Biddy Martin (00:00:10):
Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us for this third in our series of programs designed to help us think through COVID-19. I'm delighted tonight that we will feature Arthur C. Brooks, who is Professor of the Practice in Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School where he is also the Arthur C. Patterson Faculty Fellow at the business school. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Arthur Brooks, as many of you know, served for 10 years as President of the American Enterprise Institute based in Washington DC. He's the author of 11 books, several of which are best sellers: Love Your Enemies, published in 2019; The Conservative Heart, 2015; and the Road to Freedom, 2012. Arthur writes a regular column for the Atlantic called How to Build a Life, and he has recently launched a podcast called the Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks. He started his career, interestingly enough, as a classical French hornist.
Biddy Martin (00:01:22):
Along the way has acquired degrees in economics and public policy analysis. Arthur, we're delighted to have you here. Thank you for coming. Our own Phil Jackson is an Amherst College Trustee, and a graduate of the College in the class of '85. Phil Jackson is priest-in-charge and vicar of Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City where he leads ministry programs that touch on every conceivable aspect of parish life, including liturgies, music, educational programs, membership and stewardship of Trinity Church Wall Street. Prior to being ordained, Phil had an early career as an attorney. In addition to a bachelor's degree in history from Amherst, he holds a J.D. in law from Yale Law School and a master of divinity from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. We're delighted to have Phil here. We're delighted to have Phil on our Board of Trustees. Thank you both so much. We're looking forward to your conversation. Phil, take it away.
Phil Jackson (00:02:40):
Thank you, Biddy. Welcome, Arthur. Good to see you again.
Phil Jackson (00:02:46):
Nice to you too, Phil. How are you?
Phil Jackson (00:02:47):
I'm good. I don't know if you can hear it, but I'm here in our apartment in New York and it's seven o'clock and people are banging pots and pans and celebrating our first responders and healthcare workers. I can see them right outside people outside their windows clapping and celebrating.
Phil Jackson (00:03:07):
That's fantastic. You know, I'm in Brookline, Massachusetts and I can't hear that where I am, but I'm feeling the same sentiments. I'm cheering for the frontline responders. It just goes to show you when you're in a terrible situation, when you have discomfort, when you have challenge, it's always an opportunity to celebrate the great courage, the valor of other people who are stepping up in a crisis. Now it's a perfect time to show what we're made of. Right, Phil?
Phil Jackson (00:03:35):
Yes, it absolutely is. Let me ask you, Arthur, what are you doing? How are you faring during the lockdown and what are you up to?
Arthur Brooks (00:03:42):
Well, like everybody else, I'm staying at home. I'm abiding by the rules, which is as we're supposed to do. It's interesting. I just finished teaching a class at the Harvard business school called Leadership and Happiness. One of the things I teach my MBA students is that if you want to be an entrepreneur in life, if you want to treat your life like a startup. This is the big opportunity to treat your life like an enterprise. You have to look at what everybody else would say is not just a challenge but maybe even a tragedy and see it an opportunity for personal growth. I teach this. I teach this, and now I've got to live it. I have to practice what I preach. I have to say it's been tough, but it's been very beautiful. At the same time I'm finishing a book. I was very behind on a new book that I'm writing for Penguin and I had an editor that was getting a little bit stressed out and now I'm ahead in that. But more to the point, I'm reading more, I'm praying more, I'm spending more time with my family, and I'm trying to make this challenge into really a moment of personal growth. What are you up to, Phil?
Phil Jackson (00:04:44):
Pretty much the same. I feel like my life has been dominated by Zoom meetings at various times. Reading a little bit more. I miss exercising. I mean we get out and walk and whatnot, but I miss my exercise routine. I'm staying in touch with family and friends on the phone as much as I can. We just kind of hunkered down too, you know, Our head of security today--we have a daily security briefing--he announced to us today that this was the beginning of week eight, day 51, I think is today. And it looks like we've got a little bit more to go.
Arthur Brooks (00:05:37):
I was just going to say it's worth pointing out, it's not permanent. You know, people are starting to talk as if this were a permanent way of life and it isn't. I mean this is going to end. There's all kinds of reasons to be optimistic about when and what's going to happen when it does. So it's important for us to remember for ourselves and to remind all of the people watching and not to lose hope.
Phil Jackson (00:05:59):
Well, absolutely. Let's come back to that, but let me ask you, because this new column that you started in the Atlantic, I just love it. You've done two columns thus far. I guess it's going to be biweekly.
Arthur Brooks (00:06:14):
Yeah. Every two weeks.
Phil Jackson (00:06:16):
Your thing is talking about happiness and how to build a life. I wonder if you can tell us something about why happiness?
Arthur Brooks (00:06:29):
I had planned to do this column for a long time. I'd been working with Jeff Goldberg, who's the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic and Julie Beck, who's my editor. We weren't anticipating launching this column during the coronavirus epidemic, and we thought about putting it off. And we thought, what better time. People are thinking about their lives, they're thinking about their happiness as a matter of fact. It gave me, gave us, an opportunity to say, look, while you're in the stillness of your apartment, your house, think about these big issues in your life. Think about the things that you actually want to improve. Would you like to come out of the coronavirus epidemic with greater skills to be happier than you went in? I would say so. We launched it and I have to say it's gone really well. I mean, there's a lot of people who've been reading it. A lot of people have been reaching out. We started a podcast also called the Art of Happiness that goes along with the column and it's really fun. It's really gratifying. It turns out to be almost the perfect time.
Phil Jackson (00:07:24):
How is happiness, how do you see happiness as being an art?
Phil Jackson (00:07:30):
Well, in truth, I talk about it like science. I'm a social scientist by background. My Ph.D. Is in public policy analysis, but I've been working across the social sciences my entire career. And one of the things that I've found is that when you use the science of happiness, you have to use each element that you've got, almost like paints in a palette on the canvas of your life. So it's a little bit art, a little bit science, but I like the art part a little bit better. This whole idea, Phil, that you're in my life, is something that we're constructing, that we're responsible for making it beautiful. We can't leave it up to chance. And there's all sorts of ways to think about it too. Sloshing the paint on only goes so far. Sometimes you need to chip away the jade to find the sculpture that's inside that boulder as well. A lot of artistic metaphors that I use to actually find the happiest person that we can possibly find and therefore share that happiness with others to lift people up and bring them together.
