Arthur Brooks, happiness expert and former AEI president, reveals how 50% of joy is genetic while the other half stems from habits—faith, family, friendships, and meaningful work—citing Duchenne’s 19th-century smile research and the Harvard Study of Adult Development. His 2019 Camino de Santiago pilgrimage led to a Harvard career despite colleagues’ skepticism, proving happiness isn’t tied to wealth but to intentional choices like shared experiences or intergenerational giving. James Garfield’s 1853 diary entry highlights how affection thrives even amid differences, while Congress debates honoring fallen soldiers and approving Trump’s $900B NDAA, underscoring how purpose—whether personal or public—shapes fulfillment. [Automatically generated summary]
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From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubenstein.
Well, thank you, David, and to all of you for making this possible.
What a beautiful place that we're in and C-SPAN providing such an essential service.
I get to talk about my favorite subject, which is humanity's favorite subject, which is the pursuit of human happiness.
I started off my academic career as a pretty traditional behavioral scientist.
I was doing work on behavioral economics, et cetera.
And I found that everything that I was studying when I was in my earlier phases of my academic career were always coming back to happiness.
I was studying art and beauty.
I was studying philanthropy.
I wrote a textbook on nonprofits and philanthropy.
And I found that I was having conversation after conversation about the tap root, which is happiness.
I left to do something that was a little less happy.
I was the president of a think tank here in Washington, D.C., which sounds really brainy, but there's actually not that much thinking in a tank when you're the president of a think tank.
It was mostly fundraising.
And I was delighted to do it, but I couldn't get it out of my head, this idea of coming back to my behavioral science roots.
And so when I left that, I was 55 years old when I was 2019, in the year 2019.
I actually, to discern the path, I did what, I'm a Catholic, but a lot of people who are not Catholic have done this for a thousand years.
I walked the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain to discern what I was supposed to do with my talents at age 55.
I mean, I wasn't going to go golf.
I don't want to golf.
I don't know how to golf.
I have no hobbies.
And I wasn't going to run a new company, so I didn't know what to do.
So I walked day after day after day across northern Spain.
It took, well, I only did about the last 160 kilometers of it.
I could have done up to 800 kilometers, but I was doing it with my wife, Esther, and she said, no.
So I did as much as she would put up with.
And we prayed and we, you know, we, every day I asked for discernment.
I asked for sort of enlightenment.
And there's an old belief among Catholics that when you enter into Santiago de Compostela, which is this ancient medieval city in northern Spain, that you'll be granted what you seek, that you'll be in a state where truth can find you.
And I entered the cathedral and I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas.
And at that, not long thereafter, the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School called me and offered me a position to do just that, and I'm privileged to be doing it at Harvard and elsewhere.
Now, at the Harvard Business School, one of the most popular courses at the Harvard Business School, as I understand it, is your course on happiness.
I would have thought making money would have been a more important course there, but why are so many business school students so enamored with the subject of happiness?
By the second semester of the second year, they're taking all electives, and they're starting to figure out that maybe the world's idols don't actually hold out as much happiness as they have been led to believe.
There's a myth that if you're incredibly successful in worldly terms, money, power, pleasure, fame, honor, that happiness will come for free.
And that is incorrect.
The truth of the matter is that if you shoot for happiness, and this is what I tell my students on the first day, you'll be successful enough.
And there's one word there that makes them panic, which is enough.
And so that's what we have to talk about.
What does that actually mean in modern life?
And so it's a popular class.
I mean, there's 180 enrolled.
There's last I checked 400 on the waiting list.
And I hear there's an illegal Zoom link they think I'm not aware of.
I would like to know, actually, but I think so because I get a lot of my colleagues at HBS and at Harvard in general are reading the material, reading my columns in The Atlantic, and they talk an awful lot about this class.
And really it is a business class, because the truth is that happiness is the business of life.
We're not trying to accumulate as much in worldly resources.
We're trying to figure out how to earn a fortune in love and happiness.
That was, well, she said it was Oprah Winfrey, and I didn't believe it.
And she said, this is Oprah Winfrey.
