new fifth grader would show up and you'd think, wow, we're so fascinated by that person because they're new and they're different. And the universe doesn't want the same. It doesn't want a homogeneity. That's the reason why we have so

many fucked up weirdos in the Northern European royalty of the 18th and 19th century because they were inbreeding. And it makes sense for a certain level of diversity in the business landscape. And we try and protect startups. We try and protect new companies. Truth to it, my last company was acquired by a much bigger company. After about 14 months, I decided I could not survive. I literally couldn't breathe in this organization. What a shocker. I'm not effective or a fit for a big company. Things like they shut down our website one day. It was a firm called L2. And the website one day was turned off. And I couldn't even find who decided, who made the decision to turn it off. I literally didn't know what to do. I thought, I'm not going to survive here. million on the table by leaving early. It was worth it. And immediately after I left, I started thinking about, what am I going to do next? I had a non-compete, but the non-compete was I couldn't compete directly. But this firm decided to just start

sending me letters basically telling me or intimating that I couldn't do anything, that they perceived almost anything as competitive. What does that do? It puts a chill on starting new businesses. Non-competes and non-solicitations are effectively, effectively dampening our economy and growth. Two-thirds of new jobs are from small and medium-sized businesses. So when you start using the courts as a weapon to harass people instead of file legitimate legal complaints, you suppress innovation. It sends a chill over the entire economy. You don't think there's a chill across journalists right now with all these billionaires suing Business Insider or putting Gawker out of business because they outed them and they decided, I hate this firm, so I'm going to literally sue it into oblivion. not as an effective tool for remedies, not to imply or impose your legal rights, but simply as harassment, which this is, is not only bad form, it's really bad for the economy. So Elon

is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman, claiming the firm is not stuck to its original mission of benefiting humanity. So can we sue you, Elon, when you spread homophobic tropes, when you give platforms or you give audience or voice and elevate that voice to people who say incendiary, racist things, are you not benefiting humanity? And if so, can we sue you? He claims he donated $44 million to OpenAI between 2016 and September of 2020. The lawsuit states that the events of 2023 constitute flagrant breaches of the founding agreement, which defendants have essentially turned on its head. To this day, OpenAI Inc.'s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. In reality, however, OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source, de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world, Microsoft. By the way, I think he's right, but he doesn't have a legal claim against it. The mission statement of a company isn't an implicit agreement with anyone that they have to be held contractually to that

agreement. OpenAI categorically disagrees, And the firm's chief strategy officer says, we believe the claims in the suit may stem from Elon's regrets about not being involved with the company today. Yeah. So what's going on here? Okay. OpenAI was initially founded by a group of people who were, quote unquote, worried about, wanted to research, wanted to provide as a check and balance, be a think tank for what they saw as the potential and the risk posed by AI. Fine. And let's be clear, he's right. What got in the way? Money. Essentially, they saw 95 billion reasons to convert to some ridiculous, perverted, circuitous Byzantine structure where they pretend to be a for-benefit corporation,

whatever the fuck that is. There's nonprofits and there's for-profits. There's no in-between. The in-betweens are VCs who are already rich trying to pretend they're more virtuous than they actually are. For-profit companies, which this is, be clear, I think the operating agreement says the investors get the first $100 billion back. I think there's been maybe three or four companies in history, if any, have generated $100 billion in profits. So great. Then it reverts to sort of a nonprofit status. To be clear, he's right. This has been, this has transmorphed or gone through shape-shifting from a nonprofit to a full for-profit company.

But he has no legal claim that they did that. They're allowed to do that. They didn't promise him contractually that he wouldn't do that. So what is this again? Nothing but an eight-year-old who quits the baseball team, and then his team goes on to the national finals, and he is so pissed off that he decides to sue the league and the team. Well, boss, you left. And also, just a quick question. Would we rather have as the primary seminal influence over AI right now,

Sam Altman, who strikes me as a thoughtful guy, and we should also be mindful that it's a for profit and they will do whatever, they will say whatever to quote unquote, get the share price up of open AI. But at the same time, he is not the dangerous megalomaniac who is turning off and on battlefield communications technology based on his blood sugar level, that level. So far, Sam has proven to be more measured and more of an adult here. In other lawsuit news, four former Twitter executives are suing Elon for the $128 million he allegedly owed them in severance. So let me get this. There are people contractually obligated to severance and he's decided not to pay them. Why? Because his love language is litigation. His attitude is, fuck you, sue me. Yeah, that's the guy we want controlling AI.

