Arthur Brooks on How to Break Free from the Striver’s Curse in Midlife

What if everything you’ve been taught about happiness and success is upside down?

In this episode of Midlife Chrysalis, Chip Conley talks with Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, bestselling author, and former French horn prodigy, about his remarkable journey from the concert stage to the world of behavioral science. Together, they unpack why strivers burn out, how our brains shift from fluid to crystallized intelligence, and the simple formula that can turn midlife from a crisis into a transformation.

Don’t miss this inspiring conversation. Listen now and start rethinking your own second curve.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:06 Arthur Brooks’ origins and family background

02:59 Religious upbringing and conversion to Catholicism

04:56 Navigating academia and faith in secular environments

07:08 Early music training and struggles to become the best

13:06 Striver mentality and American entrepreneurship DNA

16:41 Leaving music for economics and behavioral science

20:52 Imposter syndrome and skills learned from performance

22:33 Becoming CEO of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)

29:05 Burnout, midlife shift, and vital plane encounter

32:19 Plane encounter with a famous figure and reflection on decline

35:47 Realizing the need for a second curve

38:10 How we move from fluid to crystallized intelligence

42:43 Airbnb and the role of “modern elder” wisdom

45:02 Advice for shifting into careers built on crystallized intelligence

46:56 The danger of pride and Dante’s frozen Satan metaphor

49:40 Learning to want less: the secret to second-curve happiness

54:39 Editing life instead of accumulating - reverse bucket lists

55:55 Generativity, religion, and aging with meaning

57:16 Policy thoughts on midlife education and wisdom schools

1:01:59 Wisdom bumper sticker

1:05:28 Closing reflections from Chip

Learn more about MEA at ⁠https://www.meawisdom.com/

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
What do you believe that's not true and how does it turn into
something that's similar that istrue?
The things that are true and good and right in life, they
have a, they have a, a fake version.
Here's what Mother Nature says is going to make you happy and
fulfilled and grow as you get older.
Use people. They're there for your
satisfaction. They're you're there for your

(00:21):
advancement. Love things more stuff, baby,
and worship yourself because you're the center of it all.
The real formula, based on the best behavioral science and all
of the wisdom, religious and philosophical traditions of any
value. Here it is.
Use things with abundance and joy.
Use them, but don't love them. Why?

(00:41):
Because you love people. People are made for love and
only people are made for love. And worship the divine.
Welcome to the Midlife ChrysalisPodcast with Chip Conley, where
we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a chrysalis, a time
of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful

(01:02):
chapter of your life. Welcome to the midlife
chrysalis. I'm Chip Conley.
And I'm pretty. I'm sort of a fanboy.
This guy, Arthur Brooks, I reached out to him six years
ago, a little over six years agowhen an article came out.
He's got an Atlantic column, andit went viral.

(01:24):
And it was about how your your midlife career decline may be
happening faster than you think it will.
And I told him about Mea and we started spending time together.
And then ultimately he wrote about MEA and Me and his book
From Strength to Strength, whichis #1 New York Times bestseller.

(01:45):
What I love about Arthur is thathe is has a voracious appetite
for learning. He speaks as if he's been had
four cups of coffee and some chocolate.
You were not going to be able tolisten to this one on double
speed speed if that's what you normally do.
But what I really appreciated this week is he's been teaching
here at MEA in Santa Fe. And there's a humility to him

(02:08):
that is not as noticeable on stage.
He's a he's very good at his self deprecating humor, but
there's a humility in person that is just quite notable.
I know that the group that is this has been our largest
workshop we've ever had at MEA this week.
They just love, love him so much.

(02:28):
So I think you're going to enjoythis.
Definitely make sure you listen to the very end because as many
of you know, at the end of my podcast episodes, I ask someone
about their wisdom bumper sticker and his was one of the
best we've had in in the midlife, Crystalis.
So enjoy it and I'll talk to youat the end.

(02:50):
Arthur Brooks. Hi, Chip.
I'm glad to be with you. I'm so happy to be here and
here, here, here in, in. Where are you?
Where? Tell us where you are.
Somewhere outside Santa Fe, NM, in an undisclosed location.
Area 51, I think we're in Area 51.
We're in New Mexico at the Modern Ella Academy, which you
founded in beautiful places where people could have

(03:11):
fellowship with each other, share their values, share their
life journey in a place that's stunningly beautiful.
I mean, I've my father was born in New Mexico and talked about
it for the rest of his life, andwhen you come here you
understand why. And tell that origin story.
So let's let's go through your origins, right?
Not everybody knows it in terms of your parents and your family.

(03:32):
And how did it make you who you are today?
My father was born on in the Navajo Nation in New Mexico.
His father was the the leader ofthe director of a mission school
and and it completely captured his imagination.
We had, you know, Navajo art andrugs and things our whole lives
in our house as if we had all been from New Mexico.

(03:54):
You know, my father was born there and later grew up in
Chicago. My mother was from South Dakota
and they met in College in Seattle.
Very rural roots. Oh yeah, for a guy I consider
very urbane, Yeah, I mean, it's.Interesting.
Yeah. And, and, and they, they met in
College in Seattle. They went to Seattle Pacific
College, which is an evangelicalschool in the Pacific Northwest,
and then later my father taught there.

(04:15):
My father went back and did his Graduate School work as a
mathematician. My mother was an artist.
And I grew up in Seattle becausethey always dreamed about going
back to the place where they hadmet and fallen in love.
And my father, for the rest of his life, complained about the
weather in Seattle and said it'snot like New Mexico.
Yeah, because it's. Gloomy and all those weather
fronts coming down from the Bering Strait and every 36 hours
another rainstorm all the way through January, February,

(04:37):
March, April and and, and if you're from there, fine, it's
OK, but if you're not from therestuff.
So what were your roots when it came to your Christianity or
Catholicism and how did that have an influence on you?
Clearly as an influence on you today, but have you, Has that
been a pretty consistent part ofyour life?