Phil Jackson (00:08:28):
That's lovely. Let me ask you this about the three equations. This is from the first week's column, the three equations for enriching our lives. I thought that was wonderful. Could you say something about that?
Arthur Brooks (00:08:40):
The first column that I launched was called the Three Equations for a Happier Life. It sounds really wonky, I know, but basically it follows a lot of common sense. The first equation is that your happiness is made up of three things, your genes, your circumstances and your habits. And one of the really shocking things that people don't know about human happiness is that about half of your happiness depends on your genes. Now that's only half. But for a lot of people that sounds like an awful lot. And the way that the scientists, that psychologists have figured that out is through studies of identical twins that were separated at birth and adopted to separate families and then voluntarily have been reunited to do personality tests as adults. It's uncanny how much, using statistical methods, they can figure out, how much of their personalities are genetic. Sure enough, about 48% of happiness, depending on who does the analysis is genetics. So, Phil, your mother really did make you unhappy.
Arthur Brooks (00:09:44):
I know, I'm kidding man, is she watching? But there are other parts--that still leaves half, and the two parts of the other half are your circumstances and your habits. Everybody's obsessed with their circumstances. Like if I only get that raise, if I can only get that person to marry me, then I'll finally be happy forever. And no. I mean we have an uncanny ability to go back to our baseline happiness levels because that's a process. I'll just call it homeostasis. It's the inability to stay above your zone because you wouldn't be able to live otherwise. If somebody broke up with you and broke your heart and you stayed unhappy forever, which you think you're going to be in the first couple of weeks, you'd die because you wouldn't be able to actually participate in life.
Arthur Brooks (00:10:28):
So you'd go back and very, very quickly. There's studies that show that lottery winners and paraplegics both go back to their old happiness levels after about six months, which is extraordinary when you think about it. That's the part that you think is going to matter a lot, but you should kind of disregard it because you're going to be fine. Or even if you're happy, it's not going to last. A part to pay attention to is habits and the habits basically are sort of the accounts, the accounts in which you need to make deposits every day. And there are four habits that you need to pay attention to. And that's the second equation.
Phil Jackson (00:11:10):
I really liked your discussion of habits. Please, please go on.
Arthur Brooks (00:11:15):
The habits, and this is really important, this is the part that we can control. It's somewhere between 15 and 40% of our happiness is under our direct control. But you got to pay attention to four things every day and you can't be undiversified. It's like you have to put the deposit in each one of these accounts, through your faith, your family, your friendship, and your work. Now, it's worth a little bit of a explanation here. Faith does not mean my faith. I mean I offer it up to everybody, Phil, I know you offer your faith up to everybody too. I mean you and I are both Christians, but that's not what the data say. The data say that any life philosophy that's transcendent of ourselves and focuses us on other people and serving others, that works, but we have to practice it every day. Spend time in prayer, meditation. Actually make sure that you're in communion with others, et cetera. Family is pretty self-explanatory. You define family the way you want. Friendship as well. Friendship is one that's neglected, especially by men. A lot of people, we find that the loneliest people in America are 60 year old men. You'll love this, Phil, the average 60 year old man, 60% of 60 year old men say their best friend is their wives, 30% of their wives said their best friend is their husband.
Arthur Brooks (00:12:26):
So I told that to my wife, she's like, huh, no kidding. It's very important that we've maintained our friendship chops. The last is work and I don't care what the work is because I've been studying work my whole career as an economist and I'm telling you, I've looked at above and below average income. I've looked at college educated, non-college educated. That does not actually affect happiness. What affects happiness is two things. If you can earn your success and you're serving others. Accomplishment and service are the two secrets to a happy job. So faith, family, friends and satisfying work through service and earning your success. If you could put a deposit in each one of those four accounts, you're well on your way to living your happiest life.
Phil Jackson (00:13:06):
Wow. I think that is so true. I could comment on all four of those. I would say just my observation as being a parish priest for 27 years, the one we least deposit in is our faith, and the one we over deposit in is our work.
Arthur Brooks (00:13:26):
That's right. And we focus on the wrong things in our work too. You know, when people [inaudible]
Phil Jackson (00:13:33):
[inaudible] work as identity rather than work as a locus of meaning or service, which I want to come to. Sorry I didn't mean to cut you off.
Arthur Brooks (00:13:40):
No, exactly right. Your own career is a perfect example of that. I mean, you were a high-flying lawyer, at Yale Law, the number one law school in the world and at 27 you gave it up to become a priest. Obviously being a lawyer wasn't cutting it. That's really important for all of us to figure out. Think about it now, your work is all about saving people, helping people, lifting people up. It's sort of the epitome of exactly what should bring satisfaction from work as opposed to what people usually do with their work, which is money, power, prestige. Those are the things that Saint Thomas Aquinas said are substitutes for the true happiness that we want. They're counterfeits as a matter of fact. So the key thing is that you should take what you think you want, which is money, power, pleasure and fame and substitute for that faith, family, friends, and work. So you've got the bad four, the vicious four, and you got the virtuous four. And that's really a good way to actually start trying to conduct your substitutions in life.
Phil Jackson (00:14:44):
What is it about service that all religious tradictions, certainly ours does, it's at the root and heart of our tradition, serving others, what is it about that that's so universal?
Arthur Brooks (00:15:04):
It's interesting. This is one of the many areas in which theologians and psychologists agree. They agree that other-focused, other-serving behavior is really at the secret of happiness, is at the heart of happiness. But they don't exactly agree as to why. And so psychologists will talk about it with respect to simply thinking about something besides ourselves to the extent that you can, we're wired to think about ourselves because frankly we wouldn't survive if we didn't think about ourselves. But the problem is that, how do you say, it's just boring? I mean, it's just so boring all the time. And you actually find that people who are suffering a lot from different forms of clinical depression, they'll often say the worst part about it is the boredom of thinking about myself a lot.
Arthur Brooks (00:15:51):
This is why in Dante's Inferno he talks about the devil at the bottom of the mountain, half-frozen, a block of ice up to his waist. All of our Amherst students, of course, they've read Dante's Inferno. It's a great college and classical education. And he's twisting around in agony, not even aware of what's going on around him. In other words, it's just an agonizing, boring life of pride, and that's really the big problem. And so other-focused behavior is just more interesting and it allows us to have a more fulfilling life according to psychologists. Now, on the other side, theologians think about this in a slightly different way. Theologians have quite correctly figured out that love is the nuclear fuel of happiness.