Here's the bottom line. Power corrupts. You become insular. You start believing your own press. You start believing, if I can only rule over the seven realms and conquer Westeros, then I will free everyone from their chains. And as a result of your blind ambition and your ego, you, Daenerys, become the absolute problem and the injustice that you originally set out to fight. That is human nature. Dictators always start benign. Power corrupts. That's why we have checks and balances. That's why we're supposed to have a progressive tax structure. Do we really need people worth a quarter of a trillion dollars? Is that healthy? Is that healthy? Look at our nation. And when I say our nation, the the future, it's here but not distributed equally. Prosperity is here, but it's not distributed equally. Capitalism is amazing. It's amazing

what Jensen Huang and NVIDIA have accomplished. It is our fault for not voting for legislators and not voting for leaders who enact laws that take some of that prosperity and give it back. And what's happened? Our growth has slowed as a nation over the last 20 or 30 years. Why? Because corporate tax rates have gone down. Now, stay with me on this. There's just huge incentive to get the money out of the company, to not reinvest it in the company, but to distribute it out to shareholders, because guess what? They're going to get 83 cents on the dollar. However, let's say corporate tax rates at the highest level are at 50%. You go, oh my God, that's crazy. You know what that happens? You know what the effective

incentive structure is there? You know what actually happens when corporate tax rates are 50%? They start investing more because their hurdle rate for something that works is lower. They will invest in a new plant. They will invest in new employees. Why? Why? Because they effectively get a discount on hiring and investing of 50%. Because essentially, any profit or anything that flows to the bottom line that they aren't investing, instead, if they don't invest and they reap more profits or more bottom line, they lose 50% of it. So any project, any investment, anything that grows the economy has a lower hurdle rate. So they're more inclined to try crazier shit. They're more inclined to pay

their employees more. They're more inclined to put in place retention plans that transfer wealth from shareholders to employees. Why? They get 50% off. But when tax rates dip below 20%, fuck that. Don't reinvest. Don't grow. Get the money out to shareholders. And there's some value there. There's some value there. We want shareholders to have the confidence and we want them to have the greed glands to continue to provide their precious capital to companies. But the pendulum has swung too far. The share of the spoils that has gone to capital and shareholders dramatically has outpaced what goes to labor. Labor wages have gone flat for the last 50 years, but productivity has skyrocketed. What's the delta between the two?

Trillions of dollars in stakeholder or shareholder value. Can we have a capitalist, full-body contact, competitive society that rewards winners and losers and creates a quarter of a trillion dollars in shareholder gains in one day? Or can we have a more empathetic society that funds social programs such that we don't have homeless veterans? The answer is yes. We'll be right back for our conversation with Arthur Brooks. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Arthur Brooks, a leading expert on happiness and the co-author of Build the Life You Want, the Art and Science of Getting Happier. Arthur, where does this podcast find you? I am in my office at the Harvard Business School. I'm about to go and

give a lecture on happiness, which is the class I teach at HBS. Nice. So let's start there. You're known as an expert on happiness and strategies for building a better life. How would you describe the overall state of happiness in the U.S.? If happiness were a stock, where do you think it's trading right now? It's trading way, way below where it was in 1990, and it would fallen off the out of the out of the industrial average it um it's in crisis is the bottom line and we've actually seen kind of two things happen to happiness as we measure it in the united states over the past 30 years it's been in kind of a secular decline and then there have been three crises that have pushed it down as well the secular decline has to do with the fact that that happiness rises in a population or for individuals when people have more of a sense of their faith or

philosophy of life, whether it's secular or religious, when people have a better relationship with their families, when they have close friendships, real friends, not deal friends. And last but not least, when they have a good relationship with their work, which means earning their success and serving other people. And all those four things have been in decline since about 1990. And that's been a secular decline in happiness. Then there's these three incredible storms that have pushed happiness down. In 2008, 2009, a major decrease in happiness started, particularly among young adults. And I thought at the time, probably you and I would have seen it the same way as B school guys, that it was the financial crisis and people not being able

to find jobs, you know, young people coming out of school. It wasn't. That was when everybody got social media on their devices. That turns out to have been the catalytic event, especially with young adults and especially young women, to inflect happiness down. The second was political polarization, 2014, 2015, 2016, where we were being encouraged by my malignant narcissistic politicians that we should hate people who disagree with us, which is the worst for the people who are the haters, even worse than the Hades. And then last but not least was Corona, which was, you know, hey, everybody go home and, and, you know, work from by Zoom and don't talk to your friends and good luck to you.

Have a nice day, which quadrupled the rates of depressive symptoms, which have not declined ever since. I mean, if you try to distill it down to one thing, isn't it a lack of contact? The fact that we're mammals and we're supposed to be bumping off one another and whether it's facing our screen or just not going into work, we just don't have as much contact with one another? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It's eye contact and touch. So there's a neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin. Most people know what it is. It functions as a hormone and it was evolved so that we would bond to each other, so that we would have kin groups, so we wouldn't, you know, walk the frozen tundra and die alone.