(05:01):
Yeah, my parents were my both myparents come from an evangelical
missionary background. As a matter of fact, that my, my
mother's grandparents were missionaries to the Zulus and,
and then went on the way from immigrating from Denmark and
then and then settled in South Dakota and started a farm,
etcetera. And my father, as I said, was
born at the mission school in, in New Mexico.

(05:24):
So that was, that was my background.
Then. I was raised in a, you know,
very religious household. I mean, not, not a starchy
traumatic experience that a lot of people often talk about.
It was loving and it's great. My parents were great parents.
And and then I had a mystical experience.
When I was 15 years old in Mexico at the Shrine of
Guadalupe and I discovered, who knows, I was 15, but I

(05:47):
discovered I was Catholic and. And I knew no.
Catholics. It was a real weird thing.
And I came home and I said. I want to visit the.
Local Catholic Church, my parents look at each other,
they're like, guess it's better than drugs a little.
And and I converted at 16, as a matter of fact.
So I was the first one on eitherside of my family and then then
later on I married a Catholic girl who was non practicing.

(06:08):
But little by little by little she found her faith and, and now
it's really the center of my life now.
And I'm, I'm a behavioral scientist.
So that's not what I do for a living.
I'm not a full time evangelist, but the, the, the life of the
soul is really, really critically important to me.
And I work with people of all different faiths and religions.
I work a lot with the Dalai Lama.
I have teachers and southern India who've taught me a great
deal about about the relationship with God through

(06:30):
the Hindu religion, etcetera. I've worked with imams, I've
worked with off and on with rabbis over my whole life.
So I have an ecumenical understanding of the
relationship with God, but I'm apracticing Catholic.
One quick question and then I want to go back to your French
horn days. So you have been in academia or
in, you know, a think tank. You were CEO of the American

(06:53):
Enterprise Institute and Long story short is in generally
secular society and how has yourfaith either been the bulwark
for you in terms of your relationship with spirituality
and your soul in environments that were not traditionally or

(07:13):
not typically very faith driven?It was never a problem.
It was really never a problem. People often ask because you
know, I'm I'm. Openly a Christian guy.
It must be hard for you. I mean, I'm professor at
Harvard, which is not known as this, you know, big bastion or
Christianity or any religion forthat matter, must be hard for
you. Like, no, everybody's super nice
to me. There's no problem with that.

(07:34):
And really it comes from if I'm nice to them, you know, that's
the thing. The problem that a lot of people
of faith have is that they're intolerant to people who are not
of faith. And that's the wrong way to do
it. You're doing it wrong.
If that's the case, and so nobody bothers me, I mean, maybe
some people think it's a little bit weird, but here's the
fundamental difference Ship. I have some of the most
brilliant colleagues in the world at Harvard University and

(07:57):
just in my life working as a scholar.
It's just astonishing the thingsthat I learned from people all
around me. And we all share this love for
the creation. We all share this love for
science and ideas and the marvels that are all around us.
And some people are more curiousabout the Creator.
And some people are less interested in the creator For

(08:19):
me, a fulsome experience, intellectual experience, is to
be a good scientist and also be really curious about where it
comes from and. And the truth of the matter is
that these are utterly compatible because.
You. Can't find faith in reason and
reason and faith sharpen each other in this so much the same
way that if you were an art historian and you wanted to

(08:41):
learn a whole lot about Picasso,you should learn about Picasso's
paintings. You should learn about the man
you know, that's that's the mostthat's the most interesting wrap
around intellectual experience for me and some.
People. Don't see it that way, and you
know that's fine too. And so you went to high school
in Seattle? Yeah.
And then you didn't go to college.
I tried to go to college. I sort of tried to go.

(09:03):
I, I didn't actually, the problem is I didn't try to go to
college. I went to college, but I didn't
try to go to college. So I was, I went to California
Institute of the Arts to be and and I was, I was a serious
musician from the time I was 8 years old.
And where did that come from? So my mother was a good amateur
violinist and a good amateur pianist.
She was a professional painter. She was a professional artist,
but she was very, very good musician.

(09:24):
And, and they had this, they, they, they recognized early on
that I had an aptitude for music.
So I started violin at four and piano at 5:00, and I learned to
read music before I learned to read.
And so that was really the vernacular that I had.
We listened to a lot of classical music.
I was really interested in it. I took up the French horn, who
knows why, and they gave me a French horn and I was really
good at it. And it stuck.

(09:45):
And my parents became determinedthat that I was going to be the
world's greatest French horn player.
And you might say, my goodness is setting up this poor kid for
a pathology fairpoint, but it really gave me a lot of goals
and a lot of direction and a lotof discipline.
And so that's all I did. That's all I wanted to do.
And that carried you through your 20s?
Yeah, it absolutely did. So I went to and, and I was
getting ready to go to college and I and I had a a teacher that

(10:07):
was teaching that I was teach studying with in the summers.
And so when you're a serious classical musician, your summers
are spent at music festivals. I used to spend my summers at
the Tanglewood Music Festival inWestern Massachusetts.
That's a beautiful place. Yeah.
And my teachers were in the Boston Symphony, but I also
study with other people at otherfestivals.
And the teacher that I most liked was a guy I was teaching
at the California Institute of the Arts outside Los Angeles.

(10:29):
So that's where I went to Conservatory.
It's a it's a good school. It's actually more famous for.
You know, Disney had its animators there and it's
actually was founded by Disney originally.
But anyway, they have. And I did that and didn't take
it seriously, drop my required classes, was put on academic
probation and kind of encouragedto pursue my success elsewhere.

