Jordan Peterson sits down with professor, author, and columnist Dr. Arthur Brooks. They discuss the physicality of happiness, how aim sets perception, the paradox of progress, the need for proper discernment, and how sustained maturity sets you up for the adventure of your life. This episode was filmed on January 7th, 2025. Dr. Arthur Brooks began his professional life as a classic French hornist. He left college at age 19, touring and recording with the Annapolis Brass Quintet and, later, the City Orchestra of Barcelona. While still performing in his late 20s he returned to school and achieved a Ph.D. by 34. Brooks is now the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of the Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. He is also a columnist at the Atlantic and the author of 14 books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller, “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier” (2023). | Links | For Dr. Authur Brooks: On X https://x.com/arthurbrooks/highlights Website https://arthurbrooks.com/ Dr. Brooks’ most recent book Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier https://a.co/d/e5fJY2R
Chapter 1: What does it mean to have progress in your life?
Do you want to have progress in your life? Do you want to be a happier person? Do you want to have a life full of meaning?
What you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit. And that's exactly what you see in Jacob's Ladder.
There's another weird angle on this, though.
I've been trying to think about prayer technically. That's a complicated topic.
Gratitude is a divine thing. It's managing your affective, evolved state so it doesn't manage you.
Why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could be walking in the eternal garden? Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to sit down and speak with Arthur Brooks. Now, I met Mr. Brooks several years ago when he was CEO of the American Enterprise Institute. And after that, he ended up serving as a professor of practice at the Kennedy School and at the business school at Harvard.
And that's where he is currently. He has a very active public life as well. And it focuses on psychology, philosophy, neuroscience of happiness. And so we talked about that. That was the focus of our conversation. And part of that was a matter of definitional clarification, which is crucially important because
to understand happiness and to pursue it properly means that it has to be defined correctly. You have to know what it is and what it isn't. And it isn't, for example, in Arthur Brooks' conceptualization, reducible to instantaneous hedonistic gratification in the moment, right? And so one of the things we talked about was the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. And
Well, understanding that in this introduction gives you a flavor of the conversation. So pleasure could be reduced to something like immediate hedonistic gratification in the moment. Now, the problem with that, a problem with that, for example, is that psychopaths can be pleasure-seeking.
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Chapter 2: How is happiness defined in the context of this episode?
Why do people admire beauty? Why do people love each other? And using the empirical methods and experimental methods that you learn in an economics milieu made it possible for me to study these things. And the taproot of all those things turned out to be human happiness. So when I left my think tank, And I was trying to figure out what do I want to do for the rest of my life?
I actually had a long process of discernment that culminated when I walked the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain, hundreds of kilometers walking across Northern Spain, praying the rosary and every day saying, Lord, guide my path, which is in a process of discernment is important. You've talked about this an awful lot in your work.
And you talk about how people try to actually find what their purpose and meaning actually is through discernment. I found, I thought it was to go back to my behavioral science roots and to look at what people actually most want in life using science and ideas to give them greater access to the truths about love and happiness.
Okay, so let's start with that issue of discernment. So I've been trying to think about prayer technically, let's say. And so that's a complicated topic. But you could imagine this. Imagine that your decision is to aim up. which is the opposite of iniquity, by the way, I found out the word iniquity means fundamentally to aim down, to do bad things while you're aiming at them.
Okay, so instead you decide you're going to aim up. Now you can leave that kind of amorphous because you could do that in a spirit of ignorance. You could say, well, I would like things to be as good as they could be, let's say, Although I'm not sure what that means and I'm not sure how to do it, but you open the door that way to the beginnings of something approximating fantasy.
I mean, part of what your imagination does is seek a pathway forward, right? And so you can set something like an unspecified uphill goal, and that would be like a meditative or prayer practice. And then you can say, well, my desire, my aim is to flesh out that conceptualization and to specify a way forward, right?
Now, then you've set your perceptions and your imagination to work on a particular project. The goal is to walk uphill, whatever that means, to clarify the nature of what uphill is and to discern a strategy, okay? And then you said you walk this route, right? And that gives you time for contemplation. Okay, so walk me through that a little bit. You said you were praying the rosary and you were...
concentrating on something like upward aim. Right. And then you took time to do that, right? So it's like you give your dreams an opportunity to make themselves manifest in a situation like that. And that's part of that clarification process.
That's right.
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Chapter 3: What is the relationship between pleasure and enjoyment?
You're going to sit on the damn beach for one day and you're going to be so sunburned, you're going to have to hide for two weeks. And then what are you going to do? You're going to drink like five Mai Tais a day or 20 for how long? Right. You're going to be an alcoholic in no time flat. You've got no orientation or goal. There was nothing to it at all, right?
Good luck on your divorce.
Well, right, right, right.
And your cirrhosis. These guys at Goldman have told me this for years and years. So you can make a bunch of money in finance, of course, if you're smart and you're motivated and you have your MBA and you come out like raring to go. By 49, you have $400 million. And I've seen this again and again and again with people that I've worked with, that I'm privileged to work with. They retire at 49. Why?
Because they don't like their work. Their work is backbreaking, and they can't see their families, and they don't have love in their lives. But they've lost their chops on actually how to do these things because the plot has been lost in their lives. And so they retire at 49. And then they become very good at golf or tennis. And they get a nice day.
dark tan, and pretty soon they're having an affair with their tennis coach, and then their life really falls apart. And here's the thing. Here's the thing, Jordan. Woe be unto the man whose dreams come true, because he will find that he had the wrong dreams. This is a real problem.
Well, that's also part and parcel of the call to religious humility.
It's like,
I want to get what I want. It's like, what makes you so sure you're right about what you want? So I think that notion of, this is something I've been discussing with my wife a lot because she really learned this in the last few years, is that, so we talked about setting an amorphous uphill goal. Okay, so that's sort of predicated in part
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Chapter 4: How does discernment play a role in happiness?
Ah, well, there you go. Well, that's been my experience working with The Daily Wire as well, so genuinely. And I'm not saying that lightly because I'm very picky. So, all right. Thank you, everyone. And thank you very much, sir. Good talking to you today.
Thank you.