Welcome to Quantum Potential, a podcast dedicated to curiosity, discovery, and the bold new ideas shaping our future. I'm Sibylle Raver, Provost of Vanderbilt University.
Today's conversation brings together themes that are at the very core of my values as a leader and at the intersection of scholarship and lived experience. We're exploring how individuals and organizations can cultivate meaning, purpose, and the conditions that allow human potential to flourish. Why does this matter as we define what universities must become in the 21st century? Universities are places where knowledge advances, but they are also places where individuals grow, reflect, and chart their paths forward. I think about this often in my role as Vanderbilt's chief academic officer, where I help shape both our academic direction and the social and residential life that defines our community. That dual responsibility makes today's conversation especially meaningful for our Vanderbilt community and for me personally as a leader in higher education.
And that is why I am so delighted to welcome you, Arthur Brooks, a thought leader, scholar, best-selling author, and professor, and a person who hosts an incredibly popular podcast, by the way, whose work explores the science of happiness, leadership, and human flourishing. Arthur's career has been nothing short of extraordinary. He served on the faculties of both Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. He holds a PhD in public policy analysis and has earned both graduate and undergraduate degrees in economics. He previously led one of Washington's most influential think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute, as its president. He's a prolific and influential voice in the national conversation about success and well-being. Arthur's delivered more than 3,000 lectures, which if you just think about that, that it's just amazing, around the world, and authored 13 books, including five national bestsellers. He's profoundly shaped how we think about achievement, purpose, and happiness. And we are so honored to welcome you, Arthur.
I'm also thrilled to share that you will soon be joining Vanderbilt as a member of our faculty.
I'm thrilled about that, too. I can't wait. Yeah.
This is the place to be. Thank you so much, and welcome.
Great. So, let's begin with your research and your writing. You've spent years studying happiness as something measurable and teachable, not something simply that we think about in philosophical terms, but truly grounded in science. Which, as a developmental psychologist who studies neuroendocrine function, I just love that you're bringing affective neuroscience to that discussion. For listeners encountering this work for the first time, how do you define happiness? What do people most often misunderstand about happiness?
Yeah. Happiness is something that everybody wants. Not everybody acts like they want it, but people want to be happier, and that's something that philosophers have been talking about forever. The trouble is, the thing that we most want seems like the thing that we actually can't get. And that paradox itself has actually been the center of a lot of theology, for example. So, religions that believe that there's a great and blissful afterlife will say that evidence of that afterlife, of heaven, is the fact that we want something, and we feel like we can get it, but we can't get it here. So, it's sort of like thirst is evidence of the existence of water.
But it's only been recently that the merging of theology and philosophy, but also with modern neuroscience and behavioral science, that we've been able to quantify what these ideas are. And that's what's been the most exciting thing in my career. I mean, I'm a behavioral scientist by background, studying mostly how people interact with government and behave in weird ways as citizens, but I realized along the way, as I got a little bit older, that I wanted to study what was most important to me. And I needed to retrain in areas that I didn't have an academic background. So, I went back to study more neuroscience and more philosophy, and that gave me a thrilling intellectual background to retool my skillset in ways that are so exciting. And I realized that in so doing we could kind of triangulate across these different literatures to illuminate more about the secrets of human happiness beyond what anybody would have even thought of 50 years ago. It's an interesting time. It's an exciting time. Everybody's talking about AI and vaccines, and the real vanguard is human happiness.
So great. And I would love to just open up for a minute the point that you made early, that idea of allowing ourselves to be happy. Is that because we place achievement on one end of the continuum and happiness on another, and there's some virtue to the notion of the grind of suffering?
