Good evening. My name is Millie and I'm a junior studying electrical engineering and a co-president of Veritas at Stanford. On behalf of the forum planning team and our 20 amazing co-sponsoring organizations, I'd like to welcome you to the Veritas Forum at Stanford.
Hi. And I'm Gabriel and I'm a junior at Stanford as well, studying computer science, and I'm also a co-president of Veritas at Stanford. The goal of our Veritas Forum tonight is simple. It's to provide a space for students to explore life's biggest questions. Questions about the ideas that shape our lives. For example, why is there something rather than nothing? What does it mean to be human? Is happiness an illusion? Does God exist? And if so, why does it matter? Because for over 30 years, students have been bringing together scholars from many worldviews and disciplines to seek truth together.
We aim to model what college at its best can be: a place for open and constructive dialogue rooted in curiosity, mutual respect, and a shared pursuit of understanding. In the spirit of Stanford's founding purpose, we hope that this conversation reflects the value of free expression, critical inquiry, and civic engagement. Thoughtful questioning is a sign of respect, and collaborative dialogue prevails over contentious debate.
Yeah. And over the course of this debate, we'll explore a powerful and timeless question: what does it really mean to pursue a fulfilling life? How can insights from science and philosophy help us understand what brings genuine meaning? And where might we begin in our own search for deeper, more lasting fulfillment and satisfaction?
We'll spend roughly around 45 minutes on a moderated conversation between two featured speakers. Our moderator, Professor Lee, will invite each speaker to respond to a few key questions and engage in conversation with one another. The moderated conversation will be followed by a question and response. Throughout the event, you can submit and upvote questions on Slido. You can just scan the QR code on the back of your program. Our moderator will select the best of the questions that rise to the top and ask our speakers during the question and response period.
Yeah. And at the end, we'll also invite you to give feedback via a short survey, which you can also scan on the back of your program, with an option to be matched for a coffee chat with someone from a different perspective or just to continue a conversation during chats hosted in dorms across campus.
Now it is time to invite up our panel for the event. We are honored to welcome Arthur Brooks, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and professor of the practice of public leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, and our very own Andrew Huberman, associate professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology here at Stanford School of Medicine. Moderating our discussion is Professor Charles Lee, professor emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Business. You can read more about each of the speakers and their backgrounds in the back of your program. Please join me in giving them a warm welcome to the Veritas Forum.
Oh, welcome. This is really a much anticipated night. We can tell from the fact that I don't think there are any more seats left in this room. So it's great to have you all here. My name is Charles Lee and I'm really excited to be able to moderate tonight's session. The two speakers here, Arthur, can I go by Arthur?
Okay. And Andrew have wide followings and we're just excited about what we can learn from them today. So I'm going to start, gentlemen, with a little question about something that maybe happened in your 20s. So if you could picture yourself back to your early 20s, I wonder if you can share with us, each of you, a story from your 20s that kind of captures your search for meaning and fulfillment during that time, and maybe think a little bit about how, thinking back, what strikes you about that story. Maybe Andrew will start.
All right. Well, first of all, delighted to be here and love being at the Farm. So in my 20s I was immensely focused on trying to figure out, to some extent still, who I was. And for me, since my late teens, early 20s, I maintained a short list of people who I admired. It was that simple. I still have that list and I still update that list. And that list included people in the realm of physical activity, intellectual activity, etc. My personal backstory is not so relevant here, but just to give a couple of bullet points: I was born at Stanford Hospital, raised in this area, and my father is a scientist. And so I've always had an interest in science and biology, and at the same time I've always had a drive to explore things in, I guess now we call it, health and wellness and athletics, but also an interest in spirituality. I just didn't really understand where to look for that.
And so in my 20s I was still very much trying to figure out who I was, you know, so which of these people I wanted to be most like. And at the same time I realized that there was no single individual to whom I wanted to map myself onto. And at that time the big struggle for me was I was trying to reject the incredible gifts and opportunities I had of being born and raised into a family with an interest in science and things of that sort. And I was very resistant to all that. And across my 20s I discovered that the best version of life for myself was going to be one in which I could literally check off these different boxes: take care of my physical self, take care of my intellectual drive, take care of my interesting and creative endeavors, and so forth. And I guess we'll get more to this later, but more relevant to the discussion here at Veritas, you know, eventually I checked those boxes. And I found that there was great meaning in the pursuit of those things, in the process of checking off those boxes, but there was a big open gap like, okay, what now? And we'll get back to this later, I'm sure, but that led me to the conclusion that things of our incredible species are necessary but not sufficient for a completely meaningful life. And that's something that I arrived at later than probably most of you in this room, but it reflects where I'm at now.