And so it's intensely pleasurable, and you only get it from eye contact and touch. And so anything that actually pulls us apart so we're not having in-person eye contact, and even worse, that we're not having physical touch, is going to give us a deficit of that, and that's going to lead to all the problems we see today. And if we start to begin to think about solutions, well, let's back up. Is it especially stark if you start to segment it by-harm, you know, suicidality are women between the ages of 15 and 25 and men our age, which is pretty interesting, isn't it? So it's guys who are between about the ages of 50 and 65 and women between the ages of 15 and mid-20s are where you actually see the highest rates of suicidality or the highest increases in suicidality. And there are different reasons for that. Number one is you find that young women are...they tend to actually suffer the most from the ravages of how social media

has driven them apart and become a substitute for their in-person relationships. When you talk about men, it has a lot more to do with the fact that, you know, these are deaths of despair that we see. So you see more cirrhosis of the liver, more men our age getting addicted to opiates, more men our age actually killing themselves. And the rates of growth are double digit in suicidality in that group. So I'll put forward a thesis, and I know you agree with the first, but I'm curious to explore the latter. And that is when we look at girls, they at girls, they have in boys bully physically and verbally, girls bully relationally. We've put these nuclear weapons in their hands. They're sexualized at a young age.

They're given unreasonable expectations that they place on themselves in terms of their appearance and their success. And and then they have social media picking up on algorithms that they're interested in self-harm and sending them pictures of nooses, bills, and razors. I see a blue line path, or it's fairly clear to me what's going on there. The people our age, I'll put forward a thesis, I'm not as clear, but I read this article about the path to suicide for men our age, and it goes something like this, or one of the broadest paths. A man loses his job or has some sort of mental health crisis, is no longer viewed as a provider by a spouse, spouse divorces him, 70% of divorces people our age are initiated by the woman, loses his income, his primary relationship, and access to his kids all at the

same time. And also the mental health community is, I think it's like 90% now of the therapists or women don't have a strong friend network, don't have therapists who can relate to the unique problems that a man faces and makes not a mental health or doesn't have a mental health breakdown, but makes a rational decision to kill himself. Your thoughts? Yeah, that's very adroit, Scott. I mean, most self-harm follows...most suicides follow more or less the same structure, which is they start with a mood disorder. So a clinical mood disorder, which is to say you're above the bar on clinical depression and or generalized anxiety, which are cousins in terms of mental health. Now, to be sure, those are dials, not switches. Part of the problem with the mental health profession is you go to a therapist and they say, you have depression.

Well, guess what? Scott, we all have depression. The question is how high is the dial turned? And if it goes above a particular threshold such that it's clinically designated, then you actually need treatment. Anyway, so people who are above that clinical designation, then like most, there's about a 95% undertreatment rate for these mood disorders. And most guys our age self-treat. And how do they self-treat? With drugs and alcohol.

They self-treat with drugs and alcohol, plus other really deleterious things for your brain, like pornography, which is horrible for the brain. All these things that will actually increase the neurotransmitter activity that's involved with addiction, et cetera. It basically is brain capture, gambling, whatever it happens to be. And then on top of that, so you've got a mental illness problem. You have self, a very messy and bad self-treatment issue. And then you have a setback. And the setback is what, you know, something happens. You lose your job. Your wife leaves you. You, you know, something happens to one of your kids and you just, you can't handle

a setback because life is full of setbacks, man. I mean, life is full of crises. Life is full of problems. And what do you need to deal with your problems? You need people around you who love you. You need a support structure. You need a religion. You need a spouse. You need kids. You need a family. When all that stuff is gone. And by the way, the only coping mechanism that you have is, you know, internet porn and a 12-pack of beer. That's not going to solve the problem. On the contrary, it's going to make it worse. So I just basically summarized what you said in slightly different terms. One of the reasons I wanted to speak to you is that religion plays a big role in your life. Yeah.

And it plays none in mine. And I was just curious, and it makes a lot of sense to me that you need those shock absorbers, friendships, or a belief that you're playing a part in something bigger than yourself, which I think religion, a sense of community provides all of those things. Can you walk us through the benefits of faith, specifically, if you're explaining those benefits to those of us who are atheists? Yeah, for sure. So I'm a Catholic, most important thing in my life. And the metaphysics of the rightness of Catholicism are, I don't know, man. I don't know. It's above my, I'm not a priest. It's above my, I'm not a theologian. But as a social scientist, the important thing about faith is actually the transcendence that it brings, which you can also

get many other ways. Here's the point. Nature, Mother Nature, who does not care if we're happy, Mother Nature really only cares about two things, which is procreation and survival. That's really Mother Nature's imperatives for you. Happy, that's your business. And Mother Nature gives you a real imperative to focus on yourself all the time. That's called the psychodrama. That's what most, you know, in the social science literature that I swim around in. The psychodrama is my job and my lunch and my commute and my students and my money and my sandwich. And it's just, it's like watching the same episode of Better Call Saul every single day by force.