Arthur Brooks (00:16:39):
Remember, work is one, but work that lifts people up, faith, family and friends, which are based on love. Now what is love? According to Saint Thomas Aquinas once again, to love is to will the good of the other. There's nothing sentimental about it. It's not a feeling, it's nothing squishy and soft. It's super hard-edged. It's work. To love is to will the good of the other. If that's love and love brings us happiness and it's other-focused, that's why service really matters according to theologians. It's a little bit of the beatific vision, isn't it?
Phil Jackson (00:17:14):
Would you say there's a difference between happiness and joy?
Arthur Brooks (00:17:19):
That's a great question. That actually gets into this notion, because once again, that's the difference between theologians and psychologists. Psychologists, they're a little bit dismissive of joy. Joy is a fleeting thing. Basically the way that psychologists have defined happiness, there's the emotion of positive effect, which you can actually get from pleasure. You can get it in a bottle, you can get it from smoking dope. But that's just pleasure. It's extremely fleeting, not something you can base your life on. Then there's a psychological happiness, which is kind of taking accounts, all things considered, good and bad things happen. I'm a relatively happy person and there's this kind of good life, well lived. Psychologist sort of dismiss joy as being in that first category of fleeting feelings. Theologians, no, no, no. Theologians talk about joy as being the ultimate thing that we want. Christian theologians will talk about, and Muslims will talk about joy in the sense of being in heaven. So it's that euphoria that you finally get when that window opens up and you see something that's really good. The problem is t closes, right? People of serious religious faith will say, well, guess what? If you do things right, that window stays open.
Arthur Brooks (00:18:35):
That's the offer, right?
Phil Jackson (00:18:39):
Let's go back to how to build a life. Let's look at the second column. I want to ask you, you described the column as being about how to find what matters and how to hold onto it at any age, at any age to build a life that feels whole. Can you define for us what matters and what are the things that make us feel whole?
Arthur Brooks (00:19:09):
One of the things that I talk an awful lot about with my class, or in my writing is finding the why in life. You know, we're encouraged in modern society, and for that matter in any society, to only think about the what of life. You know, when you go to a party, Phil, and people say, Hey Phil, hey, what do you do? They're saying, what do you do for a living? Basically it's the what of your life. Nobody ever says, why do you do what you do? But you know, we need an answer. You have one. Biddy mentioned in the introduction that I used to be a French horn player, and I did that all the way through until I was 31 years old. I finished college right about that age because it was sort of a wayward youth.
Arthur Brooks (00:19:53):
The reason I left music and actually became [inaudible] I was on the road. I was actually in the Barcelona Symphony. And when I was playing in Barcelona, I remember reading a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, who is my favorite composer. And he was asked why he wrote music. And it's an extraordinary question, right? I mean, why. Not what's your writing process or all the dumb stuff they would ask composers and artists today, But why? Why do you do it? And his answer just blew my mind. It actually changed my life. He said that the aim and final end of all music is the refreshment of the soul and the glorification of God. And I thought to myself, can I say that? And I actually went on a vision quest to actually find a way to be able to say that.
Arthur Brooks (00:20:43):
Again, for all the people were watching us, we're not religious. Don't be stymied by that. What Bach was saying is that the purpose of your work, the why of your work is to serve, to lift other people up. You must find a way to do that. And I thought, I'm not serving anybody playing in this orchestra. I'm not even serving myself. And actually I went to to find a way that I could study what I was really interested in, quite frankly, was solutions on how to lift people out of poverty. That's what I studied. That's what I did my Ph.D. Work in that. And it was extraordinary. I have to say that I have good days and bad days, Phil, but my why is Bach's why, the refreshment of the soul of others and the glorification of God as I can see fit. I can tell you I don't sleep poorly because of my work, when I really think I'm living up to that mission. And that's the point. That's purpose. And that's meaning. I encourage everybody who's watching us to give some deep thought during this coronavirus lockdown. What's my why? Not what's my what. What's my deep why. Am I serving it, am I fighting for it? Am I sharing it? If I'm not, what do I need to do to change?
Phil Jackson (00:21:49):
Let me ask you how, what would you say to some of our young people at Amherst who might be watching us today who have, if you've gotten to Amherst College, you've done all the right things and moved up the food chain and gotten good grades and activities and scores and sports.What would you say to a young person who this evening is thinking for the first time, "What is my why? Is my why just to do that?"
Arthur Brooks (00:22:25):
It's very easy to, to think that, to believe that when you finally meet your destination that you will finally be happy. And one of the great consolations of getting older, Phil, I mean you and I are almost exactly the same age and it's extraordinary. The data show that people, they tend to bottom out between their mid-forties to their mid-fifties but from their mid-fifties to their early seventies, that turns out to be the happiest period in most people's lives. And if they play their cards right, they can continue getting happier all the way to the end. Why is that? And it's in no small part because you realize that the journey is the destination, that the key to the treasure is the treasure. That in actually creating the good and doing what you're doing,
Arthur Brooks (00:23:11):
there's an intense amount of, or there can be an intense amount of intrinsic satisfaction. That's something that you can get a head start on actually learning. When I'm on college campuses, which I am a lot, and I was supposed to be in person at Amherst College this spring, but we'll do it again. We'll find another way because it's just a couple hours away. And it's such a beautiful place. I've been there. I love it there. What a wonderful place to study. What a great college too. But when I'm talking to students and they say, what should I be focused on, there are two things that are really suggest that it's worth focusing on during the student years. The first is the sacredness of sadness. One of the things that we do, I think we do wrong today in talking to young people, is that we pathologize all discomfort and sadness.
Arthur Brooks (00:24:00):
We say that if you have a lot of what psychologists called negative affect. Negative affect, bad emotions, negative emotions and positive emotions are processed in different hemispheres of the brain. You can be a very high positive emotion, a very high negative emotion person as a matter of fact, but when you're experiencing high levels of negative emotion because of anxiety, because of sadness, because of events, because of a bad turn in a class or in love or with your parents or whatever, there's a tendency to pathologize that, to say any of that is bad, but it's actually quite sacred in a lot of ways. Now we don't want it to get out of control. It hurt us. But at the same time, it's very important to remember that it's not just inevitable, it's super necessary.