Terrific. Thank you. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks, Charles. And thanks, Andrew. It's great to be with you. I love being here and I love the Veritas Forum. It's an important opportunity to have this conversation, and what a beautiful first question. Where did I first get an idea of what a fulfilling life actually might be, back to my 20s? That was a long time ago for me, but I have a very distinct memory. When I was in my 20s, I was not doing anything like what I am doing now. I had the ambition of being the world's greatest French horn player. God bless America. I mean, it's like, you know, and I grew up in Seattle. My father was a brilliant biostatistician. My mother was an artist of some local acclaim. Very artistic and intellectual family. And I wanted to be a classical musician. That's all I wanted to do. I didn't go to college like a lot of you, but I had every bit as much ambition as anybody in their 20s. That's all I thought about. That's all I did. I went pro when I was 19. I was touring the world playing chamber music. I spent a couple of years touring with a jazz guitar player named Charlie Byrd. And I was totally dedicated to that. I didn't have any personal relationships of note. I didn't have any romances that meant anything. And then something happened to me. I was on tour in the Burgundy region of France and I met a girl and she didn't speak a word of English. I didn't know where she was from, but she was smiling at me. I was up on stage and she was smiling at me, which, you know, was rare.
And so I did, you know, I was 24 years old. I had just turned 24. And I made a beeline to talk to her afterward and realized, I learned pretty quickly, she wasn't French. She was Catalan. She was from Barcelona. Didn't speak one single word of English. We didn't have one single word in common. So I did the only obvious thing to do. I asked her out and we went out a couple of times that week while I was on tour, and I went home and I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that this is the very first time in my life where I realized that something was more important than the French horn.
Something was more... No, something was more important than my own personal sense of greatness and drive and ambition. There was something that was maybe satisfying, maybe there was some satisfaction that could be had from this. I didn't understand. And I called my dad in Seattle. I was living in New York City at the time. I said, 'Dad, I think I met the girl I'm going to marry.' And he said, 'Great. Let's meet her.' And I said, 'Well, it's complicated because she doesn't speak a single word of English and she doesn't live in the United States and she has no idea that I think this and I can't even express it, which is a problem.'
But that was my first understanding that there's something that brings ultimate satisfaction that's not of this world. The world is full of worldly rewards and you're being beguiled by them constantly: money, power, pleasure, fame, success, adulation, adoration, compliments, Instagram followers, I don't know. But there's one thing that satisfies when you have that transcendent experience of love. That's when I realized that there was a source of satisfaction beyond anything that I could achieve that would actually come from love. By the way, how did that turn out? How did that one turn out? It sounds bad, right? I moved to Barcelona without telling her.
I quit my job. I took a job in the Barcelona orchestra, in the symphony orchestra in Barcelona, on the bet that I could convince her and close that deal. It sounds stupid, right? We now have four grandchildren.
And our communication has marginally improved.
All right. Terrific. I love the way things start. You know, my job mainly here is to remind you that we actually have an agenda. So our title today is 'When Will I Be Satisfied?' So I'm going to turn towards that now and I'm going to ask you, Andrew. So a lot of people here are probably checking boxes just like you were doing. Okay. But oftentimes they find that you go and you check these boxes but just like you said, they're not that satisfied with it. What is it, you know, as a neuroscientist, what is it in our brain that makes us, number one, go out and check boxes, set goals, priorities, and number two, constantly find them unsatisfying? What's going on?
Yeah. Well, I do think there is great satisfaction in setting and reaching goals. I want to be very clear about that. I wouldn't be a product of the South Bay area if I didn't state that. I do believe that, and I believe that is particularly true for goals that open up new opportunities, that if you're thoughtful about those opportunities, that you might take some and turn down others. And there's a whole set of questions and discussion to be had about right path versus wrong path, and we can get back to that perhaps. But I mean, if we were to kind of peel back some layers and get a little bit reductionist, my belief, this is my belief and it's grounded in science, is that we can't really attribute our drive to accomplish things and to do things to one particular feature of us. But we can generally assume that it has something to do with the brain, and that probably two systems within the brain or a set of processes really motivate this in us.
And all you have to do is see a newborn child or a puppy to see a couple of things. You will quickly observe that there are times of day and night when that child or puppy is more active than others. Like we wake up after sleep maybe with some grogginess and then we have this propensity for activity. And then we also have, so that's our autonomic nervous system, this 24-hour more or less oscillation of activity and rest. There's no escaping that, right? There's simply no escaping that. Doesn't matter if you need to sleep less or more, more energy or less energy as a person, you're not going to escape that. So there's this natural hum to the motor that escalates and subsides every 24 hours.