(10:51):
How old were you when you graduated from college?
It was a month before my 30th birthday, so I took a decade
off. That was my gap decade.
Yeah. So I left and I was, instead of
transferring to another conservatories, had an
opportunity to do is start again.
I was offered a job playing chamber music.
And so I was I went on tour at night.
I went pro at 19 and toured witha bunch of with a brass quintet

(11:12):
called the Annapolis Brass Quintet, which was it was only
called that because during the Vietnam War, a bunch of guys got
drafted and went to the Naval Academy band and started their
own professional ensemble. There was just a quirk of
history. And it's a good.
It was a good. Brass Quintet made a lot of
albums, did a lot of touring. I was on tour seven months a
year by the time I was 19 years old.
Then later I I took a job in theBarcelona Symphony and and moved

(11:35):
to Barcelona as the associate principal French horn in
Barcelona. That's where I got married,
started my family, and by the time I was in my late 20s, I
recognized that that's I probably wasn't going to be the
greatest French horn player in the world.
And I had AI had an. Early experience with what a lot
of people have much later in life who are hard course
drivers. So this is.
Explain what this driver is. This driver is somebody who's

(11:56):
completely dedicated to doing things better, doing things
more, living their absolute bestlife on the basis of hard work,
personal responsibility, merit and achievement.
And and there's a lot of good inthat and there's also a lot of
not good in that. That's a, that's a complicated
Rd., But, you know, anybody who's watching this is, they say
midlife. Yeah.

(12:16):
But nobody's listening to more than two or three of your
podcasts who's not a striver. So everybody watching us knows
what a striver is, right? And and a lot of them get into
crisis in the middle of their lives, which is a lot of what I
talk about now. But I had it early.
I had a precocious midlife crisis because in my 20s, I, I
was actually getting worse as a French horn player.
Instead of becoming the world's greatest French horn player,

(12:38):
which was my weird aspiration, Iwas getting worse.
Now there's I, I understand now because I've become a scientist,
behavioral scientist, but because I'm, I do a whole lot of
work in, in neurobiology and, and other parallel areas.
I know what actually was happening to me now, but I
didn't then. I didn't actually understand
physiologically what was wrong. I probably had a small tear in

(13:02):
the muscle in my upper lip and Icould have had that fixed, but I
didn't know and so I just thought it was getting worse.
I went to. The you and Esther were a little
just a little too a little too aggressive.
In that case it. Turns out it was mostly my horn
playing, but yeah, and, and I and I was going to the greatest
teachers in the world. And, and maybe if I practice
harder and, and this is going tosound familiar to a lot of
strivers watching us. It's like what used to be easy

(13:24):
is now hard, and what used to beinteresting now isn't.
So I'm just going to try harder.I'm going to grind, baby, grind
baby. That's what all strivers do.
And I was doing that at 27 and 28.
And my wife, I just got married,this beautiful Catalan girl,
Spanish girl from Barcelona. And she said, I think there's a
lot that you could do besides playing the French horn.
I said that is the first time anybody's ever said that to me.

(13:45):
Literally nobody ever said that to me in my life because I was
nothing without the French horn.I was no one.
I was a void, an emptiness, A nullity without the French horn.
I know it's so weird for people to hear.
Except I know people are watching us right now who feel
like a nullity. Without their thing, without
what they do, they're not human beings.

(14:06):
They're human doings. And that was me.
Let's just talk about Esther fora minute because she's she's
here with you here at the MEA campus.
She travels with me sometimes. I'm on the road 48 weeks a year
now as a touring, as a, as a, a speaker and, and, and weirdly,
she comes with me when we come to a place like this.
Oh well, good, I'm glad she's here.
I was. I was delight meeting her last

(14:27):
night. So she must be scratching her
head and saying, wow, I married a French horn player and like,
And now he's one of the leading experts in the world on
happiness. He's an academic.
He's writing New York Times bestselling books that are #1 on the
list. Or is does she look at you and
just say you're just still that stupid striver you just have

(14:48):
You're striving in new areas? It's it is the same guy, except
with less hair. Yeah, You know, it was.
I had this, it was a thing to behold, Chip.
It was this beautiful head of hair and it was like this total
bait and switch. With my wife, she swears it's
fine. I know she's lying.
That's her job. And.
And yeah, no, she knew that it was.

(15:09):
It's funny because she. Hadn't didn't speak any English
when we met and I didn't speak aword of Spanish when we met.
So we had to understand each other in, in, in more, I think
in, in more sort of luminescent ways, in more transcendent ways.
And that was a great beginning. I couldn't say anything stupid
that she would understand. I couldn't tell any lies that

(15:29):
she would actually get. So the result is, I mean, I
recommend that everybody fall inlove with that in a common
language and. And part of the reason for that
is that what we now know about falling in love is that falling
in love engages the right hemisphere of the brain, your,
all of your verbal capacity and your ability to explain and lie
and prevaricate, that's in the left side of your brain.
And so the result is, if you're managing an early relationship

(15:51):
with the left side of your brain, you're actually not
bonding with the part of your. Brain that actually is.
Supposed to be. Engaged in a permanent pair bond
and, and, and so I couldn't talk.
I mean, I could talk all I wanted, but she's like, I'd say
damn. Like I couldn't have the
slightest idea what she was saying either.
And the result of that was that we bonded that we could.
We crafted an antenna to the divine from our earliest.

(16:11):
Days and and she and that was weird for her right I mean we
would. We lived in Barcelona together
for when we were first married for, you know, years and a few
years, and we would go on vacation together and I would
take my horn if we were going upto the mountains for three or
four days into the Pyrenees, I would take my horn and I
practiced. I would practice a couple hours
a day off in a field some places.