Arthur Brooks (00:24:44):
We find that that negative experiences tend to be the times of greatest growth, which is why I hope a lot of people watching us are going to come out of the coronavirus experience and three years from now say I didn't want it to happen, but I learned so much. It's also important to recognize that bad feelings per se have an enormous amount of benefits. They can connect you to other people. They tend to be correlated with high levels of creativity. Lucid thinking, that's quite accurate. You find that leaders who have a certain amount of sadness tend to be better and more accurate and better decision making leaders. It's also quite worth pointing out that a lot of bad feelings that we feel from fear and sadness and even anger, they can keep us alive because they alert us to threats. So that's the first thing is to recognize that sadness is a part of life and to embrace it.
Arthur Brooks (00:25:32):
Embrace your poet. The second thing is another little equation that I talked about with a lot of young people. Everybody wants satisfaction in life. And satisfaction is a hard thing to get because we have this treadmill that we're on. Is that homeostasis? I talked about it a little bit earlier, but satisfaction basically is made up of haves and wants. And here's the relationship. Your hands are in the numerator of your satisfaction equation and your wants are in the dominator. Haves divided by wants. Everybody needs to be satisfied, get more stuff, get better grades, get into a better college, graduate and get a better job, make more money, et cetera, et cetera. And that's managing the H. That's fine as far as it goes. But you're W in the new denominator, f you don't pay attention to that, it's going to run out of control.
Arthur Brooks (00:26:19):
It's going to sprawl like the suburbs of Atlanta. It is going to grow and grow. And if you're not paying attention, that thing is going to be so huge that your satisfaction is going to fall even as you make more money and have a better job and get better grades and you're going to wonder why is my life so unsatisfying? And so the key thing I talked about young people is make a strategy for managing your wants, for circumscribing your wants. And what I mean is write them down. What is all that stuff that I want? What are all the things that I want? What are the relationships that I want? What are the jobs? What is the prestige that I'm looking for? Write it down and then talk about managing it. So it doesn't sprawl saying that doesn't make sense. I'm getting rid of that. Throw it away. Empower yourself by managing your denominator and your satisfaction will grow. It's like magic. Actually. This one of the great hacks to happiness. So those are the two things I tell young people.
Phil Jackson (00:27:08):
Well, that's terrific. As a parish priest, it sometimes feels like, even though we know the absolute truth of what you just said, there's literally a whole giant behemoth of a machine out there convinced whose job it is to convince us all that our wants are in fact our needs.
Arthur Brooks (00:27:36):
That's a conspiracy, I think. I think you're absolutely right on. It's amazing to convince us of this. I thought about this for a while, but I thought if I listened to Madison Avenue or just take my values from Netflix, I'm going to be convinced that the formula for a happy life is use people and love things and worship myself. That seems like the formula for the happiest possible life. That's what everybody's telling me to do. But the truth is that all the verbs and nouns are wrong in that. It's amazing when you think about it. Every religious tradition, every philosophical, every secular ethical tradition tells us that the real formula is use things and love people. And if you're religious, love God, that's it. Worship God. That's it. You should never ever use anything but things, and only within moderation. And you should never love any things. You should only ever love people. People are made for love and the love is the will the good of the other. And so if we basically remember use things and love people as opposed to vice versa, we're really off onto the right trail, I think.
Arthur Brooks (00:28:51):
I definitely see that sort of flip flop made every day and hoow hard it is to break away from that mindset. Let me you this. You talk about, in the April 23rd column... Actually I'm going to break. I want to go back to something you said about the sacred because that is such a rich and beautiful point. I know our listeners or watchers, may think that that in sadness there can be the sacred, but I think of the comment of one of my mentors, Father Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar who told me once, he said, Phil, I never learned anything important after the age of 35 by any success I had.
Phil Jackson (00:29:51):
He said it all came from failure. It all came from sadnesses. It all came, the real learning, the real depth of learning. He also talks about how, in what he calls the second half of our life, the aim is to learn to then give self away. To your point that we learn to give ourselves away. And that the goal of that, the end of that, from a psychological standpoint, a secular standpoint is this funny thing called wisdom. That by giving ourselves away we can actually acquire wisdom. What do you think about wisdom?
Phil Jackson (00:30:33):
I appreciate that. And I've read Richard Rohr's work and I recommend that everybody read it. It's excellent, it's wise. It's very moving. I'll address that because you've already addressed it from a theological standpoint more eloquently than I could. So I'll talk about it as a social scientist. There are two kinds of intelligence as defined by a famous British social psychologist named Raymond Cattell in the early 1970s, he talks about fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is what you've got just to the max when you're in your twenties and early thirties. I mean this stuff is just coursing through...your ability to analyze, to multitask, to get jobs done, to learn the answers to new problems, to come up with solutions very quickly. That's fluid intelligence. Young people have it in a big way.
Arthur Brooks (00:31:24):
It's one of the reasons they're coming up with new solutions to old problems is generally speaking, what's going on with people in the twenties and thirties. It's also the reason that physicists and chemists generally speaking, do their Nobel Prize winning work, usually by around the age of 32 or 33, as a matter of fact. It used to be in the twenties. Quantum mechanics was actually developed by Paul Dirac, who is a physicist in the early 20th century who invented the whole idea when he's 26, won the Nobel prize at 30, said that as a physicist is better off dead before he's reached his 30th year as a result. But that's all fluid intelligence. Here's the good news. That's only one kind of intelligence. There's another intelligence curve that starts increasing through your thirties and forties and fifties and can stay high through your sixties and seventies, even your eighties which is your crystallized intelligence.
Arthur Brooks (00:32:18):
And that's your ability to synthesize ideas and bring them into new ways of thinking. It's extraordinary when you get into your fifties, particularly when you teach. You're a teacher. I mean you're a priest, but you're a teacher. You're helping people understand the messages that come from Holy scripture and synthesizing different ideas and bringing them to the pulpit. And I'm sure as sure as I'm sitting here, even though we've never talked about this, that you're a better preacher at 56 than you were at 36 because you have more crystallized intelligence. And that's another way of saying wisdom. Wisdom is bringing ideas together. That's the reason that people need to think about their careers in a very integrated way. All the young people watching us today, you're going to make your bones in your career with your fluid intelligence. But by the time you're in your thirties and forties, you've got to start thinking about ways that you can pass on your ideas. You can share what you know, that you can synthesize things that you can teach, that you can be a mentor and crafting a full life is one in which you invent earlier and you instruct later. That's actually what Richard was talking about because instruction, teaching is that the essence of giving of yourself, giving what you know, helping people to be better on the basis of what you can share.