Well, it is true, and one of the great misunderstandings that we have about happiness. And then back to your original question, what do we get wrong about it? We think it's a feeling. Happiness isn't an emotion. Emotions are evidence of happiness, like the smell of your turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. And so understanding that happiness is something more tangible than that, that has sort of macronutrients. So I talk an awful lot about the elements of that. But also that it's more of a direction than a destination, at least in this life, depending on your views. That's an important thing to keep in mind as well. People make other mistakes about it that have everything to do with our biological evolutionary tendencies. So, one of the biggest mistakes that people who are strivers, you know, hard-working people, successful people make is that they believe, because mother nature has kind of programmed us to believe, that if we have enough worldly success, money, power, honor, that happiness will come for free, and that's quite wrong. And so one of the biggest mistakes of the most high-achieving people in the world is that they think that if they get worldly success, happiness will come for free. The first thing I tell my classes, who are the leaders of tomorrow, is that you need to shoot for happiness and then you'll be successful enough. And of course, for strivers, what makes them panic is that last word, enough. And so the whole secret is figuring out what that means.
Yeah. I mean, that whole notion of delaying gratification, delaying, you know, that it's a consequence rather than a correlate or something that travels alongside or even drives success, right?
Absolutely. And you know, it's an interesting thing because people who work their whole lives to be special rather than happy, they wind up becoming really, really miserable. And that's not how I want my students to wind up.
Yeah. Yeah, and I think you give a great set of antidotes to the notion that worry is something that we just have to shoulder. Right? You want to talk a little bit about worry. I love that idea that, what was it? I think you said somewhere in the middle of the book that 91% of the things that we worry about don't ever come to pass.
That's right. That's right. So, a lot of people struggle with anxiety and stress and worry, and they're all related to fear. Fear is a basic negative emotion. The basic negative emotions, the fundamental negative emotions, are fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. And they all exist for a reason. And interestingly, the human limbic system, this console of tissue that was between 2 and 40 million years ago, it predates Homo sapiens. It exists to turn signals that we get below our level of consciousness into emotions, which are the human language that we can understand. Negative emotions exist for a reason. They're signals that we have perceived a threat. That's what it comes down to.
You know, that you had inhibition and activation that, you know...
Oh, yeah. Well, that's the prefrontal cortex, you know, the human... It's like its whole job is saying, 'Don't do that.'
[laughter] Withdraw. Yeah.
So, you know, it's like the prefrontal cortex is the C-suite. That's where the provost of your brain sits, which is the behavioral inhibition system of a university.
And then the chancellor is the behavioral activation system.
We try to share both. You're BIS and Daniel's BAS.
Really hard to balance, but I get your metaphor. It's working. And of course, the signals that are coming through the limbic system and his wild emotions are us, the faculty, you know?
Well, I mean, you know, I think it's that fascinating idea, right, that seize the moment, seize the day, seize the opportunity often requires tamping down that inhibition, the worry, the...
Yeah, yeah, and that's actually getting more toward activation. Actually interesting because some people what they find is they're too inhibited and some people find they're too active. People who have neurodegenerative diseases or they've had some sort of brain pathology where their behavioral inhibition system is damaged, that's the primary job of making sure that you're not doing things, that you don't get yourself into trouble. And this is, you know, people who are, for example, people who suffer from psychosis, often they don't have a functioning behavioral inhibition system. Yeah, or the, you know, work hard, play hard, right? Playing a little too hard can... I've been actually studying that a little bit. And you'll be interested in this because what you find is that people who are interested in extreme sports, they take really a lot of risks, and what we find is that they have different amygdalae than the rest of us. That you've seen this research, right? Yeah, so you find that people, if their amygdala is literally too big, not too big, bigger than average, then it'll be activated really easily and they have a hair trigger and they have to work on their temper and they have anger management problems. But if it's too small or if it's underactive, then they can't feel anything and so they'll do crazy things and take crazy risks.
To jump. You got to do that because you're not going to feel alive until you jump without a parachute off that thing or whatever happens to you, right?
And I think a lot about the ways in which institutions like ours that expect so much of our students, right? We have really a wonderful community that goes big and goes hard for things that are difficult, right? This idea, I think you quote President Kennedy at one point in the book about many people really like to do something because it's hard, not because it's easy, right?
But in the course of doing that, do we end up leaning a little too much on the worry end of the spectrum or the inhibitory control end of the spectrum?