(16:33):
She's like, what's up with this guy?
I mean, this guy is like it justalways, always push, push, push,
push. And there were a couple of
things that were going on. One it was me, but the other is
I was an American and Americans are, I mean, we're we're wired
different. Yeah.
We were strivers. Yeah.
I mean, it's like. Into our DNA.
And that's literally true, by the way.
I mean all that that research onthe hypomanic character of

(16:55):
Americans comes from the fact that America that the single
does entrepreneurial in thing that you can do is immigrate
because but entrepreneurship is about putting capital at risk
and service of audacious rewards.
It's the best. I wrote a textbook on
entrepreneurship on time, and that's that's the best I can do.
It's like crazy risk that you'reable and willing to take and

(17:16):
manage in service of audacious rewards that other people can't
see. That's entrepreneurs in a
nutshell. And that's immigration.
I'm going to put my cultural andlinguistic and religious and
social and emotional capital allat risk.
I'm getting on that boat, man Why?
Because I want something better.I want some better.
And that is a mutation. That is a genetic mutation,

(17:36):
almost certainly. It's not like we found
entrepreneurship on the human genome, but it's absolutely in
the research, we know that it's a, it's strongly genetically
passed on that, that tendency, willingness and ability to take
risk in search of a vision. That's what people do.
And, and it's a mutation in the old country.
It's a mutation. It's a weird thing in Spain.

(17:58):
It's a weird thing in Denmark, where my my ancestors are from,
but it's not a mutation here, man Why?
Because we all came here. This is the great thing about
being from an immigrant nation. And by the way, the big caution
is not being an immigrant nationanymore.
You want America to stop being America.
Stop the immigrants. We're.
Not going to get into some political.
It's not even. Political, you know, I mean for

(18:18):
for me, yeah. Well, it is a political.
Well, I mean. Unfortunately, everything is
political. We talked about you like
tomatoes or onions and be like it's political or something
these days, right? Yeah.
So you went from French horn. How did you make your pathway to
becoming a behavioral scientist?And then ultimately the CEO of a
very large think tank that was that is political.

(18:42):
How what was that pathway like? And how did you know you were on
the right path? Yeah, so I leaving the French
tone was the hardest thing I ever did.
I thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to die
because I was a doing, not a being, right?
And so the thing that I was doing, I was like, I was a
cardboard cut out of a human being.
I was utterly a self objectifying being.

(19:03):
I was success addicted person and my success was waning, which
meant that I was dying. Everybody has a death fear.
For most, it's not physical death.
For most people, it's a threat to who you think you are.
And that's why so many people who are involved in the modern
Elder Academy. They come not because of
ebullience and thrills. They come because of crisis.

(19:24):
And I know him. I've talked to him for years.
Even before I came here for the first time, I was talking to
him. It's like, yeah, I didn't know
who I was. I looked, I woke up in the
morning and I said I'm not the CEO.
I'm not I, you know, I'm, I'm not the guy who owns 23 car
dealerships. I'm not.
So I'm nothing. I've disappeared, right?
And, and that's how I felt. And I had to do something else.
And, and it was my wife who had confidence in me by the time

(19:45):
that we were able to communicate, which after 34
years of marriage has marginallyimproved that.
She said, actually, you're intelligent.
You should study because you'll you'll learn something and
you'll find something new. She had a confidence in that and
she knew I was going to strive and struggle on.
And so I went back to school andand what I found, I was

(20:06):
completely fascinated by behavioral science.
I read these books and I took these classes and I read these
tools. These quantitative tools give
you an ability to understand whypeople tick, why people do the
things that they do. And I had more confidence in it
than I should have at the time. Because the truth.
Is I've had to go way outside the boundaries into philosophy
and religion and spirituality, way outside the boundaries of my

(20:27):
structural equations to be able to understand this.
But at the time, I felt like I had, I felt like I had a secret
weapon. I had the Oracle, I had the ring
by studying this stuff. And so I did a bachelor's degree
in economics. Which is the most powerful in
social sciences analytically. And I was still hungry.
So I was teaching in a music Conservatory by that time.

(20:47):
And I didn't tell anybody I got my bachelor's degree because
when you're a musician and you do something like that, it means
you're not committed with this friend.
When I was in, when I was still a musician, there's a group of
us were hanging around. She was another French horn
player, good horn player. And she comes to us one day and
we're hanging out. She's like, you know, I have an
announcement. I'm like she says, would you get

(21:08):
married or something? Said no, I just got, I just got
admitted to medical school, University of Miami.
I'm going to be a surgeon. Like and, and and that's a big
deal. And, and then she leaves a
little bit later. We're like, see, she didn't have
it. She wasn't one of us.
And that showed a lack of commitment.
And that was it's. Not like we were jealous at all.
We were actually felt she's great.

(21:29):
We liked her. We just felt bad for her that
she had to quit. So I didn't tell anybody.
I was getting my my. The only person who knew was my
wife that I had a bachelor's degree.
And then what nobody else knew is that at night I went and got
a master's degree in economics. I was still hungry.
Still hungry. I.
Was eating and eating and needing and by the end of it I
was just so. Fascinated by the whole deal
that I, I, I, it was time. And so I, I went to start my PhD

(21:53):
and I knew that that was the point at which I was going to be
a different person. I was going to do a new thing.
And I started my PhD at 31 and, and I finished when I was 34
years old. And as a social scientist, I was
a new guy. That was the new opening of the
thing. That was super hard.
That was super hard. I have to say it sounds easy.
Like you'll get a PhD. No, no, I was, I was way older

(22:16):
than the other people. I was way behind in what I had
actually done. I had a master's degree in
economics that was nothing compared to the people that were
coming from India and China thatgraduate degrees in mathematics.
And, you know, they were intellectual powerhouses.
I was buried. And I'm like trying to catch up.
And it was hard. It was really, really, really

(22:36):
hard. Have you in the course of your
life, Arthur? Have you felt the imposter
syndrome as a consistency or is that something because what
you're speaking to right now is,is the potential for imposter
syndrome. Tell, tell us a little bit about
that. Yeah.
I mean, it was just force a personality, ability to perform.