And I said, yeah, and this is Batman.
And it turned out it was the voice.
It was actually Oprah Winfrey, who had been reading my columns all the way through the coronavirus epidemic and then read a book that I wrote called From Strength to Strength on the First Day and invited me to come on.
She's a very popular, she's a prodigious talent in books and understanding.
She reads, she interviewed me and was quoting verbatim from my own book to me as the author.
It was an incredible experience.
And we hit it off like a house on fire, like we'd grown up together practically.
And she said, why don't we write a book together, which I will kind of host and introduce to America through the lens of the science that you propagate.
I mean, David, you and I are blessed to know a lot of very public people.
And in American life, in public life and private life are not the same.
Ordinarily, it's not the same kind of person because you have to have a persona in public.
She's the same person.
It's extraordinary.
Having lunch together around her table in Montecito by ourselves talking about a writing project, or if we're on tour and we're in front of a stage in front of thousands of people in New York.
She's the same person and I finally figured out why that is, and it's actually one of the reasons that she's a quite a happy person.
It's because she believes that the abundant earthly rewards that she's enjoyed, she has them because they're for other people, and that the money, the power, the fame are a way to refract other people to greater happiness.
She uses them to lift other people up and that keeps her kind of normal.
Now when Thomas Jefferson was writing the famous preamble to the Declaration of Independence, he talked about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It's probably the case, well, to be sure, he was cribbing from the Virginia Declaration of Rights written by George Mason that talked about life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.
And probably, we don't know, but the best belief is that Benjamin Franklin was whispering in his ear saying, say happiness.
You know, this crazy idea.
Benjamin Franklin was, you know, penning his own autobiography and had some crazy ideas.
And the whole idea probably was this idea that you can be a self-inventing people.
Now, you're not granted happiness, but you can imagine your own blissful future and build it yourself in this new place, even if you are the unwashed masses.
Now, your book with Oprah became a number one New York Times bestseller, and your other book on happiness was the number one bestseller in the New York Times.
Does that tell you that people really are not happy because they're reading books on happiness?
The market for happiness is pretty good, is what that tells me, which is great, I have to say.
But it is true that people find it elusive.
The thing that they most want is hard to get.
And so when you can actually help people, you have a method to help get people where they need to be, and you're helping people to manage their own expectations about what it is, you can do a lot.
They wanted me to be the world's greatest French horn player.
My parents had decided by the time I was a little boy that I was going to be a classical musician.
I showed a lot of aptitude for it.
I started violin when I was four, piano when I was five.
I took up the French horn at eight, and I was really good at it.
And so they decided that that was what it was going to be.
And my mother was my accomplished.
She was also a very talented amateur pianist and violinist.
And I toured and I took lessons and I played in every orchestra and ensemble and that was my ambition until, well, I left college at 19, as a matter of fact, to drop out of college.
Yeah, well, so I went on tour at 19, and I was playing chamber music.
I played for a couple years on the road, also with a jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird.
We made some records together, et cetera.
And then when I was on tour, on a chamber music tour in France, when I was 24 years old, after a concert, I met a girl who didn't speak a word of English, but she was smiling at me, which wasn't all that normal in those days.
And so I tried to talk to her.
I got an interpreter.
I asked her out on a date.
We went on a couple of dates.
I went home from France where I was studying.
I had learned that she was actually from Barcelona, Spain.
It was not French.
I told my dad I've met the girl I was going to marry.
He said, terrific.
Let's meet her.
And I said, I'll have problems with that.
I mean, she doesn't speak a word of English.
She doesn't live in the United States, and she has no clue that we're going to get married yet.
He says, Well, good luck with that.
And so I quit my job.
I was living in New York at the time, playing with this chamber music ensemble.
I found a job in the Barcelona City Orchestra, and I moved to Spain and started working on my Spanish.
And two years later, I closed the deal, and we're celebrating our 34th wedding anniversary next month.
So I actually started studying by correspondence when I was in the Barcelona orchestra because I was figuring out that this was probably not the path of supporting my family forever.
Also, I kind of wanted to do something else with my brain by my late 20s.