Phil Jackson (00:33:31):
I love that. By the way, your column on just that, on aging, I thought was brilliant. At least at my age, it really hit me, and touched me deeply. Let's switch to the American educational system for just a second. We know that, as we were talking earlier that obviously this year, this coming academic year or the next one is kind of up in the air as to schools closing, classes moving online, students and families unsure whether schools will reopen. We don't just learn academic things as part of the experience. We learn how to socialize with one another. We learn interaction, we learn, hopefully, broadening of our minds. We might say in a way that part of what happens at a place like Amherst over your four years, you should be maturing. Do you think what we're going through now with the pandemic and having to go online, do you see any effects that might touch that area of growth and learning?
Arthur Brooks (00:34:55):
Yeah, I do. And obviously I can see the costs, but I'm also seeing some benefits too. To begin with maybe some people are watching us thinking about should I defer, should I wait a semester? And the answer is no. Why? Because next fall is probably going start weird and end well. That's what the data say. That's most likely a semester where you're half online and half in person or something. That will be an ancient memory and there's a lot that we can actually learn from that because we're getting better and better alternative teaching methods and students will be part of the experiment in doing that. So I'm recommending to people that they they not defer. They take an opportunity for actually learning in a new way. It's completely temporary. The gist of your question is a little bit different.
Arthur Brooks (00:35:44):
Are we sacrificing the socialization that is an important part of higher education? Answer is obviously yes. I mean when you went to college, I think you went to college in 1981 at Amherst and you grew up. I mean 18 to 22, these were formative years. [laughter] I know you're still working on it. We all are. I know the dirty secret of being in your mid-fifties is you realize that you're never really grown up. You socialize, you grow up because you're exposed to difficult things. You're exposed to risky ideas, different ways of thinking, things that maybe threaten your old paradigms. That's part of growing up that comes from socialization, learning together as a matter of fact. Now here's a problem in higher ed today that's actually different than in the early 1980s when you went to college successfully and I went to college unsuccessfully and almost immediately dropped out.
Arthur Brooks (00:36:41):
The difference is that we've actually taken a lot of the socialization experiences that lead to a lot of benefit out of higher ed. And I know a lot of us are really quite worried about that. You find, for example, that the in loco parentis experience is sort of making sure that a lot of people are exposed to less risky ideas. It's extraordinary to me the extent to which, on college campuses, people are protected from hearing things they disagree with. That's a big problem because that's actually cutting down on the resiliency of our students and we're not serving them very well. So I wonder to the extent to which we've been actually living up to our socialization function to begin with. Either way, come back to my first point, which is this is a highly temporary situation and we need to look for the best that we can get out of it. Recognizing that by the spring of 2021, things are going to be normal and we're going to go on with our lives.
Arthur Brooks (00:37:38):
Okay. We heard it here. Thank you, sir. I love hearing that. Let me, if you don't mind, I'd like to open up a a more personal dialogue if we can. We talked a little bit earlier about how in calling the spiritual masters tradition, certainly in the Christian tradition, I know in the Buddhist tradition, in the Islamic tradition, that there's always been this group called mystics.
Phil Jackson (00:38:14):
The mystics bring us to a description of what they call experiences with the divine. In those variances with the divine, they almost uniformly, universally describe those experiences as being what they call unitive, or that is that they somehow, when they encounter the divine, they walk away with a sense that all things are one, where all things are in unity. All things are of the same creator. I was thinking, as I mentioned earlier, about Thomas Merton's fourth and walnut experience. And I know you've described an experience you had with our lady of Guadalupe when you were young, when you were 15. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Arthur Brooks (00:39:10):
When I was 15 years old, I had the opportunity to visit the shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City. I was not Catholic. I was raised in a Christian home. I was raised in a Protestant Christian home and I didn't know any Catholics, but I remember sitting contemplating the tilma ofJuan Diego in Guadalupe and I remember it's a rather extraordinary thing by the way. The image of the Virgin Mary and the tilma of Juan Diego. And this is at a time in the 16th century when the Spaniards were brutally suppressing the indigenous people trying to convert them to Catholicism with complete lack of success. And what happened, this appearance, believed still today by most Catholics, that the appearance, the apparition of our Lady of Guadalupe to an indigenous peasant Juan Diego, she appeared as a woman of mixed race. Now sounds normal to us today.
Arthur Brooks (00:40:12):
That is super radical at the time, the idea of somebody of mixed race and what that did, and it was imprinted on his tilma, which, and again, some people believe in it, some people don't. But in point of fact, this image of a woman of mixed race saying, you are my beloved son had this incredible catalytic impact on people. There were 9 million conversions in the next decade. That's how radical unity works. That's when we come together as people and we can believe something bigger than ourselves. When we recognize the what the Buddhist call the emptiness, the illusion that we are somehow separate. I realized that they feel that you and I are different beings, but in point of fact, I don't fully exist without the existence of Phil. I mean that's what that is really saying.
Arthur Brooks (00:41:00):
Whether it's the Buddhist tradition of the Catholic tradition and that had such a big impact on me. I didn't know how big an impact that had on me until many years later. I converted to Catholicism when I was 16 because of that, which is not nothing, but now I look back on it and I recognize that the true moral and mystical importance of that was happening without me knowing. And this is an important thing for all of us to recognize that the mystical moments, the hinge moments in our spiritual lives, they might be happening right now and we don't know until later. Most experiences are only recognized as such retrospectively, and that's why we have to be so careful about the sacred. That's why we have to remember that every moment of our lives is potentially the moment of our mystical transformation. This might be the epiphany right now. There might be somebody watching us right now and then who thinks about it and she thinks about it. And in a few weeks she says, something's changed for me because retrospectively it turns out, I mean, probably not, but that's a really important thing to keep in mind. All of my most mystical experiences in my life, they've shown themselves to me. They've revealed themselves to me after the fact. That's how mysticism works. That's an incredible gift.