(22:56):
And when I say perform, I don't mean perform as a scientist, but
rather to get up on stage and act like you're doing something.
That's what I'd done for a living.
And so the whole point was my relative strength and all this
stuff was, you know, when I findwhen I finished my PhD in a
cohort of people all across the country that were better.
Trained than me that were more qualified for jobs.

(23:16):
I got job offers for one reason.I could give a job talk like
nobody else. I could put together a
presentation, get up and talk infront of an audience in a way
that the, you know, the other professors would be like.
That was super interesting as opposed to saying that guy's
methods. And then when I really learned
my SO, that's how I got a job, was being a French horn player.
And everything I've learned in life is being a French horn

(23:38):
player. And by the way, everything in
life is easy when you're not holding a French horn.
So I that's what I was doing. And then and when I became an
assistant professor in economicsand public policy, my PhD is in
public policy with with fields and applied microeconomics and
mathematical modeling. I did the stuff I needed to
learn. That was really hard for me.
And then when I became an assistant professor, that was

(24:01):
when I really learned because day after day after day, I was
spending 1012 hours a day on my research.
I was getting the the code from other people that were doing
statistical modeling that I wanted to do.
I was studying the code to learnthe methods.
And that's where I really got myeducation was when I was on
that. It was OJT on the job training.
How did you move into becoming the CEO of AEI?

(24:22):
So I was a professor. For 10 years, three years at
Georgia State and then in the seven years at Syracuse, which
was the top school in the field in public policy.
So it was really a great step upin a wonderful opportunity and I
learned a lot. And I realized that in public
policy, what I was most interested in, besides the
analytical work, I published 60 academic period articles or
something during those 10 years.I published a lot of papers.

(24:43):
I was really interested in the moral case for what a free
society based on, on free enterprises at its best, should
be. I was really interested in one
big thing, which was wiping out poverty.
I had this big epiphany actually, which was everybody in
America, not everybody. Most people sort of think that

(25:04):
poverty's gotten worse, because it always does, and the rich are
getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
When I became a social scientist, an economist in
particular, I realized that's not true.
That isn't true, that from the time that I was a kid until the
time I was an adult, a mature adult in my 30s, that or 40s,
that 80% of the world's worst poverty had been wiped out.

(25:27):
And we just like, that's not a headline.
That's not what you see in the New York Times. 50,000 people
today were pulled out of povertyand and and didn't go to bed
hungry again. There's lots of problems in the
world, but this is like the biggest economic miracle in the
history of planet Earth has taken place since Chip and
Arthur were kids and like. People got to understand this.
And so I started looking for thereason for that.

(25:49):
Why did that happen? And again, I'm not a
fundamentally political guy. I come from, you know, my father
was a college professor, my mother was an artist.
I grew up in Seattle. What do you think they're
politics for? Right.
Well, I mean, I, I, if they're evangelicals and missionaries,
I, you know, in today's world, you would think that they'd be
conservative. They're not.
Yeah. They weren't.

(26:09):
Yeah. I mean, they weren't, I mean,
they were Seattle people and they were, you know, and, and,
and God love them, they're greatparents.
But I started experimenting a little bit with what was
actually making the world free, what was actually setting the
world free. And, and it wasn't the United
Nations, good or bad, or the International Monetary Fund or
the World Bank or, or or USAID and, you know, great stuff,

(26:34):
great stuff and important stuff.It was free trade that was
property rights. It was the rule of law starting
to spread around the world for the first time.
And it was the culture of entrepreneurship in the free
enterprise system that people were seeing for the first time
because of the explosion of global communications coming out
of the United States. And that didn't make me some

(26:55):
sort of conservative guy. It just made me an enthusiast
for wiping out poverty using theonly tool that's ever really
done it. And I found one place that
believed in that in a non partisan way, which is a place
called this crazy think tank in DC that had been founded in the
late 30s called the American Enterprise Institute.
So I started hanging out there. I would come down once a month
from. Syracuse and just hang out
there, have lunch in the lunchroom.

(27:16):
He's that guy. He's like, I don't know, he's a
professor at Syracuse. I talked to the scholars and
they were really enthusiastic about the moral case for what
entrepreneurship and opportunitycould.
Do by the way. Lots of people watching us, some
are Democrats and some are Republicans, but I bet nobody's
saying no, I don't want to, you know, free opportunity society
where people can pull themselvesup.

(27:36):
Everybody wants that, right? And so I said that's what I want
more of. And, and, and then a weird thing
happened when I was 44 years old, this think tank, I'd just
been haunting because I like theideas there.
They were looking for president.Like I had never had Chip.
I'd never had a single employee.I had never raised a dollar.

(27:59):
And this is a big nonprofit organization in Washington, DC
And they had. Offered it to a guy who was the
absolutely the best possible guy.
I mean, on paper, still the bestpossible guy.
And he's like, I don't know. No, they offered to him again.
I don't know. No.
And and they went around the barn for about a year and ran
out of time. And their presidential search,

(28:20):
they were out of time and out ofideas.
And this happens all the time inleadership searches.
Organizations are trying to finda leader and they can't.
It sounds like that should be the easiest thing to do.
No? All the people who really want
it, you don't want them because they're, you know, there's,
it's, it's like, it's like politics.
So they said. And so the guy.
Who just comes down from Syracuse once a month and hangs

(28:42):
out in our lunch room. Let's have him he.
Seems interesting. And so somebody just suggested
it. You want to throw your hat in
the ring? And I did.
And, and at the end of the day, the last words uttered by the
board before, you know, taking aflyer on me was what the hell?
And it was interesting because the guy who later became the
chairman of the board and one ofmy very closest friends, Tully
Friedman, who is that, you know that that the legendary private

(29:02):
equity guy, you know, another Bay Area guy like you.
Yeah, no, I I've met him like a few times.
Yeah, he's a very tough guy, very tough guy, beloved friend
of mine now. And, and he said when I first
met him and he was interviewing me, he said so you want the job
and said frankly, I don't know. I love the American Enterprise
Institute. I believe in the place, but I've
never been ACEO, I've never beena manager.