Superimposed on that, or I would say in concert with that, we have this thing of a drive to look for things that leads us to go out and look for things, and as we forage we find certain things that make us feel good and other things that make us feel less good, and some are neutral and some actually feel like punishment. And through that we learn what's out there in the world and what feels rewarding. Right? This is very basic and sort of obvious, but we're sort of layering from the most basic of systems like the autonomic system which breathes and regulates activity to where do you take that activity. You take that activity in a particular direction where generally you find things that make you feel good. How long do they make you feel good? Ah, well, that's where it gets interesting. Does it make you feel good then much worse? Addictive drugs, substances, behaviors and things of that sort, typically discussed in the realm of dopamine. I can sort of summarize here. I think nowadays we all know what I'm talking about: things that lift you up and crash you down further than the inverse of the peak, maybe even further.
Or are these things that make you feel good with some kind of sustained sense that you're taking some of the energy that you had, some of the resources that you invested, and you get a return on those investments? It's like good investments and you have more energy and more opportunities. So these opportunities to go in particular directions fan out. This is the stuff of degrees. This is the stuff of learning. This is the stuff of healthy relationships and so on. And so I believe that we, and there's much more to it of course, but I think we just do that over and over from the day we're born essentially until we die. It's just that when we're born, we don't have a lot of agency in the physical department. We need to be fed, right? We cry. All of a sudden, food is brought to us. That's pretty nice. There's a learning there, too. And so I think as we check off these boxes, we're forced at some point to ask, do I like this or do I just need to do this to get to the next set of opportunities?
And you know, I've been around Stanford long enough to be able to say with absolute certainty that the students here are the most valuable resource here. They don't pay me to say that, that's just a fact. And they are experts in increasing the number of opportunities available to them. And so the question about meaning, where you're going to take the energy and your accomplishments and where you're going to direct them, becomes especially important. It's like having a big portfolio of money. What are you going to do with it? Right? Because it is true that if you're driven, you never really want to stop pursuing things. And today we're talking, ultimately we will get to discussions around bigger meanings, spirituality in particular, relationship to God in particular. And I think that ultimately most people arrive at the question, whether they admit it or not, they arrive at the question of like, what is this all about? Because you hit enough peaks and you garner enough resources and enough positive reputation and experience, you are forced to ask that question.
Because I do think that going through these cycles is very valuable to educate you about your own neurobiological processes, your own psychological processes, and then you go, okay, it's not 'now what, none of that mattered,' it's 'I've got all this stuff, now what do I do with it?' And I think it's at that point that hopefully people come to the realization that the answer to that question is not going to come from more pursuit. It's going to come from an understanding that the bigger meaning is not going to come from the things of people, of animals, or even of nature. That this notion of higher power, of God, is that it's the meaning that you've been trying to either superimpose on everything or set at the foundation of everything. But I think that that's the basic process. You're going to pursue stuff. You're going to get stuff. You're going to have opportunities. They will expand your freedoms in most cases. And if you make more good choices relative to bad choices on average compared to your peers, that's just going to continue to happen. But the meaning piece is one that has to be a conversation with self, probably self and God. And I believe having that conversation with other humans is, it's not meaningless, but you're not going to get the answers from other people. So this brings me back to the list I made in my 20s and continued to update. I realized eventually no single one person on that list had all the answers or the recipe.
And then at some point, probably in my 40s, I realized, oh, humans don't have the answers. Like, we're incredible as a species, but we can't provide this bigger meaning piece. We can't, because it's of humans, means we can't. Everyone has gone through the same set of processes. So we'll get back to this, but I think that drive is intrinsic and I think it either arrives to you early or it arrives to you late, that you're forced to ask, what do I do with all this stuff that I've acquired, material but also intellectual resources, and your drive itself.
Thank you. I think we're getting into the meat of this stuff already. As you know, at Veritas, we like to create space for questions about belief and meaning and transcendency. And I think we're really getting into that area. So, Arthur, so you're... let me ask both of you this question and then we can expand from there. You're both elite scientists, right? You have a very exacting standard when it comes to evidence and your science. But as I understand it, you both pray every day, is that correct? Right. So I think there are some people here who might find that curious or fascinating. So how do you... maybe you can help us understand, how does your faith, your belief, your framework affect your work and do you see any contradiction in the fact that you pray every day even though you're an elite scientist? Well, let's start with Dr. Brooks.