Phil Jackson (00:42:18):
It really is. You made me think when you said that you said it so beautifully, but I was thinking of one of our professors at Amherst College. There was a guy named Bob Thurman taught Buddhist studies back in the eighties, seventies, eighties, and maybe into the nineties. Ended up going to Columbia. But I took a class on Buddhism with him and he had us read this text, a Mahayana texts that he had translated himself. It ended, the high point of the text was when the bodhisattva who is the central figure of this text was able through silence to declare that the nature of non-duality was in fact, the answer to the question, what is non-duality with silence. I was 19 or 20 when I read that and had no idea what that meant. And it wasn't until about six years ago after being a priest for over 20 years, that one day out of the blue that came, that moment came back to me and I understood what that concept meant. It came back years later, and I was able to understand the mystical truth at the heart of the obliteration of non-duality.
Arthur Brooks (00:43:38):
That doctrine of emptiness and the non-duality, the illusion of individuality is something that takes many, many years too. I had a very similar experience. As a matter of fact, I remember when I was 20 years old reading Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel, which is a great book and everybody should read it. It's not to be mistaken with Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is a kind of a pseudo Buddhist book and I don't recommend it, but Zen and the Art of Archery is really a very profound book. And it introduces this concept, this sort of mystical question of what is the sound of one hand clapping? I contemplated it. And of course nothing came to me. And then when I was many, many years later, when I was studying in Dharamsala and the Himalayan foothills with the Tibetan Buddhists, I was learning to meditate with the Tibetan Buddhist monks.
Arthur Brooks (00:44:27):
And I was studying this concept of the illusion of the individual. In other words, we all have common roots and we're simply different manifestations of the same common roots. And I realized that the question, what is the sound of one hand clapping, is not a question. It's an answer. So who is Arthur, me, in the absence of Phil? And the answer is it's the sound of one hand clapping. It doesn't exist and it took me three decades to figure that one out. Right. But it's important because those are the mystical questions that if we actually can focus on them, can contemplate them, they can actually help to help us, that can help us understand our deep why or deep purpose or deep meaning. And that's really a nutritious thing to do. That's worth contemplating during our coronavirus lockdown.
Phil Jackson (00:45:20):
Exactly. I'm getting messages that I've got to stop asking you questions, although I feel like I could ask you questions for hours.
Arthur Brooks (00:45:32):
Yeah, I know we're just getting started and I'm looking forward to our lunch together in New York coming up.
Phil Jackson (00:45:37):
Let, me just quickly ask you before I go to these, I'm going to pick some, but I'm going to ask you, we talked earlier this afternoon about...you made Camino de Santiago. Could you, say what that experience is like for you?
Arthur Brooks (00:45:52):
So the Camino de Santiago is an ancient pilgrimage, is a 1000 year old Catholic pilgrimage that walks across the North of Spain. So it's somewhere, depending on how much of it you do, between 160 and 800 kilometers. It's on foot, it's hot, it's blisters, it's staying in not very nice hostels. It's terrible. And it's the most beautiful thing ever. And so pilgrims have been walking the Camino de Santiago to help understand the nature of their belief for these last thousand years, to the cathedral of Santiago, which is the site of the remains of Saint James the Great, who is the brother of Saint John, one of the apostles of Jesus. Spanish believers particularly believe that that his remains showed up in Santiago. He buried there. It's an incredible experience.
Arthur Brooks (00:46:45):
Now, pilgrimages are nothing new. The Hindus have been doing pilgrimages for 6,000 years. The Catholics and the Christians have been doing it only for the last 2000 for the obvious reasons. But pilgrimage is a very important thing because one of the things that we need to understand is that one of the barriers to our spiritual development is that we think of it as a task. We think of our religiosity, our faith, our getting in touch with ourselves spiritually. It's just, it's a bunch of work. And who's got the time, I mean, reading ancient texts, sitting in meditation, praying, you know, being in communion with other believers. What a hassle. Right? And the truth of the matter is that only when you can cross the concept from task to opportunity, from responsibility to adventure. Can you actually understand the deep import of this for our lives and a pilgrimage brings this to life.
Arthur Brooks (00:47:39):
So everything is a metaphor. There's a pebble in your shoe. Well, that's your next problem at work. You've got a blister. Somebody broke up with you. One foot in front of the other because you're getting to Santiago and Santiago is a certain point of your life that's not more important than any other, and yet is the place you're going to go and just understanding yourself. I'm telling you, Phil, I'm never going to be the same. I recommend it to everybody, that we think about pilgrimage because you'll understand your life that much better.
Phil Jackson (00:48:09):
Absolutely. You know, wow. Sorry. I'm about to start talking with you.[
Arthur Brooks (00:48:18):
Let's go more. [laughter] Let's keep going man.
Phil Jackson (00:48:19):
I just wanted to tell you about the pilgrimage that I took with some kids from my parish in Detroit. We made the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick, which is the Holy Mountain of Saint Patrick and on the West coast of Ireland. And it was quite an experience. I'll tell you later. Let me ask you this question. I like this one. How could new graduates prioritize building happiness when planning for their future?
Arthur Brooks (00:48:49):
It's imperative that they do exactly that. And one of the ways that we do that is by remembering some of the basics that we talked about before. So remember that the challenge and the opportunity in life is not money, power, pleasure and prestige. It's not. It's faith, family, friends, and work where you can serve others, lift other people up. Now the first thing that people are thinking about, that graduates are thinking about when they're going out into the labor market is what's the best job for me, right? I mean, those are the lucky ones, by the way. I teach graduates. I teach MBA students at the Harvard business school and they're all working like crazy. There's no problem with that, but it's a tough labor market. So I'm sympathetic to that. But in the best of times it's what's the best job for me.
Arthur Brooks (00:49:32):
And the answer is that in which you can serve others, in which you can earn your success or you can sense your own accomplishment. Thank God we live more or less than a time and place where people can make a living, where we have opportunities, where we have options, where we have labor markets, where we can make that so. But even when we don't, it's the opportunity of our lifetime to surround ourselves with work, with worthy endeavor that we can sanctify, that we can offer up because we're serving other people. And because there is a sense of actually doing something meaningful, doing something that creates value. And I don't care if you're folding laundry, you're taking care of children, you're volunteering or working for an investment bank or your professor at Amherst College. It's really all the same. Earn success and serving others. That's the most important criteria to be thinking about. And the sooner that we get that straight in our heads, the sooner that we can do, the sooner that we can be able to manage our unhappiness and managing ecosystem of happiness that we can bring to other people, which is really beautiful and sacred thing to do.
Phil Jackson (00:50:38):
Is there nothing sadder than the thought of going through a life at the end of which we can discern no meaning.