(29:22):
I don't want to screw this placeup.
And he said don't worry about that.
And I thought he was kind of trying to give me confidence.
Now he's a tough guy. He said, let's say you get the
job. Let's say it doesn't go well.
You can't raise money or motivate the scholars.
We'll fire you and find somebodyelse.
Don't worry about it. And they oddly gave me a whole
lot of confidence. And so they offered me the job.
And the first two years were brutal.

(29:42):
It was at it was 2000, the January 1st, 2009, I took over,
which is in the teeth of the recession we had.
We had blown a 10% hole in the budget just because people
stopped giving philanthropicallyand we were 100%
philanthropically based. No government money, only
contributions. We sold nothing.
We were at the time it was more like 18.

(30:03):
By the time I left, it was more than 50.
But the first two years were super scary.
I was cutting the budget. I was saying goodbye to a lot of
people. I was cutting my own salary.
Esther's like. You're quite a quite the
businessman, aren't you? And, and, and then we, the, it
wasn't that the financial crisisfixed itself, but we, we righted

(30:24):
the ship in a lot of ways and webrought a new, a lot of donors
along the way. And the whole modus operandi was
not, you know, conservative politics or so how boring the
modus operandi of the American Enterprise Institute was a world
with less poverty and more opportunity.
That's what it was really all about.
And so we have a lot of Democrats who given, a lot of
Republicans who give and a lot of liberals who give.
And it's like more opportunity, baby, less poverty.

(30:47):
And that's what the secret saucetends to be.
To go from a budget of 18 million to over 50 million
suggests that you were a very successful leader and yet after
being there for about 10 years you were burned out and your
strivers gene had over been a little overactive.

(31:08):
Talk about that time of your life, like your mid 50s, maybe
your midlife chrysalis during that time, what was going on for
you? Because what I'm, what I really
admire about in you, Arthur, is that in the last five to 710
years, you have remade yourself as somebody, you can see the

(31:33):
roots of it there as a thinker and a thought leader.
And but you're, you're writing and you're speaking and your
activism for points of view thatare very relevant in, you know,
modern culture for midlifers in particular, has made you maybe
the most well known speaker in the world around midlife issues.

(31:54):
So here we are at a midlife wisdom school.
By the way, the best. Thank you.
Everybody who's thinking about coming here, come here.
You're coming back next year. We're having you back for sure.
I was so happy here. Yeah, so long.
Short is like, talk about that last few years because it you,
you could have been the person who sort of just kept striving.

(32:17):
You ultimately wrote a book FromStrength to strength.
It was almost like the book you needed to write for yourself.
Talk about that. Talk about From strength to
strength. Talk about how it was.
In some ways. While it doesn't tell your story
that much, you do tell the storyat the very start about a very
famous person. Whose name?
Who's nameless? Although have you ever named his

(32:38):
name? No, I promised.
My editor I never will. That I was I.
Promised my editor. I'll take it to the grave, OK?
Esther knows. OK.
Yeah, you're right. So I had a.
Lot of good fortune in that. I had changed careers a bunch of
times, so going from French hornplayer to economist was hard.

(32:58):
Going from economist to executive to running a large
organization was hard. But I knew I could do it.
I knew how to do it. I knew actually how to make the
change at that point. What I wasn't.
Prepared for was at changing it completely changing as a person.
Because I'd done these other things because of a skill change
or an ability shift that I wasn't anticipating or a change

(33:20):
in my interests or an opportunity that came along.
But man, my mid 50s was, I actually was early 50s when this
was happening was not what I banked on.
What? Used to be easy.
Became hard. What used to be hard became
impossible. I felt my working memory was was
not and again, I don't drink alcohol.
It's not like I'm or I'm like, you know, smoking a bunch of
weed every night. No, I don't use any substances.

(33:42):
It's like there's no, I exerciseevery day.
I'm I'm living. The I saw you in the gym here
this morning. You too.
I was the healthiest lifestyle Icould possibly live and there's
no cognitively, there was no neurodegenerative problem, but I
was changing and I couldn't explain it and, and, and I
thought to myself, well, I got 2paths.

(34:03):
I can try to understand this because I'm a social scientist.
As a behavioral scientist, I cantry to understand what's
happening to me, or I can ignoreit and grind harder and grind
harder and grind harder. And so I actually sort of in a
way studied both of those paths.And then I had an experience
that you know about that's that,that that started to clarify

(34:24):
what was actually happening to me with the great advantage that
when it was time to change, I knew how to do it right.
I was at my apprenticeship was long past.
I, I know how to change careers,man.
I mean, if I needed to right now, I could probably become a
firefighter. Actually, that's a young man's
game. But anyway, the the story is
that was on an airplane and I overheard a conversation behind

(34:46):
me on the plane and it was nighttime so I couldn't it was dark.
It was a man and I assumed his wife.
I could tell by their voices that they were elderly, probably
actually old and. He was explaining to his wife
that he might as well be dead. Actually couldn't hear him
exactly. He was mumbling.
But his wife's answers were verypenetrating and coming through
the seats like, oh, don't say it.