And it's incredibly tedious and terrible. That psychodrama will drive you almost literally mad. And the only way to get beyond the psychodrama is to transcend it. You need to look at something bigger than yourself. And there's a lot of ways to do it. You know, you and I both know Ryan Holliday, who's a good dude. And what he's done is he's actually introduced millions of people to stoicism, which what it does is it gives you a sense of transcendence. You play a smaller piece. It becomes, instead of the me self looking in the mirror, it's the I self where I can actually observe the world and take some sense of awe in it. Some people like to walk in nature without devices. I love to analyze the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. Some people engage in a Vipassana meditation practice. Some people like me go to mass. The point is, man, you got to zoom

out because if you don't zoom out, you will be zoomed in and you'll be miserable all the time. That's why you need a sense of life's philosophy and something that will put you in proper perspective, which is little. You need to, as they used to say, as Steve Martin used to say, you got to get small, man. You got to get small. Do you think, I'm trying to move to solutions here, and I like the way you framed it. I think the more time I spend just focusing on my own shit and looking at myself constantly, the more susceptible I become to a shock. And for me, having kids was really became a bit of a shock absorber because for the first time I was thinking about other things more than myself. And so quite frankly, I just had less

time to be hard on myself or think about my shortcomings because I was focused on something other than me. Do you think that, for example, what outside of religion, like national service, nonprofit, volunteer work, what else can serve that role or fill that hole like religion does? Yeah, relationships are key. So you find that the happiest people, they engage in faith or philosophy, family life, real friendship, and work that serves other people. Those are the big four. Faith, family, friends, and work are the big four. What do they all have in common? They're about other people. They're about love of the divine or love of your family or love of your friends or love for everybody is

expressed through your work. And, you know, that's probably, I mean, you and I have, we're engaged in public education. That's what we do. You know, we have our university students, but then we have the general public that we're dedicated to educating. And your work makes you miserable when you're thinking about your own career. And it makes you intensely happy when you realize you're doing something good for a lot of other people. When people say, you know, what's the best way to get rid of loneliness? The answer is go find a lonely person and give them relief. That's the single best way for you to be less lonely. If you want to be less depressed and you feel isolated, go do something for somebody because you actually will go from meself to iself. It's all about other people. Talk about the role that fitness plays in happiness

or exercise. Yeah. So that's an interesting one because that's really important. I know to you and really, really important to me as well. I've been a gym rat for 30 years. And for the longest time, I noticed that it was tremendously important for my wellbeing, my wellbeing in general, but wellbeing is, you know, subjective wellbeing, which social scientists have been talking about for a long time is, is too blunt a concept because it mixes two things that are actually occurring largely in different hemispheres of the brain, positive and negative affect, positive and negative mood, which are separable because they're actually induced by activity in different parts of the limbic system of the brain. You need negative emotions, fear, anger,

sadness, and disgust to protect you from threats and give you aversive sensations. All emotions are data. All they are are information. So you know what's going on and you know how to react to it. Your positive emotions, they give you approach motives. It's like joy, interest. These are the things that make me want to go do something. Now, people talk about good and bad feelings. They're completely wrong. There's no such thing as good and bad feelings. There's positive and negative emotions largely emanating from different hemispheres of the brain. Now, the reason that that's really important is because when we mix them together and call it subjective well-being, you're kind of mixing things that don't mix very well. What we find is once we separate those things, that we have different stimuli that will either raise your levels of happiness

vis-a-vis your positive affect or manage your levels of negative affect, your unhappiness. Fitness and health are very good techniques for managing your unhappiness. They're not very good for raising your happiness. And that's a super important thing. I mean, I have these tests that I give people about whether they have really high or low levels of positive and negative affect. You know, I've been, you know, it's like you and I are just meeting, but I've been, I know who you are. I've been seeing you for years and years and years. And you have a classic mad scientist profile of an entrepreneur, very high positive affect and very high negative affect. You're a high affect guy, super engaged, super high energy. But that means that you got to do two things. You got to make

sure that you keep that high positive affect, but you got to manage that high negative affect, or you'll make everybody around you nuts. I mean, you'll drive your spouse off. You'll make your employees insane if you don't do that. And the single best way to manage negative affect, not to get rid of it because you'll die, you'll get chased down by a tiger and get killed. You want to manage it to manageable levels is physical exercise. Now, another way to do it, of course, is meditation.

And so I recommend to all of my students who are mad scientists like Scott Galloway and Arthur Brooks, by the way, is to get up before dawn, no coffee, no stimulants, because you'll, all you'll be doing is pouring stimulants on top of unusually high cortisol levels that are spiking at that point. Go beat yourself up. I mean, beat yourself up for 60 minutes in the gym, man. And I'm talking lifting because there's no substitute for lifting for the, for the hormonal impacts that it have. And then work on your spirit, whether that's your meditation or you're analyzing Bach or doing your

wisdom reading or going to church. And then two hours after you get up, have your coffee, and then you'll have a maximum period of dopamine. You'll be managing your negative affect. You'll have a much better day. We'll be right back. So you talked about caffeine, and I'll use this as a segue into, I try to be as transparent as possible with my listeners, and I'm finally in a position of economic security where I'm not too worried about being canceled, at least economically. I love alcohol, and I'm finally in a position of economic security where I'm not too worried about being canceled, at least economically. I love alcohol and I love substances. I drink, I used to drink four or five times a week. Now recognizing my liver just can't handle that, I drink two to three times a week. And I think it's been a net positive in my life. And I also take edibles