And so I started studying by correspondence.
We moved back to the States together.
My wife didn't speak English yet.
She took a minimum wage job.
I took a job teaching the French horn and studying at night and got my bachelor's degree and then my master's degree without telling you.
I started at Cornell, actually, in the economic and theory program, did some core coursework, then I moved to the RAND Corporation, where I had a job doing military operations research, doing theater-level combat modeling for the Air Force during the day, so I could support myself and my doctorate at the same graduate school.
Then I graduated, I taught three years at Georgia State University, and then I transferred up to Syracuse University, which is a good public policy program.
Okay, so you're at Syracuse, and then somebody comes calling saying that in a think tank in Washington called AEI, American Enterprise Institute, they're looking for somebody who can be the head of that, but you had no fundraising experience.
I wrote books, but one of the things that's very important when you're leading an institution is to trade in your own autonomous research agenda and that the institution becomes your research agenda.
And so that's what I did.
I mean, the American Enterprise Institute has been dedicated since 1938 to a strong economy of opportunity, enterprise, and freedom all the way out to the margins of society to lift people out of poverty and good foreign policy.
So I wound up promoting AEI as my research agenda for the 11 years that I was there.
And the other thing that's, I mean, I have been looking at leadership, teaching at business schools off and on during my career.
And one of the things that I wrote about was the tenure of the most successful social enterprise leader.
I wrote a textbook on social entrepreneurship while I was at Syracuse.
And one of the things that I found was that the most successful leaders in nonprofits, they have five years to build their vision and then five years to instantiate their vision.
And if they stay longer than 10, they're usually overstating their welcome.
Unfortunately, I published that.
And then when I was 10 years in at AEI, somebody sent it to me.
And so I didn't know quite what to do.
Now, the chairman of my board when I was at AEI was your partner, Dan Daniella.
He was a fantastic, a visionary chairman of the board.
And at Carlisle, I mean, everybody knows at Carlisle, you guys have hired and promoted and fired and rewarded hundreds and hundreds of great and not so great CEOs.
So I went to Dan, one of my great friends.
I said, Dan, I'm going to have to leave, but I don't know when.
How do I leave?
And he thought about it.
He said, well, there's two ways to leave as a CEO.
I said, well, tell me, tell me.
He says, you can leave before you're ready, or you can leave on somebody else's terms.
You choose.
And I thought to myself, time to turn in my resignation.
All right, so you did that, and then you put yourself up for hire for academic institutions who said, hey, this is a great guy, and we want to hire him.
So the born part is pretty important because 50% of your baseline happiness level is in point of fact genetic.
And we know that from identical twins that were separated at birth and then reunited at about the age of 40 and given personality tests.
And you find that between 40 and 80% of all personality characteristics are genetic, including happiness.
And that might sound depressing.
But if you know your genetic tendencies, then you can tailor your habits.
And so the habits are really important.
Now another 25% is circumstantial.
Meaning at any time that nice things happening will push you up by a quarter, bad things push you down by a quarter.
The last 25% of your happiness really is all about habits, where you have direct managerial control over your happiness, which also gives you systematically better circumstances and allows you to manage your genetics.
Now the important thing is the habits themselves, and this is the crux of your question.
Happiness habits, there are thousands, but they're mostly trivial.
The big ones are faith or life philosophy, taking seriously sort of the way that you transcend yourself and understand the universe, your family life, your friendships, and the meaning in your work, which means that you're earning your success and serving other people.
Faith, family, friends, and work.
And so these are the things that I work with with other people that don't have their happiness habits or their happiness hygiene in order.
Well, that person is probably an introvert, and there is almost no one that I've ever met that needs no one because people, Homo sapiens, are fundamentally a social creature.
We're built to be around other people.
Now, some people are built to be around one or two people, and some people are, they want a lot of fresh meat, and so they want to be around 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 people.
But the truth of the matter is that there's almost nobody who's normal who's a loner.
And this actually comes from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is a 90-year longitudinal study from Harvard graduates, but then matched up with people who didn't go to college.
And it looks at what they've done over the course of their lives and whether or not they wound up in their 80s and 90s as happy and healthy people.