(35:07):
Would be better if you were deadand then.
Mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble. And she says it's not true that
nobody cares about you or loves you anymore.
And, and, and it was just like so sad.
And I thought this is somebody who is, he's not like, he's not
like you, you know, he's not somebody who got sort of rich
and famous doing this like boutique hotel something that
would his, you know, I mean, you, you became sort of

(35:27):
legendary for something like that.
No, it's somebody who obviously had big dreams and never was
able to fulfill them. That's what you thought?
For sure. It may make perfect sense.
I have this. You know, I was putting the sort
of portrait in my head. And at the end of the flight
when we all stood up because thelights went on and I just wanted
to put a face just to see what the old man looked like.
And I turned around as one of the most famous men in the

(35:48):
world. This is somebody that literally
every single person watching us or listening to us knows who the
person is, and not because of some politician or, you know,
some controversial character. This is an authentic hero,
somebody who with a few other people at a certain time in
American history, changed the course of American life, changed

(36:08):
the course of human life. And, and it's was long past.
It was a moment in time when those things occurred.
And and now he's rich and famousbecause justifiably, because,
you know, he dined out on that forever.
But what it showed at that moment was either that that
model that we have in our heads of of getting happier as we get
older, which is strive. Work.

(36:30):
Hard play by the rules, kill it,die happy it.
There's something missing from that.
Either, you know, there's. Something wrong with that model
or something wrong with him. So I went home and I told
Esther. I said, you can't believe what I
just had. And I was going through this
existential crisis right now because I was as an executive.
Feeling things happening that I didn't like.

(36:51):
And I'm like, So what do I do? And then I heard this and I said
I told her about it. She said, who is it?
And I told her. And she says, huh?
And I said yeah, huh? And I said I don't want that.
Yeah, and I'm never going to be that guy.
I mean, I'm not going to be the hero on the plane because he's
doing 20 times as much as I've ever done.
But I absolutely could be telling her that when I'm in my

(37:11):
80s. And I said, honey, I don't want
to tell you that when I'm in my 80s, she said so.
And I don't know what to do, shesaid.
Really, You don't know what to do?
Don't you have a PhD? I.
Said yeah, she said. Why don't you use it for
something truly useful for once?She's the wise one in the
family, isn't? She's brutal.
And and so I said to work on a plan.

(37:33):
Why is this happening? Why does this happen to so many
people? What is actually happening
happening neurobiologically? Who are the minority of people
who actually figure it out? So, so when you see an epidemic,
for example, if you want to sought find out how to get a, a,
a virus, for example, if you want to find a, an antiviral

(37:56):
drug, you look for the tiny minority of people that have a
natural immunity to the virus. And then you figure out what
they have when the antiretroviral drugs for, for
for AIDS, they found like that, like that, like a few people got
the age virus and then he gets sick.
What the heck? And so they looked at them and
anti write retroviral drugs werecreated on the basis of the

(38:16):
natural antibodies that certain people had.
Same thing with the coronavirus is what we were really
interested in. That's how a lot of this stuff
gets gets developed. So I said, OK, now I know what
to do. Because when you start seeing
this pattern of people who used to be great and now have gone
into decline and they don't knowwhy and they're really bitter
and they don't know what to do and they're thrashing about.
You see it every place. You can see it in politics.

(38:39):
You see it in business. Oh my gosh, you know the CEO who
hangs on won't leave. And, and certainly the
politicians, I mean, we, we, youknow, there's an identity.
I mean, I, I, I Dianne Feinsteinwas a investor in a hotel with
me and I knew her well and she was a gracious, lovely person,
and yet she couldn't let go of that identity.

(39:00):
She couldn't. And you know, it's what do you
see in the mirror? Senator Feinstein?
That's Senator Feinstein, not Dianne.
Yeah, yeah, it's true. Or.
You know, his wife, their mom. No, no, no, no, no.
It's this thing. It's doing, not being.
Remember strivers, the strivers curse is doing, not being.
And that's what I saw again and again and again.
But a tiny minority didn't. A tiny minority grew.

(39:22):
A tiny minority did it right. And, and I wanted to know if
they either didn't change or if they reacted differently when
they changed that change that I was feeling.
Those are the people that I studied, and it turns out they
change just like everybody else.And there's neurobiology behind
why this happens. Your brain, literally it

(39:42):
doesn't. It doesn't degrade, it changes.
It shrinks a little. Bit it shrinks a little bit and
the more you drink, the more it shrinks.
So careful with that, right? But it's the four wheel drive of
the brain that Doctor Jean Cohentalked about.
Talk us about. Tell us about what changes in
the brain and how we move from fluid to crystallize.
So, so this is what I found in the research.
When you're young, you have whatRaymond Katel, the great social

(40:06):
psychologist from Britain who isthe world's leading expert.
On the manifestations of intelligence at different points
of life. So it wasn't.
Just IQ testing, that's just so pedestrian, right?
What's really interesting is howintelligence manifests itself at
different points in your life, how it's different, and how
that's an add up to an evolutionary adaptation that
makes sense early in life. We have fluid intelligence,

(40:27):
which is innovative capacity, indefatigable energy, focus, and
working memory. That's fluid intelligence.
That's what makes you great at what you do and get getting
better at what you do autonomously as an individual.
It's what makes you a star in the brain game in your 20s and
30s. When I say the brain game, I
don't mean like what you and I do.

(40:48):
I'm talking about, you know, in Europe, air traffic controller
if you're the. SAT test is very well suited for
a younger person, not an older person, Yeah.
Electricians. I mean, I'm talking about people
who look at stuff and have to figure it out.
In your 20s and 30s, fluid intelligence makes you figure
out ways to do things in new ways autonomously.