probably two or three times a week. I love THC. And I used a lot of it when I was young. I gave it up when I was working all the time. But maybe this is the symptom of an abuser, but I've talked myself into believing it's actually enhanced my happiness. Have you thought about a construct through which to look at substances in terms of – because I don't just buy, I find it's very reductive to go Nancy Reagan and say, just say no, and they're all bad all the time. I just don't buy that. Have you thought about a lens through which to look at substances in terms of managing your own happiness? It's a cost benefit question is what it comes down to. And so the

whole idea of being very arch on this is not appropriate and and the cost-benefit differs for different people I don't use any substances because I have a lot of addiction in my family and you know wrecking so nothing no alcohol No alcohol not a glass of wine. No, nothing. Nothing. I drank very heavily through my 20s and 30s I was a musician all the way through my 20s I was a professional classical musician until I was in my early 30s and then all the way through graduate school getting my PhD And becoming a social scientist. I kind of kept being a musician with respect to my habits. And by the time I was 38 years old, I saw the writing on the wall. I was going to go the direction of the rest of my family. And so I needed to stop. That doesn't mean Scott Galloway

needs to stop. You need to know yourself. Remember the Oracle at Delphi, know thyself. It's very important. And if you don't, then you'll be following somebody else's pattern and somebody who has a tendency toward alcohol abuse can ruin their life. Or somebody who actually could get some positive benefit for their relationships and just entertainment will be missing that. So one of the things that I talk about is family tendency. There's a whole series of very interesting behavioral experiments. So you can find, for example, that if it's easy for you to stop with two drinks, you probably don't need to. If it's hard for you to stop at two drinks, you should probably not be drinking. And that has everything

to do with just your general proclivities toward the addiction that comes from the dopamine pathways. The other thing that's really worth pointing out, Scott, is that people can enjoy substances a lot more the longer that they wait to use them. And the reason is because of the dopamine pathways. The other thing that's really worth pointing out, Scott, is that people can enjoy substances a lot more the longer that they wait to use them. And the reason is because of the pathways that we lay down in the brain. When your brain is highly plastic and you're drinking at 14, you're much likely to be an alcohol abuser when you're 28 and 38 than if you actually don't start until your brain is less plastic. And so the key thing for parents listening to us, don't waste your time trying to tell your kids never, never, never, don't, don't ever try pot, don't ever try alcohol,

you'll die if you do. Just delay as long as you possibly can. And they're far more likely the longer you delay to develop healthy patterns and, you know, life affirming patterns as opposed to having to, you know, quit and go through a whole lot of crises later on in life. We both teach at a business school. And I've, you know, the notion that money can't buy you happiness. I've found that that's something we tell ourselves to feel more comfortable with a society where, in fact, and again, this is a thesis, that money can buy you happiness. And now it tops out. But my understanding is it tops out at a pretty high level. And billionaires are no happier than millionaires, but they're no

less happy either, at least the research I've seen. And that economic security is just, and again, it's not a good thing. I'm not saying it's the way it should be, but it is. But money is a very strong forward-looking indicator of your happiness. What are your thoughts? It's true. So it's a complicated relationship. Now, at low levels, money absolutely lowers the sources of unhappiness, unambiguously, that you can eliminate the sources of unhappiness. Stress is everywhere. Absolutely. I mean, if you're not meeting your caloric needs, if you're not getting adequate health care, if you don't know if you're going to be able to pay your rent, it's horrible for your unhappiness, not your happiness, your unhappiness

that will raise your stress levels. You'll have chronic, you know, a cortisol drip right into your brain. You won't be able to function properly or even, or even focus. So that's at low levels, but that's really low levels. On top of that, the biggest problem that people make, I mean, I remember when I was poor, I mean, I was living in New York City. I was a French horn player. I didn't go to the dentist for six years from when I was 19 until I was 25 years old because I didn't have the money. And then when I was 25, I went to the dentist because I finally had the money. I joined an orchestra in Barcelona and I was making a living and I went to the dentist and I felt a lot better because I had like 12 cavities I needed to get filled. And I mistake, of course, I will admit that during that time, I never went a day without

cigarettes. So I guess probably it was, you know, priorities at that point. But, you know, at 25, when I got, I went to the dentist, I figured out that I felt a lot better and I concluded money really does buy happiness. No, it was eliminating my avoidable sources of unhappiness. Above those low levels, here's the point. If you just buy crap, you're not going to get happier. It really depends what you do with your money if you want to keep buying happiness. So there's five things you can do with your money, and anybody can do

with their money no matter how much money that they have. They can buy stuff, they can buy time, they can buy experiences, they can give it away, and they can save it. Those are the five things that people can do. The one thing at relatively high levels that money doesn't give you very much happiness at all, much more than kind of a fleeting thrill, is buying stuff. What will bring you authentic happiness is experiences with people that you love, time not to fritter away on social media, but to spend with people that you love, time not to fritter away on social media, but to spend with people that you love, giving it away to causes that you think are highly meritorious, and saving your money. It turns out that saving your money has a lot of huge benefits for people. It makes them feel secure about their future. It makes them feel good about what they're going to leave to their