What they find is that the happiest people are well married or have close friendships.
And so it turns out that marriage isn't key and family isn't key, but having very, very intimate relationships with other people is key.
And interestingly, I work a lot with strivers, with really hard-charging, very successful people.
The key to having a happy marriage is understanding actually how marriage works.
And this is the most popular unit of the class that I teach at Harvard.
They would keep me the entire semester on the unit called Falling in Love and Staying in Love because it's baffling to average 28-year-olds in America today.
How do you fall in love?
How do you stay in love?
And so I walk them through the neurochemical cascade and what's happening in their brains when they're falling in love and then talk to them of what the actual goal is five years into their relationship, which nobody tells them.
Now that's a really important thing.
And to cut to the chase, the answer is not passionate love, but what we call in my business companionate love.
Companionate love, which is best friendship.
You know, I told my kids that, who are now, you know, two of my kids are young married, and my son Carlos said, companionate love, that's not hot.
And I said, well, trust me, it's got some hotness to it, but that's not exactly what you're in the business for if you want to live the rest of your life with this person.
People that go to Harvard Business School, I think, I didn't go to Harvard Business School, but my assumption is they would say, making a lot of money makes you happy.
Is there evidence that having a lot of money makes you happy?
I mean, what evidence is the relationship with money and happiness is very complicated.
One of the things that we do know is that relatively low levels of money eliminate sources of unhappiness very, very effectively.
This is one of the reasons that people believe that having more and more money will make them happy because early on in their lives, they get more money and they feel better.
And they can't distinguish internally between higher happiness and lower unhappiness.
You know, when I was 19, 20, 21, I had no health care.
I couldn't go to the dentist.
When I was 25, I took the job in the symphony in Barcelona.
I went to the dentist for the first time in six years.
He fixed 12 cavities, and I felt a lot better.
And I concluded that money bought happiness, but that was quite incorrect.
Now, what we find is that what really matters, number one, is it doesn't make you unhappy.
It depends how you use it, number one, and why you earned it.
So those are the two big factors in money and happiness.
Evolutionarily, we are told Mother Nature tells us that if we buy more stuff, we'll be happier.
That's incorrect.
But there are four ways that money can bring you greater happiness.
One is to buy experiences and spend them with people you love.
One is to buy time and spend it in edifying things, which you've done abundantly, to give money away to causes you really care about.
Once again, A plus, David.
And last but not least, is saving your money so that you can see a brilliant future in intergenerational wealth.
The problem is Mother Nature says do door number one, not door numbers two through five, is the problem.
Now the second issue is why you earn the money in the first place.
If you're earning money because there's something special that you want to do with others, that's very, very positive.
If you're trying to put numbers on the board so that you can feel a certain way, that's a big problem.
The happiest people that you can find are people, number one, who are very, very good at self-transcendence, which is a slightly parallel point.
We are stuck in a psychodrama.
Mother Nature doesn't care if we're happy.
Mother Nature only has two goals for us, which is to survive and pass on our genes.
We want to be happy, and we make this cross-circuit in our minds where we say, well, these are my impulses, and I want to be happy, so following my impulses will make me happy.
Quite wrong.
So we are stuck in a psychodrama where we're the star.
My job, my car, my money, my television shows, me, me, me.
I was even the star of all my dreams last night.
It's exhausting.
So what we really want, what we really need, is to transcend ourselves notwithstanding our urges.
And part of the reason is because you can't sum across people's happiness and find out how happy a country is.
The second reason is that the way that they survey this is by going to a thousand people in each country and saying, how much do you like your life?
As if we wouldn't answer the questions in different ways in different languages with different cultures.
So I don't put any stock in that.
It's interesting because, you know, my grandparents were Danish immigrants.
They left for a reason.
It was probably a pretty happy country then.
They left because they wanted to, they were orphans with a first-grade education of the wrong religion, and they started a farm in South Dakota and made a life.
They were prototypical Americans.
Americans are different, and that's how we've self-sorted into a different set of priorities.
And that's really a question of getting to the transcendence that we talked about before, taking your philosophical life and your charitable life very, very seriously.