Yeah, I come from a pretty strong Christian family, but I've found my own way over my 20s, for example. You have to grow up and figure out your own beliefs is what it comes down to. And people have asked me a lot as I transitioned. I finally went to college when I was 30 and then to graduate school in my 30s. And that was kind of a funny time to have your formation in the sciences. I actually liked it. I think it's great in its own way because my beliefs and my knowledge, they could come at different times, you might say. And in a lot of academia, in a lot of science, you have a pervasive secularism because there's a belief that faith and reason, they don't meet naturally. This is, I think, the apogee of this kind of thinking came from a Soviet cosmonaut who was the first one to actually orbit the earth named Gherman Titov in the early 1960s, and he came to the United States in 1962 to my hometown, Seattle. Some of you who have been there, you know there's this structure called the Space Needle. It was actually there in the World's Fair of 1962 because the theme was man in space, you know, this big scientific thing, and they invited this famous cosmonaut. And he was interviewed next to the Space Needle and he was asked, what was it like when you were in space? What did you see out in space? And he parroted this Soviet atheism, official atheism of the government, and said, 'I took my telescope and I looked out into space and I saw neither angels nor God.'
Which was supposed to be some sort of proof that if you're scientifically valuable, that you have chops, that you have to rule out this transcendent, that if you know about the physics, you have to reject the metaphysics is what it came to. And I remember my father talking about this because my father was a scientist. My father was dedicated to... my father's in the mathematical lineage that actually goes back to Gauss, his PhD students, PhD students, PhD students, PhD student all the way. I mean, this lineage, like no joke, this is the basis on which scientific knowledge has been put forward. But my father was a serious Christian believer and so I asked him about that one time. I don't remember Gherman Titov, that was before I was born, but that was a famous story. I said, 'Dad, what gives? How do you balance these two things?' And this really formed me. This is the great gift that my father gave me. He said this, he said, 'If I were a scholar of Picasso, I would really need to know deeply two things. I would need to know all about Picasso's paintings and I would need to know all about Picasso, and I would find no evidence of Picasso in his paintings.'
I need to understand those two things with two different kinds of knowledge. One that actually appreciates the creator and the other that revels in the creation. That's what it means to be a true intellectual in the classical tradition. If you go back to Halley of Halley's Comet, if you go back to Isaac Newton, if you go back to Charles Darwin, they found no conflict between faith and reason. Zero. They would have thought it was a void, an emptiness for somebody not to wonder about the creator and only pay attention to the creation. It would be sad. It would be impoverished. It would be bereft of what these things actually mean. And what we understand today, and this is Andrew's world more than mine, there's a new field of hemispheric lateralization studying the brain. It's really come back and forth. The idea that the right side of your brain, the left side of your brain, great similarities, but some significant differences. Most notably, the right side of your brain, it asks the why questions of mystery and meaning. And the left side of your brain adjudicates and works out the how-to and what. It's the information that you actually need to fulfill the why questions. And that's one of the reasons that you can quite justifiably and with full confidence that you have the intellectual credibility that you can and should worship the creator and admire the creation at the same time.
So there's 20 Christians in here. Okay.
Andrew, I find your faith journey especially fascinating. When I mentioned to one of my students that you were going to be, we were going to be having a conversation, she said, you know, he's been telling people to pray and wishes that he had started earlier. I thought that was just a fascinating thing. I wonder if you could share that a little bit.
Sure. Well, my relationship to God and religion and my path to it couldn't be more different than Arthur's. I grew up in a mixed religion home. My mother is Jewish, my father technically is as well, but they diverge strongly on the value of faith. And then my family is very unusual in the sense that there are multiple divorces, remarriages, adoptions, and we're a very international family. So right now I have immediate family members that are Jewish, Christian, Protestant, Catholic, and atheists. And so I always secretly prayed. I don't know why. I used to go swimming when I was a kid at this place they called SCRA, the Stanford Campus Recreation Association. I would swim there and most of my prayer, I remember, was done underwater. I thought if I prayed there, no one would see me. And I always prayed and I've always believed in God, but across my life, and again, I don't want to get into too much backstory, but I had this really wonderful sheltered upbringing here in Palo Alto.
And then when my parents split up, when I was about 14, because of my relationship and interest in skateboarding, I started going to San Francisco and hang around with kids that grew up very differently from me and I was exposed to a lot of different ways of living. And that was actually a real gift. While I was wayward, I should have spent more time in school then and I fell behind in my studies that I had to make up later, I gained many lifelong friends and I was exposed to a whole different way of life for other people. And that still stays with me today. I think it helped me develop a sensitivity to people that don't grow up with many opportunities. And back then skateboarding was kind of, it was for the parentless kids. It was the kids whose parents weren't going to go with them to Little League or soccer or things like that. And it was amazing and it was fun and I wasn't very good at it and I got hurt a lot. So eventually I stopped, but many of my friends went on to become the people that you know about and read about and started companies and do all... it was a wonderful time for me. But it was one where I was really lost. I was exposed to a lot of bad behavior young. I saw many things and was involved in many things that for a young child, like I was still a kid right at 14, looking back I was like, that was just too much too early.