kids or causes and all kinds of stuff. So I mean, there's a limit on that too, obviously, but those, it depends on how you spend it. You can buy happiness for sure. So you're coaching two people about to get married and they come to you and they say, professor, you understand happiness. Talk about happiness through the frame of a relationship. What are the best practices when you approach a relationship that not only increase the likelihood of your own happiness, but of your partner's? The key thing is, number one, what is the goal of the marriage? And the goal is not permanent passion. It's what we call in my business, companionate love,

which, as my kids remind me, does not sound hot. But it's the best thing ever. It's best friendship. That's the goal. The reason that people will date and be just madly in love and then find after two years that they hate each other is because they actually never got to friendship. That's the goal. The reason that people will date and be just madly in love and then find after two years that they hate each other is because they actually never got to friendship. When the neurochemical tide receded, there was nothing left on the beach. And that meant there was no friendship left. Here's the point. So the process of falling in love with somebody has a very important chemical

footprint, neurochemical footprint. It starts off with the sex hormones of estrogen and testosterone, where we're, that's where attraction starts. That's, that's ignition. The second part is where we have the sense of euphoria and anticipation in falling in love. And those are two neurochemicals that, you know, dopamine, which gives you anticipation of a reward, which is why the, you know, the signature of falling in love looks an awful lot like the early stages of a methamphetamine addiction because of the dopamine. The noradrenaline or norepinephrine in your system gives you the sense of euphoria when you're talking to that particular person. The third step is infatuation. And infatuation is where you're really neurally imprinting on another person because you can't stop ruminating on the person. So rumination involves a drop in

serotonin levels. That's the reason that people who are clinically depressed, they'll take drugs to enhance their serotonin levels or the reuptake of the serotonin in their brain is because they want to ruminate less. The problem is that when you're falling in love with somebody, you need to ruminate on the person. That's the same thing that creative people do when they're doing a business plan is they can't stop thinking about it. You know, when you and I are doing a thing for work, like I'm writing a book or we're putting together a company, all the stuff that we do, and you can't sleep. And the reason is because you're ruminating in the same way that you would be depressively ruminating or when you're in love, infatuated with the other person.

Then last but not least is when the oxytocin really bonds you to the other person permanently. That's where you want to wind up in your relationship. And so you need to cultivate true, deep friendship with the other person. By about five years in, if you have that best friendship that actually comes from the high oxytocin levels. It does. It's, I mean, you, you got all the other stuff has to go away or you'll lose your mind and hate your life. I mean, if you're basically completely infatuated with the other person, you'll be so stressed out. You won't even be able to work. You need that to stop. You need your serotonin levels to come back, but you need your oxytocin levels to stay high. The goal of that is you don't need to go get, you know, like a PhD in

neuroscience. What you need to work on is making sure that you are cultivating a deep, real, authentic, profound, even metaphysical friendship with the other person. And as a parent, if you want to raise kids that are just generally more likely to be happy, are there practices or behaviors or values you can instill or try to instill as a parent to increase the likelihood they will be? I don't want to say likelihood that they will be happy because there's so many things that go into that. But give them a better, maybe a better toolkit. Yeah. It's all about modeling.

It doesn't matter what you say. There's nothing in parenting that matters what you say. You know, I've done this work on what's the biggest likelihood that your kids will grow up and practice your religion. You know, if you're Jewish and it's important to you and you want your kids to grow up and be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, whatever it happens to be. And it turns out that the number one predictor of your kids growing up and practicing your religion is seeing their father practice the religion. It does not matter. It's a lot less the mother, weirdly. And the reason for this is that the physically most imposing human being in a

child's life is often, in conventional families at least, the father. When I was a kid, I wondered if my dad could lift the house. I mean, because he was huge. I mean, he seemed huge to me. And my dad, I mean, he bent the knee to no man, but he was on his knees on Sunday. And as a little dude, that had a huge impact on me. It's like something's bigger than dad. So my point is not the religious point. My point is the modeling point. Put your own oxygen mask first. You have to have good happiness hygiene in your life so your kids can witness it. That's the most important thing. And that means that you're serious about your sense of life philosophy, that you're serious about your family relationships, that your kids see you with a relationship with your own parents,

for example, that you have real friendships, really deep friendships, that you're engaged with your work, that you're passionate about it because you're serving other people and creating authentic value with your life and value in the lives of other people. And that's the best thing you can possibly do for raising happy kids, frankly. I mean, I can talk all day long about, you know, conflict in families. You know, 11% of people our age are not speaking to at least one of their adult kids, which is insanity. And I know the reason why that happens. We can talk about how to make sure that doesn't happen. But if you want them to actually be happier, you got to model happiness. And so it sounds like, I mean, you started off as a musician, you ended up at HBS.

It's a pretty unusual path. What advice would you give to your younger self around trying to get to a position of happiness more quickly? I would have cultivated my family relationships and friendships more. I mean, Scott, I was a CEO for a long time, too. So there was a lot between the French horn and HBS. I was actually a professor for a while doing really conventional. I was doing genetic algorithm stuff, early AI stuff and applying it to public policy. Then I was the CEO of a big think tank in Washington, D.C. for 11 years, a place called the American Enterprise Institute.