Then you get more or less the same happiness benefits.
I'm not going to say what the metaphysics are, but certainly the happiness benefits.
So I have studied that extensively because I make my students take a battery of happiness tests that are very well, that have a lot of construct validity.
They're very, very well validated.
And so I take the tests every six months myself.
And when I started teaching happiness, I was at about the 10th percentile in happiness across the adult population, which is pretty bad.
That means, for those who are keeping track, if you remember the SATs, 90% of the population was happier than me.
Well, that's just not good enough.
By the way, I know everybody in America who teaches happiness.
It's always the same.
They study it for a reason.
It's not research, it's me search.
And so I started working and formulating these ideas and actually taking my own, eating my own cooking, looking at my own research, and my own happiness has risen by 60% over the past six and a half years.
So there's an ancient Sanskrit theory, Vedic theory, which the words in Sanskrit are the Brahma Mahurta, which means the creator's time.
And this theory said that two mahurtas, which is two 48-minute periods, an hour and 36 minutes before dawn, that has magical properties.
It turns out that neuroscience has largely validated the idea that if you get up before dawn and witness the dawn, it has very, very strong neurophysiological properties.
It enhances focus, life satisfaction, memory, and creativity.
And so if you're getting up after dawn, you're already behind.
At 4.45, I have a gym in my house, and I work out very hard every day for 60 minutes because it's well validated in the neuroscience literature that strong exercise is the single best way to manage negative affect.
So my problem with well-being is not low happiness.
It's actually higher unhappiness.
These are opposite, largely governed by opposite hemispheres of the brain.
And I have to manage my negative affect and do so very early in the morning.
When I'm home, and when I'm on the road, usually I'm staying in a place where the nice thing about being a Catholic, it's like Starbucks.
It's the franchise system.
And so the service is the same in almost every place and it's available.
So I start by with, which by the way, you can also get through meditation practices, but it's one of the best ways that I know because it's also well validated that this is the best way to start to gather the dopamine in the prefrontal cortex of the brain for greater creativity and life satisfaction.
Yeah, well, it sort of does, and it depends on what you eat and when you eat.
So when I come back from mass, the first thing that I do is I drink coffee.
We call that self-administration of a psychostimulant because that's just how we talk.
That's how we get tenure in my business.
So I drink the coffee.
I've been drinking very dark roast Starbucks coffee since I was a child, having grown up, born in Spokane, but growing up in Seattle, this was the culture.
And then I eat a very high bolus of protein, a very high-protein meal, which is good if it has a lot of tryptophan, because that, once again, is good for bringing dopamine into the prefrontal cortex and giving creativity.
Look, I need four hours of pure creativity to be a writer, and everything is setting me up for four hours of uninterrupted focus.
My MBA students, I say, imagine yourself in 10 years.
You're 38.
And they say, oh, that's really old.
Just wait.
And I say, happier or unhappier?
And they all choose happier.
Well, you know, 5% say unhappier, but that's like the French students.
You know, they're in the back smoking cigarettes or something.
But happier.
And I say, why?
And they think all these good things are going to happen.
And they are.
And then I say, okay, 48, happier or unhappier.
And they say, a little happier because more of the same.
Then I say, 78.
And I say, I don't want that.
And I say, why not?
And they can't tell me.
When you're 28, it just doesn't sound like fun to be 78.
So I say, okay, young friends, you're saying that your happiness is going to rise and rise and rise and rise and max out and then start back down again.
And then I show them the data on millions of people around the world.
And it's all the same no matter where you go.
Sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, North America, every place.
And what happens is, and traditionally this has been the case for many years, that people actually decline in their self-evaluation of happiness day to day from the early 20s until the early 50s.
And the reason is not because they're actually unhappier.
It means they're enjoying their lives less because life is really stressful during that period.
But they're banking a lot of meaning in their lives.
That comes in in their early 50s until about 70.
Almost everybody gets happier from their early 50s until 70.
And then the population breaks up into two groups.
Half of the population keeps getting happier after 70, and the other half of the population starts back down.