In that time I think there was probably two or three instances where I met people who within that community seemed really grounded and very happy. A complicated word when sitting next to Arthur because he studies happiness, but they seemed very content and had their lives structured and they were believers, right? One in particular, a guy I met, he had a bracelet that said Jesus, and I liked the guy because he was cool and he was nice and he had his life together, like it's kind of interesting, you know. And over time, as I moved through my studies and got more into science, I kept looking for this God experience inside of science. I'll never forget dissecting a retina for the first time and seeing things labeled and the organization of the cells. I was like, 'Oh my goodness.' And so I wanted the God experience in it. And what I learned was there are all these really cool molecules that organize that, and development of the human embryo is a true miracle. I completely acknowledge that when you think about the number of things that have to happen in a certain way for the nervous system and other systems of the brain and body to organize to create a human, it's beyond spectacular. It's a miracle.
And I could also list off a bunch of molecules and mechanisms and I teach about that to medical students and I did in the past to others how that works. And so I didn't find the God experience in that. I even stayed up all night once in graduate school looking at a zebrafish develop from an embryo because I thought it took 12 hours and at the end there was a fish and I thought like, oh, I'm going to feel this like God, and I didn't get it. And so I was like, damn it, you know. So I would say there are three things that led me to what is a very serious practice for me. I pray every night, every night. And I'm not proud of the consistency. I love the fact that it's there and I do it every night because it feels like the one thing I can really count on. I know I have agency over that and I do it every night. And there were a couple of things that led to that decision. First of all, and I'll just be quite honest here. One thing that's nice about being public-facing for a few years now is I don't have to tap dance around anything. I'm not worried about getting fired. If they want to fire me, they can fire me. I'm tenured. It's going to be a little tricky, but if you want to do it, do it. But here's the thing. So I don't tell other people what to do, but I'll be direct. I've spent some time in 12-step meetings related to alcohol. I don't drink. And one of the first things that you learn in 12-step is that you don't have total control over your behavior. Now, think about that. You don't have total control over your behavior. What's the solution? You have to give control over your behavior to a higher power of some sort. And they're very cautious about how they word that.
I started the steps and I discovered and I observed in now thousands of people, people who could not control their behavior, that through... it didn't matter what the consequences were, it didn't matter what the incentives were, they could not control their behavior. And then they give the process of control to God and they get and stay sober. That's a miracle. That bypasses everything we understand about human consciousness through the lens of the brain, through psychology. It's a miracle, right? That to me was, I couldn't look away from that. I think this is crazy. This is crazy compared to everything else I've known and been taught in science. And I also started looking around, and this is no condemnation of my science colleagues, I started noticing I have a lot of science colleagues that can't seem to control their behavior. And there are a lot of well-meaning people out there in the world and highly accomplished people, in some cases the most accomplished people, who can't seem to make the right decisions when the right decisions are obvious. And then people who have a faith seem to make on average better decisions for themselves if they adhere to their faith-based practices. I thought, goodness, like there's really something here.
And then the other experience, and I'll try and be quick here, was I don't always need to do it, but I sometimes travel with security and I've had a long-standing relationship to people in the tier one special operations. This is code for kind of SEAL teams and Green Berets type folks. And these are incredible people who've lived a higher risk, high consequence life of the most intense kind. I go to work every day and talk, or I go to work and look down the microscope and write papers. These people go to work and they're in gunfights where people live or die. And one of them in particular became a security person for me and we were taking a walk one morning when we were out on one of our podcast-related functions and I just started asking him about good and evil and that opened up into a conversation about behavioral control and whether or...