Arthur Brooks (00:50:49):
A lot of people do this. A lot of people find this., One of the things I'm writing about, you referred to an article I wrote in the Atlantic last summer about professional decline and I'm actually writing it up into a book right now that'll be coming out next year. It will be out with Penguin and I'm just learning so much. I worked on it all day today and I'm learning so much. I'm talking to people who, the biggest problem with the midlife crisis that people have with their work is that they're really good, they're really accomplished, but they don't have purpose. They don't have meaning. And the only source of meaning is not going to come ever, ever from the money or the power or the prestige or the fame that actually comes from it.
Arthur Brooks (00:51:31):
Those are false idols. It's interesting. There's a party game. You know that when we talk about this, and again, this comes from the ancient Dominicans who talk about the substitutes for joy. And the substitutes for God. Money, power, pleasure, honor, which means prestige and fame. And I'll ask people, what's your idol? And put them in order. So money, power, pleasure, fame, easy to remember. What's the one that you're least attracted to, right? What's the one that doesn't attract you at all? For me, it's power, right? You know, I was president of a think tank in DC for 11 years. It was a chore to have power other over other people. And I hate it when people have power over me. So it's easy for me to pat myself on the back, you know, Hey, I'm super virtuous.
Arthur Brooks (00:52:12):
I don't care about power, but let's move up the line a little bit, right? And it turns out that all of us can recognize this idol that we fought, that we're in thrall of. And it's an interesting, it's a dangerous thing. Don't fall prey to the idols. Remember that your true bliss is going to come from the four virtuous goals: faith, family, friendship, and work. In other words, love. Different manifestations of love. Work is love. Family is love. Friendship is this platonic love. That's at the heart of really what brings meaning. And faith is love of God and God's love for us. Or if you're a secularist, even if you're an atheist, it's love for all of your surroundings so that you can bring more good to others. It's such a beautiful thing to remember that. Again, I'm saying, I've fallen prey to the idols many, many times. I'm just struggling, struggling like everybody else to get my priorities in order.
Phil Jackson (00:53:09):
What...oh, sorry, I keep being tempted to ask you my questions. Let's see. How about this question? Someone writes the effects of COVID-19 are
Phil Jackson (00:53:26):
so overwhelmingly negative for so many. How can they find happiness in the midst of it?
Arthur Brooks (00:53:33):
So one of the greatest...well there are basically three complaints for people who are not in harm's way. In other words, they're unlikely to suffer grave danger from the disease--death--or lose their jobs. Thankfully most people are not in the situation of dying or being permanently unemployed or even temporarily unemployed. Many people will, and this is a different situation, but I'm talking about most people who are suffering despite that, the reason their sufferings cause basically three things: disappointment, uncertainty and loneliness. So disappointment is basically, and again, we probably have some seniors at Amherst who are watching us, and my son is a senior in college. My oldest son is a senior in college, graduating from Princeton and you know, he's home like everybody else.
Arthur Brooks (00:54:25):
He's doing his precepts and his lectures online, he's writing his senior thesis and he's super disappointed. He won't admit it because he thinks you know, graduation. Who cares? That's just a piece of paper. He's super disappointed and everybody's disappointed. Look, I'm disappointed. I travel. I do. I do 175 speeches a year. I live to get on stage and talk to people and meet people. I'm at the 99th percentile of extroversion. Everybody, I'm looking at a camera right now, but I'm thinking of you and I love you. It's pathological practically. So I'm really disappointed at the stuff that I'm not doing. People are missing...they missed Easter, Passover, their weddings. The problem is that they're thinking about it in the wrong way because disappointment is not the same thing as regret. Regret is something that we'll ruminate on so that we can learn from it and behave differently.
Arthur Brooks (00:55:18):
Disappointment is a very similar cognition, but it doesn't involve your agency. There's nobody watching me here who's responsible for the COVID-19 epidemic unless you were patient zero and even then you didn't do it on purpose. So ruminating on what you're missing, all of this is reinforces disappointment. So I recommend that people start the day with an empowering reminder. I am disappointed. It is true, but I didn't do anything. So therefore I should not face regret. And as a result of this, I choose to move forward. Uncertainty is the same kind of thing. We have a tendency to mistake the uncertainty around this. We don't know what's going to happen with risk. Something we can manage. How do we try to treat it like risk? We binge on news. We watch three or four hours a day of CNN or look at the Johns Hopkins coronavirus website. But that's a mistake because you can't do it. And the same thing with loneliness. We can manage loneliness by understanding the social, psychological basis of it, by understanding that we need more contact with the people that are touchable and more eye contact by using Zoom and getting off of social media. But a little knowledge goes a long way.
Phil Jackson (00:56:26):
Wow. That's good stuff. That's good stuff. What about this one? What trends do you see in the changes of college students' want list during this pandemic?
Arthur Brooks (00:56:41):
I'm doing my office hours on Zoom every day. I've learned to use it, we've all learned to use Zoom. I'll set up my, I'll be sitting here at my desk and, and I'll have a queue and every 20 minutes I say goodbye to a student and I let another student in from the waiting room. And actually it's good as far as it goes, but I'm hearing a lot of the same lament and that really is a lot about, about seeing people. And they're sorry they didn't appreciate the value of cohort enough, they don't appreciate what it meant to be in community quite enough. And now it's gone. They've said, you know, my graduating MBA students, they're leaving. They're going to go off to their jobs.
Arthur Brooks (00:57:28):
They're not going to see most of their class again until they come back for their reunions. And they're really, really sad about that. And they're also suffering because they're in quarantine. Some of them alone, most of them are not alone. So I wind up giving a lot of the same advice and it's something we just touched on a minute ago. Not to be too technical about it, but there's a neurotransmitter that functions as a hormone called oxytocin produced by the human brain. And you get it in response to touch and with eye contact. And when you don't get it, you physically suffer, you feel lousy. And so people will say, I wake up and my back hurts and I don't feel rested. And the reason is because you're not getting enough oxytocin. So one of the things that I'm telling students, I'm telling everybody, is that you actually need a 22 second hug therapeutically every two hours to maximize your oxytocin levels.