So I want to help them make the decisions in their 20s and 30s and 50s and 60s that will get them on the upper branch when they're old.
Okay, let's suppose I'm an average person, I read your book, I want to be happy, but I don't know if I digested your book completely.
Let's suppose I came to see you.
What would you recommend that I, an average person, average unhappy, average happy person, what should I do for three or four things I could do to make myself happier?
Well, to begin with, I would take an inventory to find out where your greatest challenge is.
Number one, I'd give you a test to find out whether happiness is your problem, if you have a problem, or unhappiness is your problem.
And this is called the affect test that I give to a lot of the people that I'm working with, a lot of the executives and to all of my students, for example.
Half of the population is above average in negative affect intensity, which is to say that they have intense negative moods.
Now, moods are a limbic phenomenon.
They're a physiological phenomenon.
Moods and emotions, they exist to give you alerts about the outside world.
You need positive and negative emotions, but half of the population is above average in the intensity of the negative emotions.
Most of them think they need to be happier.
They actually need to be less unhappy.
And so that will give me strategy with respect to what's going on with you.
The second thing that I'm going to do is to find out where your greatest challenge is.
Now, the definition of happiness is it's not a feeling.
That's a mistake that people make.
The definition of, and feelings, by the way, are evidence of happiness, like the smell of the turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner.
Real happiness has the macronutrients.
You know, the Thanksgiving dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat.
Happiness has the three macronutrients of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
And I would start digging in with you to find out where your greatest challenge is.
I know a lot of very successful people that have enormous amounts of satisfaction, which is the joy you get from accomplishments after delayed gratification.
They're pretty good with meaning.
They have a good sense of the meaning of their lives, but they've never really come around to enjoying their lives.
And so I'll have to work on a strategy for that.
Others are really good at enjoyment, but they're not so good at meaning.
So I'm going to find out where the weaknesses actually lie, and I'm going to put together a strategy that actually exploits that.
Well, psychoanalysis is something that you go to for a long time, typically, or other forms of therapy.
Psychiatry is largely, you know, as a medical profession, is one in which there's a lot of drugs that are dispensed.
And what they have in common, psychotherapy and psychiatry have in common, is that they're normally used to address pathology.
They're normally used to address people who are really in a whole lot of trouble with mood disorders, for example, that need to treat these things because they're so dysregulated in their emotional life and their unhappiness is so out of control.
Most people don't actually need that, but they all can benefit from understanding the science of happiness.
Now, one of the things that people who are not dysregulated typically do is they turn to self-improvement.
And self-improvement provides a lot of epiphanies, but it never sticks.
And the reason is because it doesn't take a scientific approach.
The right approach to look at happiness interventions, what we're talking about here, and making them stick, is number one, understanding the science.
Number two, changing your habits.
And number three, teaching these things to other people.
So it's like learning math.
It's the same basic approach.
So I specialize in people who don't need in-house or in residential psychiatric care, for example.
I want to talk to people in all different walks of life, have normal problems, but they want to be happier and a little less unhappy.
We are a mixed country to be sure and there's a whole lot that we could do.
Now there's a whole lot that we could do personally.
There's a whole lot that we could do with respect to just some of these physical properties that we're talking about.
Eating in a more healthy way and exercising more would be a good thing to do for most people's well-being, to moderate their negative affect and to live longer with better high quality of life.
But it's also the case that there are trends in American life that are cultural trends that are pushing down our happiness systematically.
And that's one of the things that we found for generation after generation after generation.
Now, let's put up, kind of put, let's get a little bit, drill down into that a little bit more in a way that's not compromising the conversation.
Men and women who are in a loving, exclusive relationship, these are the people who actually benefit the most from sex, which is the reason that monogamous, religious couples, they tend to get the greatest life satisfaction from having an active sex life.
And one of the reasons that people are, they tend to chalk up to their circumstances, their unhappiness, and it really isn't.
It's mostly this genetic property that they're actually, they probably, their mother probably did make them unhappy biologically is the reason what it comes down to.
But understanding that and then having the best possible happiness habits can benefit them tremendously.