And I was doing that job, and it was a big job, man. I had to raise $50 million a year. I was on the road all the time giving 175 speeches a year. And I was all about work. I was working 80 hours a week for a long time. I spent the 14th hour at the office instead of the first hour with my kids many times. And those little ingrates, they got their revenge on me, man. They grew up, you know, and, and, and now I look back and I'm a grandfather

now. So, you know, um, and I'm not screwing it up anymore. I talk to all my adult kids and, uh, every day now on FaceTime, whether they want it or not, they're going to be hearing from dad because, and I'm not going to screw it up with my grandkids, but that's the greatest thing. I mean, there were days when I neglected my marriage. I, my parents died and I didn't know them very well. They died young. I mean, they died young. There's, you know, there's, you know, issues with their health, but they were interesting people. My mother was an artist. My father was a brilliant mathematician. I always thought, gosh, what interesting people, but I was doing my thing and I was running around. And so the ambition got in the way of my life in a way. And I liked the

results, but it was a sacrifice that was too great, actually, for my own happiness. So if I'm giving myself success advice in worldly rewards, it's different than giving myself happiness advice. And at this point, I took the choice to be special too many times over being happy, but I wonder if you're being a little bit hard on yourself because every piece of stimulus and incentive out there as a man is to be a baller professionally and everything else will fall into place. And so I think the incentives are, you know, every, every piece of external stimuli is telling you that you have to be successful. And if you aren't, you're going to regret that more than anything. But I never forgave my father for not being around. I still have struggles with it. I mean, it sounds like you have a good relationship with your adult children now.

What about, I like this idea of repair. What about the dad who, understandably, in his 20s and 30s, wasn't there as much for his spouse and his kids because he was just really focused on economic security? I'm grateful I didn't have kids when I was young because I did nothing but work. That was my identity. I was worried. I was always worried about being broke. And kids wouldn't have changed that. I just wouldn't have been around. Yeah. And that was me, Scott, because, you know, I had my kids in my thirties and I was working all the time because I was just... Look, here's the thing with my students, which is to say me and you too, we're intensely afraid of failure. That's our

death fear. So everybody has a death fear. Only 20% of humans are actually morbidly afraid of physically dying, but we all have a death fear, which is the end of our sense of self. If you define yourself in terms of your work, you're going to be intensely afraid of failing professionally. And that's what I am. And that's what you are. And that's what we're going to take to the grave unless we manage it, unless we're open and we articulate that particular fear to ourselves and the people who love us the most. To say, look, I know I'm strong and I'm successful. I've been very fortunate that things have really gone my way professionally in four different careers. Fantastic.

And so people say like, you must be the happiest guy on the planet. It's like, no, I got something chasing me. You don't understand. You know, when you're something chasing you, you can run really fast and it can look like you're running a race, but you're basically kind of, you have this ghost actually. And so the point is that when I've talked to my own family and my adult kids about this, I have a frank conversation about it. I say, look, that was not a good impetus. And so the result is that that's been my own process of knowing myself. And the reason that

I teach happiness right now is because Scott, I want know, it's not because I don't have natural athletic abilities in the sport of happiness. It's because I don't, quite frankly. And so studying it as a scholar has been really the secret to giving my own self a better life. And, you know, the truth is I measure it carefully with my students and my own happiness is up 60% in the past five years since I've dedicated myself to it. And that's what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. So last question, I appreciate you've been very generous with your time. Have you given any thought to the notions of masculinity and femininity and gender roles, embracing them, modulating them, redefining them, the role that plays in happiness? Yeah, I have to a certain extent because you find

that there are pretty substantial gender differences that you see in the literature. And I'll give you an example of that. I've looked for the longest time asking who's happier, men or women. And forever, the answer was women. You find that married women are happier than married men, that single women are happier than single men, that widowed women are way happier than widowed men, right? I told that one to my wife and she's like, huh. But this weird thing happened, Scott, over the past 15 years, which is that the gap is closed. And the gap has not closed because men have gotten happier. It's because women have gone down to the unhappiness level of men. And the reason for that is because probably, I mean, we can speculate on this, but this is not something that scholars are likely to touch for the obvious reasons of

self-preservation, that gender roles have been blurred to the point that women are working in much the same way with many of the same unhealthy work patterns that men are. And it's not good for happiness under the circumstances. So one of the things that I recommend is that, you know, men understand what their proclivities are and embrace them when appropriate and fight against them as is appropriate as well. You know, the truth is that you will just, I mean, you left your devices as a man, you will think that because mother nature is telling you that nobody's going to love you unless you bring in a freaking gazelle every day. Bring in the gazelle. And if you drag in the gazelle, then your spouse will continue to love you and your kids will continue to respect you