Arthur Brooks (00:58:18):
So if somebody is touchable in your environment, go touch. I've got a 17 year old daughter here and she's like, get away from me, but my wife fortunately is not shunning me. This is what it's like to live with a social scientist. We've got to hug now. The other thing is to get more eye contact. And that means using this technology. I talked a minute ago about social media. Social media is social junk food. To get the oxytocin that we want is like empty calories because you don't get very much with social media. No eye contact, no touch. So people will binge on social media because their brains hurt and they wind up feeling actually lonelier. So everybody watching us, you should limit your social media consumption to a total of 30 minutes a day and then therapeutically used Skype, FaceTime and Zoom and other eye-based technologies for one to two hours a day. And in doing that and with your 22-second hugs on the two hour intervals, you're going to start feeling a lot better.
Phil Jackson (00:59:12):
Wow. That's good stuff. I think we have time for one or two more questions. Let me ask this. One of the qualities you mentioned aren't evident in our national leaders. Do you think they are making a bad situation worse?
Arthur Brooks (00:59:32):
So it's a good question. I contemplate this a lot. I moved from Washington D C last summer. I kind of got out of Dodge and I'm liking it. I've got to tell you, the problem is that we tend to get leaders that reflect us. I don't want it to be true. I'm a professor of Public Leadership at Harvard. I want leaders to be so visionary, and so inflecting, and so entrepreneurial that they bring society along with them for the better. But that's not the way it works generally. Just like in market economies, companies give us what we want more or less. And sometimes it's bad. You know, private markets give us poison gas and pornography stuff that shouldn't exist. Why? Because it's profitable. Why do we have leaders that are antisocial, dysfunctional that reflect our worst characteristics?
Arthur Brooks (01:00:24):
It's because we reward it, you know? Again, we're in a moment of polarization. I understand. We're at a unique time, a really tough time, but it's in our hands. My last book is called Love Your Enemies. Why? Because I'm completely convinced that we can re-inflate our culture. How? By reaching out to people who disagree with us, who challenge us, who maybe even offend us and treating them with love. It's interesting. When I say love, I'm remembering, is to will the good of the other. It's nothing sentimental about that. Dr. King in 1957 he said, in Matthew 541, Jesus said, love your enemies. He didn't say like your enemies because like is a sentimental something. It's a hard thing. But to love them, that's what actually will create the market signals, can create a new social movement during this coronavirus epidemic locked down. By the way, we can change society by demanding something better, by looking within ourselves, by coming out of it better than we went in. And, you know, will it be overnight? Will it be magic like that? No, but I'm actually kind of convinced that--I'm hopeful at least--that good times are going to come, but we're not going to be talking so much about leaders who bring out ou worst angels forever.
Phil Jackson (01:01:38):
The last question. I'm going to stay with that book. Could you tell the story that you tell about the Black Lives Matter gentleman, and the gentleman from the, I forget who the group was, but they're on the National Mall and I think it was maybe the second amendment group or something. Could you remember that story?
Arthur Brooks (01:02:05):
Yeah, I do. It was in September of 2016. No, September of 2017. It was a Trump rally. It was called the Mother of all Trump Rallies with a whole bunch of very pro-conservative and Trump groups, bikers for Trump, voters for Trump, et cetera. And a Black Lives Matter group showed up. Black Lives Matter in greater New York as a matter of fact, which is run by a guy named Hawk Newsome, the guy who's become a great friend of mine since then. He comes with his group and this is going to be trouble. He's got his fist raised in the air, and the bikers for Trump, I mean this is combustible. So the people who were there did what you always do when you want to make things better.
Arthur Brooks (01:02:53):
You take out your cameras and start filming so you can put it on the internet. It's the worst of society. But so there's a million film clips of this. But what happened was not what anybody expected. What happened was the guy who was running the rally saw Hawk Newsome. I mean he's hard to miss. He's six foot five. He's a huge guy and he's decked out in Black Lives Matter gear, and he ended up, the guy running it, he sees him up on stage, says, why don't you come up here and tell the crowd what you're all about. This is America and I'm going to give you two minutes of our platform and see if you can make your case. Now Hawk Newsome, this guy is a really super serious Christian and he says to himself, it's in God's hands. Lord Jesus Christ,
Arthur Brooks (01:03:31):
Give me the words, put them into my mouth. And he walks up on stage and within two minutes he went from them booing to them cheering, Bikers for Trump, cheering for the head of Black Lives Matter of greater New York. How did he do it? He did it by saying, I love this country. I want what's better for this country. I'm an American, I'm a Christian. He made unity with this group that he didn't agree with. Nobody came away from this thing saying, Oh boy, you really convinced me. And Hawk Newsome didn't say, why those bikers for Trump, they're making a lot of sense. No. But they understood that they were brothers and sisters because of the unity that came from the things that from their shared, their common loves. He also made the case,
Arthur Brooks (01:04:14):
He explained the Black Lives Matter movement in a way where people were actually listening and not booing. And you know what's my point? You can say he did it wrong. You can say he's wrong. The bikers for Trump are wrong. The point is this, my friends, is possible. Loving your enemies is not a theoretical construct. It's not pie in the sky. It's not ridiculous. People laugh it a generation after generation, but look, it changed the world 2000 years ago and it can change your life and my life today. You've just got to do it. You got to be a little radical. You got to be like Hawk Newsome, go where you're not invited. Say the things that people don't expect and do it with warm heartedness, answer contempt with love and maybe magic is going to happen. It did that day. I think it can happen again and I think we should all be down with that. We should be trying to make that kind of our goal.
Phil Jackson (01:05:05):
Arthur, this has been a true joy for me. I cannot thank you enough. I hope I will get to see you at some point. Maybe in New York City.
Arthur Brooks (01:05:14):
We'll make a point of it, Phil. They're going to let us out. They're going to let us out sooner than later. And you and I are going to break bread and we're going to be friends for a long time and I appreciate it.
Phil Jackson (01:05:27):
Oh, well, thank you for being with us. I want to hand it back over to Madame Biddy. Would you take it from here?
Biddy Martin (01:05:36):
Thank you, Phil. Thank you both so much. What a wonderful conversation to listen to in on.Thank you so much for being here, Arthur. We really appreciate it.
Phil Jackson (01:05:50):
Thank you, Biddy.
Biddy Martin (01:05:52):
Phil, thank you. What a wonderful interlocutor you are. We have a final event for now on Thursday at five o'clock, I'll be asking questions of Zeke Emmanuel, Amherst class '79 and oncologist and bioethicist who is also Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at University of Pennsylvania. So please join us, and everyon,e stay well