I never write until I've actually gotten back from mass that I've had my coffee and this big 60 grams of protein and then I'm really ready to go because my brain is primed.
I want as much dopamine in my prefrontal cortex as possible without using pharmaceuticals.
So I don't want to use any of these psychostimulants that actually do that and that's the best way to do it to get four hours of.
Well, I read a lot, but the problem is that for my job as a social scientist, I'm reading professionally, so I'm harvesting other people's writing for information.
And I'm reading about 15 to 20 academic journal articles a week in neuroscience and behavioral science.
So I'm not occasionally, well, I mean, I always have a book going, for example, and something that I really enjoy.
So you've met a lot of prominent people in your life, obviously.
Are there certain people you admire because they're great leaders, political leaders, government leaders, business leaders, or you haven't met anybody like that yet?
I've been working very closely for the past 13 years with the Dalai Lama.
And the Dalai Lama, I mean, a great religious leader.
It turns out that he's an incredibly inspirational human being as well, who every time you see him, I mean, he's the most respected religious figure in the world.
And I see him every year, once or twice every year.
I go to his home in Dharam Sala in the Himalayan foothills.
It takes a couple of flights, to be sure, and some of the flights are scary.
But once you get there and you drive and drive up the mountain, and once you get there, and every time I see him, it's as if he's seeing an old friend and he's truly, he's just blissful to see an old friend, and just that, with the sincerity that that brings.
And then, of course, you know, the conversations that we have are really life-changing.
And so that's been a relationship that's modeled a lot of what I'm trying to do.
The most amazing thing is that you're three questions ahead of me and you've not looked at a single note, which is really an extraordinary achievement.
So the things that have made me happy really have nothing to do with achievements and have everything to do with love.
The loves that I have in my life, the love that I have, the relationship that I have with the Creator, my family life, which has turned out to be so unbelievably satisfying.
The fact that I live with one of my children and his spouse and their children, and the others are just up the street.
And we've made a resolution to have a close family, not in a compound, but to be together.
And I'm very close to my grandchildren at this point.
I have three.
I'll have four by next month.
I have a few very, very close friends that I really, and some in private equity too, by the way.
And these are the most wonderful people that I've ever met.
And that's what I value, is the love in life.
And the truth is that when I look at the research, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, that 90-year study, the guy who ran it for 30 years, a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School named George Valiant, he was asked to sum it up and look at the trajectory of people's lives.
He said, just sum it up in a few words.
And he said, happiness is love, full stop, is what it came down to.
And my own work validates that, and my own life validates that as well.
So today, if you were to ask your wife about your happiness expertise, would she say he's really not as expert on happiness as he should be, or I shouldn't have married him, or whatever.
So sometimes my wife says, when I'm doing something that's clearly contrary to what the research would suggest, do you read your books?
She'll ask me.
And part of the reason is her nice, her, you know, very, the Spaniards, their humor is kind of on the nose.
And she's telling me that it's time for me to pay attention to what I'm actually doing.
And the trouble with it is that I'm very, very driven.
And I'm driven to do more and driven to do more.
And I know you can relate to this, David.
More, more, more.
I want more life.
I want more experiences.
I want to see more things.
I want to do more things.
And she's quite correct that that is not the secret of the happiest life.
That isn't.
Life has a cadence to it.
And life requires that you slow down, that you experience things.
And this is one of the things that we experienced when we were on the Camino when we're walking in the community of Santiago, where it's just walking all day long.
Hundreds of miles you're walking.
And we would stop and we would look at a little flower open up.
And I never see that in my ordinary life because I'm trying to do something that's too audacious for that.
And so the result of it is that I have to put my life into the hands of my beloved.
And she will take me to look at the flower open at Eventide.
So would it surprise you that there may be some people watching who would say, I don't really like people that talk about happiness because I'm not happy.
And he's so happy, it makes me feel unhappy that somebody could be so happy.
Now, on his epitaph, Thomas Jefferson famously listed three things, including being the founder of the University of Virginia, author of Declaration of Independence, and so forth.
On your tombstone, eventually, maybe 50 years from now, what would you want to have written there?