yet for another day. And then you go get another gazelle. But that's not right. That's an evolutionary anachronism. That is not correct. They love you and they want more of you. How many times do I talk to men our age and they have the same argument with their wife over and over and over again, where the wife is like, are you on the road again? And it's like, yeah, you complained about me not being here, but you sure love what all of this work brings you. And I noticed that you use this money and the wife is like, I'm spending the money because I got nothing else to do. I would take less money if I had more of you. And that argument goes on and on and on and on. And it's what I recommend to men in particular,

who are stuck in this vortex of incentives from mother nature is to remember that you can take that animal path or you can, you can choose a divine path. And if you're an atheist, that's the truly human prefrontal cortex path where you're not a prisoner of your limbic system. Your prefrontal cortex, the C-suite of your brain, can make the decision to go against those proclivities and you can be happier. One quick last question. We both are around a large cohort of what I'll call highly productive, overachieving young men and women. If you could tell them, this is the behavior I need you to do less of or more of, what would those one or two things be? There's really one big one, which actually comes from the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Now,

that's the longest running longitudinal study on happiness and health in the United States. That started with guys at Harvard in the late 1930s. And then it matched it up with a cohort of guys who didn't go to college. And then it wrapped in their spouses and then it wrapped in their kids. So it's very demographically representative at this point. And it's 85 years in. It looks at, as people who are happy and healthy when they're older, what did they do differently than the ones who were not happy and healthy when they got older? And it comes down to one thing, Scott. Happiness is love.

That's the one thing. The grant study. Greatest opening line of any academic study. Happiness is love, full stop. Full stop. That's from George Valiant, who ran it for 30 years. The guy who took it over is Bob Waldinger at the Harvard Medical School. Wonderful guy.

Really worth having on the show, as a matter of fact. He wrote The Good Life, which was a big bestseller. They keep getting bestsellers out of these data, but it comes down to this unipolar idea, which is that when you're doing something instead of love, you're doing it wrong. I mean, when you're basically, when you're systematically substituting for love in your life, it's a problem. When you're complementing the love in your life, when you're doing something that's a complement to your love relationships, you're doing it right. But what I tell my students is that if you're lonely, you're doing it wrong. That if you're making sacrifices with respect to your marriage and having children and forming your family, you're doing it wrong and you don't have to do it that way. And you're going to regret it because you're not going to have as much love in your life as you want and need and deserve. Arthur Brooks is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit

Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership, happiness, and social entrepreneurship. He's also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes a popular weekly How to Build a Life column and is the author of 13 books, including the 2023 number one New York Times bestseller, Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, with co-author Oprah Winfrey. He joins us from his office at Harvard. Professor Brooks, I love this stuff, and you just have such a facility. You just break it down so well such that it

resonates with people. And I think you're in the seat you should be in. I think it's good for you, good for your students, good for the planet. We really appreciate your time. Thank you, Scott. And thank you for what you're doing. You've enriched my life a lot, not only given me a lot of great entertainment, but a lot of incredible ideas. You've used your platform as a public intellectual for public good. And I've been the beneficiary of that. So thank you. Auditor of Happiness. I've been alone with my 13-year-old this week, and it's been tough. He's been, I think kids are a little bit like stocks. And I know that sounds weird, but the one there's stocks that are more kind of consistent, but don't offer the same volatility. They don't offer the same upside, but not the same downside.

I think kids are sort of the same way, or at least that's my experience. There are some kids that are nice to be around and just pretty easygoing and do what you tell them. And, you know, just not, not a lot of drama or brain damage. My youngest is not that stock. He has a volatile stock and he's difficult and he can be really disrespectful, even mean sometimes. And I think it's important for the dads out there to remember a couple of things. Parenting experts will tell you the reason they're acting that way is because they feel safe around you, that they know that they can behave this way or that way and not around other people because you love them and they feel secure kind of having that emotional release around you.

The second thing is you're not their friend, you're their parent. And don't be disappointed that they're not treating you like a buddy or a friend. And I have fallen into that. I think I envisioned at this age or at this point in their life that we'd be buddies. And it's a little bit with my older one, but my younger one, and I need to remember this, you know, I'm not his friend. I'm his dad and that's fine. The other thing is it's not an equivalent relationship. I unfortunately approach it with a bit of a scorecard. And it's like, I'm so nice to you. I do so much for you. I'm constantly thinking about your happiness. And you're just impossible to get out of the house in the morning and rude and mean and bring the whole household down with

your dramatics. And it's just not very nice. And I don't like the way you're treating me. And here's the thing. You know what that's called? Parenting. Parenting. And I do believe you get it back. Actually, I know you get it back. There's moments when I'm down, I like to fall asleep with my youngest. I just like being next to them. I find it very restorative, oxytocin, a mammalia, whatever it is. But I think it's important as dads that we remember we're not their friend, we're their parent. And what does parent mean? Parent means it's not going to be an equivalent relationship. Parent means you're going to invest a great deal more than you're going to get back, at least in the short run.

That's what it means to be a dad. That's what it means to be a parent. It's not their job to be nice to you. It's not their job to calculate what they're getting from you and give it back. It's not a business relationship. It's not even a friend. It's your son. It's your kid. You're the dad. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer, and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to The Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly markets show.