not whether we as a species are fundamentally good or evil. And he shared his own experience with having tremendous, tremendous difficulty organizing good versus right versus wrong action, despite the fact that he represented the pinnacle of behavioral control. This is the 4:30 a.m. physical training. This is the apex of training and self-control, of pursuit, and being at this super, super elite, high-risk, high-consequence job and population. And he said the only thing that actually could organize his thinking, keep him out of feelings of trauma, keep him out of addiction — he was a recovered addict — and bring real peace to his life was prayer and reading the Bible. So he and I started reading the Bible together. He sent me one. We'd get on the phone. I started praying every night, and we still do that from time to time, and certainly more discussion in times when I need additional help. But it wasn't the understanding. It wasn't the interest in it. It was the experience of giving kind of over to my faith, to God, that there is a God, and praying to God and listening, that my life began to organize itself in a number of ways. But I was always pretty good at doing the right stuff. Sometimes the wrong stuff, but the right things. But for the first time in my life since I started praying nightly and sometimes daily as well, I experienced what I can only describe as true peace. And the feeling that no matter what, there's a plan, and as long as I'm praying, I'm on the right path. As long as I'm listening to what I hear in my prayers, I'm on the right path. And forgive me that I'm, you know, sort of this is not as eloquent a description of a relationship to God as perhaps you're used to hearing at Veritas, but I'm clearly new to this. But then when I sit down with scientists on my podcast or I talk to them and they'll talk about the health benefits of faith-based practices, like, yeah, there's that, too. And I acknowledge that. I think it's wonderful, but I believe that most people would like to have a relationship to God, whether they know it or not. And I will say that as I started becoming more vocal about my relationship to God and my belief in God, I fully expected to get attacked by 50 different missiles in the media landscape. And I'll tell you, there hasn't been a single one. Not one. Which is incredible. I mean, one person wrote to me and said he didn't like my reasoning for exploring religion, but that he acknowledged that it was okay. Thank you. As if. Again, people, right? People with their opinions, as if they know. But I will say it's been an uncanny experience for me because not only have I been attacked for pretty much everything else, but it tells me that people have a fundamental respect and maybe a fear, but a fundamental respect for at least the exploration. So I've tried to be open about my process of exploring this, what it's done for me, what I hope I can do for sharing what I've learned and observed. But really for me, it's entirely clear that if you want to have the best possible life that includes peace, if you want to be able to make the greatest number of good decisions, that faith and prayer are an absolute requirement. I just don't see how life could go any other way.
Breathtaking authenticity. Thank you. I have a question that, as you spoke, came to my mind. You know, we humans like to control everything, or at least we like to think we have a way of figuring something out. But it does seem like this faith journey, at some level, at some point, we're going to have to surrender control, or at least have an inkling that that process may involve a vulnerable moment. How do you think about that? You know, your journey — I mean, our journeys are all different, and your journey is raw and recent. Your journey has been a long, long one. Have you all had such moments, and have you all felt that that was a necessary part of the search?
I think that anybody who has a substantial relationship to something metaphysical, something divine, something transcendent has these kinds of experiences. And what they all have in common ultimately is, look, this is a relationship. You know, I can cite chapter and verse the behavioral science data on the practices of the happiest people. There's really four. You want to be the happiest possible person, you got to do four things every day. You need to take care of your spiritual or philosophical life every day. You need a practice for that. You need to stand in awe of something bigger than yourself so you're not stuck in your lame little psychodrama. My job, my classes, my money, my future, my television, me, me, me. So boring. You need peace and perspective. The second is that you need family. You need family. And again, we could talk — I mean, Andrew and I could talk all night about, you know, oxytocin and vasopressin release when you're actually with your kin and the biological basis of this in the Pleistocene 250,000 years ago, yada yada yada. But the bottom line is that when something's going wrong in your family, it's incredibly painful. And there's a reason for that. The third is friendship. Real friendship, not virtual friendship — doesn't work — and not real friends, not deal friends. And the difference, by the way, deal friends are useful. Real friends are useless. The people you can say, 'I don't need you. I just love you.' Right? And last but not least is your work. And where your work — what that is, is it's nothing about position or power or money, god forbid. No, it's really about only two things empirically. It's an empirical matter. It's about the belief that you're earning your success, which is to say that you're creating value and you're being rewarded and recognized for real value that you're creating. You're needed. And second is that you're serving other people. Those are the two characteristics. Whether you're putting roofs on houses or, you know, teaching college students, or if you earn your success and serve other people, you're going to find joy in your work. And all of those things, what they have in common is this: they're all based on love. One of the things that I teach about a lot, the number one most popular topic when I'm teaching — I teach MBAs at the Harvard Business School, a class called Leadership and Happiness, and they would keep me on the topic of love the entire semester. And so we start — but for sure, I mean, they're intensely interested in it. But the first question is, what is it? And the truth is that love — this is from Aristotle via Thomas Aquinas in 1265 in the Summa Theologiae. He says to love is to will the good of the other. Nothing about feelings, man. No, no, no, no. It's an act. It's a commitment. Martin Luther King gave a great sermon in 1957 based on Matthew 5:44, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. He said Jesus didn't say like your enemies. He said to love your enemies notwithstanding your feelings. Love is something that you choose. And the practices of the happiest people are to love the divine, to love your family, to love your friends, and to love everybody through the way that you earn your daily bread, which, by the way, you do. I'm a listener to your show. The secret ingredient is not expertise. It's love. You love what you're doing and you want to share it with Arthur Brooks.