Do you ever lose your temper and start cursing and maybe not around the Dalai Lama, but around somebody you ever get mad at something and just say, I can't stand this?
Yeah, I mean, I lose my patience, to be sure, but I have to say that one of the greatest things about being associated with the movement on happiness and having people buy my books and recognize me wherever I am in public, occasionally while I'm in public, is that being a jerk is really off-brand.
And it's held me to a higher behavioral standard.
It's an incredible thing that ever since that people started buying my books.
I say, you know, I'm pretty irritated at the airport right now, but I'm not going to show that because probably somebody saw me on TV talking to David Rubenstein and they would be really disillusioned by that.
And then I act a little bit better and I get happier.
They were documented in the late latter part of the 19th century by a physiologist by the name of Duchenne, a French physiologist, who he had a hypothesis there was only one kind of smile that was associated with true authentic human happiness.
And so he went around the world, Papua New Guinea, in Japan, Sub-Saharan Africa.
And it turns out he's right.
That the true happiness smile uses the same muscles in every population in the world.
And so he named it after himself, the Duchenne smile, which is the best thing about academia.
Would have been absolutely best thing.
And here's how it looks: it's not your mouth, it's the eyes.
The eyes tell all.
And so you can be smiling like this, then I can be like this.
And you know, that's like the United Airlines smile.
You know, it's like, thank you for flying United.
Get off my plane.
And but if you want to know if somebody's actually happy with you, they're actually exercising two sets of muscles: the zygomatic major muscles and the auricularis oculi muscles in the top of the cheeks and around the eyes.
And you cannot actually simulate that.
If you scrunch up those muscles, if you're 85 years old and you have pronounced crow's feet, it means you've been doing the Duda Shen smile and you've experienced a lot of joy.
Arthur Brooks and David Rubenstein viewed artifacts from the Library of Congress's archive.
All right, well, we'll start down here, and we're going in chronological order from the manuscript division.
And the first item is future President James A. Garfield's diary from 1853.
And this was a period where he was courting his future wife, Lucretia, but trying to determine whether their different temperaments and personalities would make him happy.
And he actually says that whether she has the warmth of nature that will that I need to make him make me happy, because they came from very different families in terms of showing affection.
And he was very outgoing and she was very reserved.
And ultimately, he decided to go ahead and marry her.
But they had a very rocky courtship and a rocky marriage because of that different temperament.
For a while, it actually has a happy ending because a few crises in their relationship meant that he started to appreciate her calm nature and her ability to forgive.
And basically, after about 10 years and five kids thereabouts, he fell in love madly in love with his wife.
And then you're able to track their relationship through his diaries and their letters.
And at one point, he says, We love not because we ought to, but because we do.
Rest of their lives together until his untimely demise.
He was assassinated in 1881.
But they absolutely had, they adored one another.
But it was an interesting thing of him trying to determine what makes them happy.
And she wrote a letter to her children afterwards: when you read our letters, I want you to understand the differences between myself and your father, so you understand what you're reading.
And they didn't sanitize their letters before giving them to the Library of Congress.
So it's a wonderful story.
See more with Arthur Brooks and the Library of Congress's archive on America's Book Club, The Treasures, available at c-span.org/slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
Congress returns for its last scheduled work week before the end of the year.
The House is back Monday at noon Eastern.
Members will consider legislation to honor the two West Virginia National Guard members, the late Sarah Beckstrom and the severely injured Andrew Wolfe, who were shot last month while on duty in Washington, D.C. Later in the week, the House will vote on the Republicans' health care bill that seeks to lower health costs ahead of the expiration of enhanced health care subsidies at the end of the year.
The Senate returns Monday at 3 p.m. Eastern.
Debate continues on the final version of the $900 billion defense programs and policy bill for 2026.
A final vote on the legislation, known as the NDAA, is expected by the end of the week.
Lawmakers will also continue work on 97 of President Trump's executive and judicial nominations as a package, including former State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce to be Deputy U.S. Representative to the UN and former one-term New York GOP Congressman Anthony Desposito to serve as Labor Department Inspector General.