And I love that you encourage everybody to schedule time to explore or to be curious or to read or to rest or to laugh. That there's room, and in fact it's paramount to make that case.
Yeah. I've been working a lot on the essence of leisure of late. And part of the reason is because I'm bad at it.
You're bad at leisure. You're a loafer.
Absolutely. And the reason is because I didn't understand leisure properly. And so lately I've been going back to work.
Brooks, expert at flaking out. Yeah, I can see that.
I need to become a slacker. I mean, I need to learn to be a slacker. And you know, I tell my students, you know, I'll talk to them about the necessity of actually finding some integration between the work and the rest of their lives. And they'll be like, 'You want us to be slackers?' I was like, 'There's nothing I could tell you that would make you into slackers. Strivers are born.' It's what it comes down to. But I'm a classic striver and so are you. The trouble with that is that it's all points on the board. And then there's this arrival fallacy that we get into, and there's a lot of problems with happiness for this. So I've gone back to the work of Josef Pieper lately. I've been reading a lot of Josef Pieper. And his most influential book was Leisure: the Basis of Culture, written after the middle of the 20th century. And Pieper talks about what leisure really means. And we get it wrong today. So we think of leisure as he would call acedia, which in ancient Greek is this laziness, you know, sloth. And that's not right. He says that leisure is a serious business. You don't get paid for it, but it's a kind of self-improvement in more or less three realms: learning new things, building relationships, and deepening spiritual ideas. And so, becoming more philosophically or spiritually deeper, getting closer to your family and friends, or anybody for that matter, and paying attention to your learning, and not doing it for money. It's something like being highly focused and highly attentive.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is very alive.
And that's just really great, I have to say, and that's a wonderful thing, and that's one of the roles that we can actually play in the university in the ongoing life of students and the communities that we have is that we can help them participate in a life that has not just the daily grind, but actually has leisure properly understood. And that's how I'm trying to learn how to have a leisure life that's better, too.
No, it's great. So, I guess one question, since you claim that you weren't good at leisure, I would imagine you might claim that you hadn't really gotten a close beat on happiness early.
Yeah, happiness is hard for me. That's why I study it.
Right? Precisely because it's hard for me. And when I started looking at the studies that the Minnesota researchers were looking at identical twins, you know, the identical twin studies separated at birth and reunited as adults, identical twins that were adopted into separate families, because this is practically a quasi-experimental way to...
Yeah, that were created in the 1970s. TV shows about this. There's a great documentary.
There's going to be social scientists like me and you with clipboards following them around, you know, collecting data. And what you find is that 40 to 80% of all their personality traits are genetic, which none of us wants, but, you know, too bad. And happiness. And so, somewhere between the low 40s and high 50% of happiness is genetic. Your baseline, you know, how you wake up most days. I mean, some people they wake up and they're like, 'It's a great day.' Right. What is it? This person's child, you know, all of this. But, you know, for the rest of us like...
Gratitude, you know, gratitude.
And I remember seeing that and thinking, okay, you know, my mother did make me unhappy. [laughter] Or, you know, my mother was great. But the point is I had gloomy parents. Characterologically, you're...
I had gloomy parents and gloomy grandparents and all right. And, you know, I married a Spaniard who's a sunny person, and she said like, you know, you're a behavioral scientist. Why aren't you using your PhD for something really truly useful like your own happiness? And she had a point. [laughter] She had a point. And so, when I was in my mid-50s, I actually stepped back. I was running this big think tank, and I dedicated the rest of my life to actually retraining, as I mentioned before, mostly to update my toolkit as a social scientist with the modern neuroscience that really shows us how much of psychology really is biological. That psychology is biology in this very beautiful way. And then marrying it up with the wisdom traditions and especially the philosophy that I had never studied before.
Yeah, but what's so great is that I find your work is suggesting that while that genetic component is real, that there are so many action steps that we can take to shape our physiological responses to our environment, our ways in which we experience our day, our community, our work, right?