That's the brilliance of it. And by the way, each one of you is going to do something like this, like what we're doing here. You're going to do something. You're at Stanford for a reason. You're here because you want to do something important. And the whole point is do it with love. And then what are you doing? You're doing exactly what Andrew so eloquently — he said he struggled for the words, but no, he talked about submitting to divine love. That's what he talked about. To finally relaxing enough to submit to the divine love, which is what people are doing in 12-step programs where they're being released from the grip of white-knuckling their lives through addiction. You can let go. You can let go, but only if you love. That's what it comes down to. And the ultimate love that actually lasts is the love of something that transcends us. That's what it comes down to. That's where your peace resides. That's where your happiness resides.
Yeah. Beautiful. Wow. So, Andrew, I have to tell you, you were the first professor I've ever seen on a video where you were trying to explain energetically how to do a plank and you were wearing like — you're, you know, a black shirt and no, you were not like a gym person. You were a Stanford professor doing planks and there is a sense of love in that. I have to tell you, I'm like, this is a guy you can love. I mean, you look — I think this is actually a lot of why both of you connect with so many people because you just give of yourself and I think that really does take you out of — you know, we were talking about satisfaction — takes you out of yourself and into something much more satisfying. So I think it's just awesome. Oh, but let me get back. I'm supposed to keep time and all that stuff and I get into it. Okay. So Andrew, I have a question for you. Okay. I've been reading, watching your podcast and you've been talking about how important it is to be serious about awe and mystery and engaging the spiritual and that this is an essential part of the human journey. So I'd love to have you sort of expand on that a little bit for us.
Yeah. So, and thanks for the comments about love. I didn't know we were going to talk about love tonight, but it is true. I think whatever you end up doing, and I encourage you to listen for and pray for the most loving energy to come through you in whatever it is that turns out to be your pursuit, and that's true for all domains, you know, all things that you do, family as well. But I think that I have to assume that when you met your wife, that there were — I'm going to assume that there was something coming through that interaction. It was between you, but there was something else going on that had to be. That's an incredible story.
And well, it's quite something that most religions teach that marriage is an antenna to the divine. If you know, in Hinduism, this is taught very clearly, in Sikhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, all forms of Christianity. And it's absolutely the case. You know, it's like I start every day — Andrew's writing this book that's going to be a massive bestseller called Protocols because he's famous for that. A morning protocol that I have is I get up early and I work out and then I get dressed and my wife and I go to mass together every day, seven days a week when I'm home. And when I'm not home, I'm going to mass and she's going to mass and our batteries are wired together. The antenna is complete. It's like a nuclear submarine with two keys. And that's how it feels, actually. And I didn't know what that feeling was until much later on. I was able to identify it. I didn't mean to cut you off.
No, I asked — I'm so glad you elaborated on the story because it reminds me of something. Sorry, I'm going off script here. Can I do that? Is that cool? All right. You know, you got the mic, man. No. So I have a really good friend and I'm very blessed to call him a friend. Sounds like I'm name-dropping, but you know it — Rick Rubin is this incredible music producer who is a very unique person because he spends a lot of time thinking and meditating and he's produced some of the greatest works of rock and roll but also country music and also gospel music. He has really tapped into something. And so I'll never forget something that Rick said. And we have interesting conversations about God and faith lately. And he said, listen, only a couple things that are real. And by the way, the context of this is I was sort of upset about things I'd seen out in the media and the world and I'm like, 'What is this?' And he said, 'Look, look, there's —' well, that's not how he talks. He said, 'Look, you've seen Rick, the big beard, the whole thing.' And he said there's only three things that are real. He said nature, the laws of nature, physics, chemistry, biology, God, and professional wrestling. And he said, and everyone knows that professional wrestling is made up. That's why it's real. That's the only reason it's in that list. Rick loves professional wrestling. He watches about 10 hours a week of professional wrestling. That's commitment. And I said, you know, what's with this professional wrestling? Rick's a smart guy. What's this? And my view of professional wrestling is, you know, it is what you know it to be. And he said, you can see it all there, right? So, sure, it's a Shakespeare of sorts. But his whole thing is that he likes that people don't actually get hurt most of the time, and that people know it's made up. What he was really saying and what he eventually said separately was God and nature, these things are things that you can count on, what you learn in your studies, what you see, you can count on the things that you can really see, and then there's this other piece that you can't see and you can count on that. And a lot of our discussions generally are around that. Now, you asked about awe. So Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley, has been on my podcast and is out there elsewhere talking about awe and how to access awe, and it's actually pretty straightforward. There's a protocol for this. You intentionally observe structure and beauty at a small scale and then at a larger scale. You think about the incredible level of detail. What a miracle it is that a leaf is organized with such regularity and then all the leaves are organized with such — and then you look at all the trees and then in your mind's eye you imagine the planet Earth, this rock we're spinning on in the middle of space, and you go, okay, that's awe, right? And that's Dacher's understanding from the science and I completely subscribe to that. The piece that's kind of different, I believe, about the relationship to God is it's not just in space, but it's also in time. And we've been talking about this notion of transcendence and we don't often talk about time perception, but it's a favorite topic of mine because I actually think this thing that we call meaning and this thing that we call transcendence has a lot to do with connecting our experiences across time so that we at some level feel reasonably certain that our life is woven together in some coherent fashion that makes it all worthwhile. Because if you really get reductionist, you'd say, okay, well, I was an infant and I conquered that stage and I was a toddler and I went to college and I got these things and I accrued all these experiences and some wins and some losses and some hardships and each one I assigned meaning to that must have happened for a reason that led to this. And you can create a story of your life looking backward, but when I pray sometimes or when I experience awe, I feel — and I don't have words for — I feel that the story is threaded through. It's not a rod. It's more like a complicated weaving line through all my experiences. And I'm at the front edge of my life experiencing things unpeeling here this way. And I know that it's part of a larger trajectory. And so it's one big time bin. Does that make sense? And we don't have a language for this. And I was greatly — I had my dad on my podcast and we enjoy a really good relationship nowadays and I asked him, he's a theoretical physicist, and he said something — he said maybe it was just to make me feel better about my lack of understanding about physics, but he said, I don't think so. He said when you learn quantum mechanics you eventually get to this point where you have to accept that the human brain can't really think in those dimensions and you just have to trust the math. And then every theoretical physicist learns that it's real. But the human brain, it works outside the standard logic of the way that human neural circuits work. And I thought, okay, that feels very much like what I'm talking about here. I don't yet have a language to describe to you this thing, but it's more than a feeling. It's the sense that this happened, that happened, but it's all threaded together in a story, and you're at the front end. You can't know what's coming next, but you can trust that this is part of a time trajectory. And the awe piece has been described in the space domain in that, you know, you're walking through the woods, you're in Yosemite, get to Clouds Rest if you can, folks. You get to the top of Clouds Rest and you're the highest point in Yosemite. That's awe. But the time component is something we don't yet understand. And people smarter than me about the brain and smarter than me about God and how to understand that relationship hopefully will come to some words that are more eloquent than mine. But I think our story is a space-time story. And as you pursue what you do, as you get up in the morning and get your sunlight, I actually believe the morning sunlight viewing is the fundamental step to organize yourself in time. And there's a whole discussion to be had about this circadian timing system, but the day is the fundamental unit and the week is the fundamental unit and so on and so forth. So by organizing ourselves on those shorter time scales, we gain some certainty that we're organizing our life on the larger time scale. But again, without this faith piece and the idea that there is a larger plan and we need to listen and we need to take the lessons of the other flawed humans that came before us and make better decisions for ourselves than we otherwise would, that's the greatest degree of certainty that our story, that we're going to end up in the place that's best for the world.
Well, so let me — we're mindful of time and we want to bring it home and make it practical. So we've covered a lot of ground from the brain to behavior to belief. And so I wanted to ask you about both of you a couple questions that relate to two types of people who might be in this room tonight. One is, for lack of a better word, the overwhelmed. Okay, the person who is very focused on their lives and ticking boxes. Is there something that they can do? Is there maybe where would they begin? So what's one small realistic first step when they don't have any idea how to approach life in a more fulfilling way?
Let me pick up where Andrew left off. To answer this, I want to be really super practical. I don't want to be really philosophical about what's the one thing that you can do when you're freaking out. It's not helpful to say don't freak out. I got it right. I have kids your age. It doesn't help. And by the way, it doesn't help for people my age either. So there is an ancient teaching in Vedic wisdom in Hinduism. It's called the Brahma Muhurta. The Brahma Muhurta in Sanskrit means the creator's time. Now, what it technically is, is to get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn and ambulate. Walk. The whole point is to be walking as the sun starts to come up. Now, Andrew can explain for a long time, and I've heard him do it, what actually happens with the horizontal angle of the sun and it actually interacts with the retina and it affects your brain in a particular way. Nobody knew this 4,000 years ago when the Brahma Muhurta was first recorded in Mathura in Uttar Pradesh. You know, it's unbelievable that they were talking about it this particular way. And I don't know if it's an hour and 36 minutes before dawn or not. But I do know that the research clearly shows that if you want more peace and more perspective in your day, if you get up after the sun is warm, you've lost the first battle. If you get up before the sun is up and you experience it without your devices while doing the ergonomically most sound thing you could possibly do, which is to walk in the cool of the morning, hearing the sound of your own feet and not the sound of my podcast, god forbid, your life will change. You'll have more focus. You'll have more creativity. You'll have more productivity. But most importantly, you'll have a better understanding of yourself and your overwhelm will diminish. That's a practical thing you can do starting tomorrow.