(41:09):
You can remember everything. It's amazing.
You have recall, you have intense energy, incredible focus
that peaks for most people around age 39.
It peaks and then it declines. It's like, and people think I'm
burning out. I mean, burnout is funny.
We do a lot of work in business schools.
I teach at a Business School andpeople talk about burnout all
the time. It's a work life balance

(41:30):
problem. Nonsense.
The problem is the waning of fluid intelligence.
All we care about as humans for happiness is progress, That's
what. And strivers times 10, it's
about progress. It's not about arriving.
It's not about hitting the goal.It's about progress toward the
goal. That's the secret to the
satisfaction you get from day-to-day.
And if you're not making progress anymore, you'd learn to

(41:50):
hate it and you burn out. And so it's like your dentist,
your best, the best dentist, best dentist at 43 starts taking
Fridays off. Why?
Because I don't know. I don't know.
You know, I used to be getting better and better and better and
it was so inspirational, the whole thing.
And now it's just dentistry. That's because they're fluid
intelligence, which they're still great dentists, but

(42:10):
they're not getting better. They're not getting better at
what made them good. That's the bad news.
That's and that's universal. But there's another kind of
intelligence that Raymond Kanteltalks about that comes in behind
fluid intelligence called crystallized intelligence that's
not based on working memory. Thank God, right at 61.
I mean, somebody comes up on theto me on the street, it's like,

(42:33):
hey, Arthur. And I'm like, what's his name?
And my little librarian is goingback to the stacks and looking
for his name and open an app book. 15 minutes later he comes
back and that that was Mike. And Mike is long gone.
If you like a moron, right? Working memory has declined a
lot by the time you get older. Focus is harder in a lot of
ways. Innovation is way harder.

(42:53):
And anybody who doesn't believe me, I mean, lots of
entrepreneurs in their in their 50s and 60s, but they're not
doing entrepreneurship in the same way.
There's a reason The Rolling Stones wrote their greatest
songs in their 20s. There's a reason that Ezra # and
TS Eliot wrote their greatest poems in their 20s.
Those guys were reading the poems they wrote in their 20s
sixty years later, because they both lived to be old.

(43:14):
But it was all their younger stuff.
It was all their inventions thatcame about.
What happens later is you get this crystallized intelligence,
which is not based on innovativecapacity.
It's based on wisdom. It's based on pattern
recognition. It's based on using all the
stuff that you know because you know a lot.
So this is really important. You're going to be an

(43:36):
entrepreneur, but you're going to assemble a lot of other ideas
that come from people with fluidintelligence and in innovative
ways because they don't see the patterns.
You've seen all the patterns. You know, young scholars will
come to me who write these incredible papers, breakthrough
mathematical theorems, and I'll say, do you realize what you
found? And like, no.
What? Because you have the pattern,

(43:56):
you have systems thinking you can see the big picture and
connect the. Dots.
I can, I can recognize the patterns and, you know, I can
look at something that I've never seen before and say here's
how we should probably solve this problem.
And I couldn't have done that inmy 30s.
I was way more innovative at inventing a brand new thing in
my 30s. I was writing math in my 30s,
that was harder than I can understand today.

(44:18):
Yeah, but when I read somebody else's papers today, I can
actually say the story that they're trying to tell, but they
don't even know that's crystallized intelligence.
When I joined Airbnb at age 52. You was there, You were there.
You were there, Senior Sage. Senior Sage.
They called me the Modern Elders, someone who's as curious
as they are wise. They they after about two

(44:39):
months. You're as wise as they were
curious. No, but you were.
I think we were both. I was they.
What they said to me is you're as curious as you are wise.
Oh, as you are, wise guys. I am both curious and wise, the
alchemy of curiosity, wisdom. And and So what they said after
a couple months is they said, Chip, we hired you for your
knowledge, but what you really brought is your wisdom.
And I didn't really grok that atfirst.

(45:01):
It was like, oh, OK, you know, what's the difference?
And, and I think that's what I've spent the last question
that was 2013. So the last 12 years is to
really explore why is wisdom, especially in the era of AI,
such an essential human skill that we need to be amplifying
and developing. And we have all these amazing

(45:24):
institutions like Harvard that are about accumulating
knowledge, but where are the institutions out there that are
about distilling wisdom? They don't exist.
You went to Airbnb because you knew a lot.
They hired you. They thought because of the size
of your mental library and what they found, your value was how
to use the light. You knew how to use the library.
They wanted the librarian more than the books.

(45:44):
Well, they did. And that's interesting.
I, I, I used the word librarian to describe what my role was
there was to be able to know theknow how and the know who and to
be able to see, you know, for a young person, especially in that
kind of business, that's like going global very quickly.
They were so focused on next week, right, That the kind of

(46:06):
question that I would ask, whichwas if we were as successful as
it looks like we may be 3 years from now, what will be our
biggest problems that we're going to be dealing with and how
can we start solving for those now?
That's such a crystallized intelligence question.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
I mean, you're looking down the road.
Yeah. Because you've been down the
road. Yeah.
The truth is you're down there. You're already three years

(46:26):
ahead, right. I mean, you were more than three
years older than they were. They were probably 15 years old
or so. No, No.
I was 21 and 21, three years older than the three founders,
so I was I. Was yeah, that's, but I was.
To reporting to Brian, who was, you know, 21 years younger.
I was reporting to my mentee. Yeah, yeah.
But I loved it. I wouldn't have done it.
And I. No, no, it's great.
Super successful for sure. I think what I'm curious about

(46:47):
is how does, what advice do you give to people who are at that
inflection point where that second curve, that second curve,
the the crystallized intelligence curve is meant to
actually help them to see a whole new career path for them?
How do you know? How do people make that shift?

(47:07):
Well, to begin with, you have tobelieve.
To read the book, to read the book from strength to strength.
By the way, yes, we're very proud that, you know, Arthur
interviewed me for the book and.I interviewed for you for the
book you found the research before it was published.
Yeah, I guess so. You came to me.
Oh yeah. Yeah, you came to me.
You read an article I wrote in The Atlantic.
How about that? You introduced yourself to me
and said, I'm doing this cool thing.
And I said, well, that's turninginto a book.

(47:28):
I better find out more about what you're doing.
And so this was sort of the self.
Looking Ice cream cone of mea from strength to strength.
June 2019 The which is It has a couple different titles to it,
but it's basically the Atlantic article.
Yeah, the only article is your professional decline is coming
much sooner than you think, which is the 2 by 4 across the
chops to get people's, to get people's attention.

(47:51):
The reason that people really struggle with this is they don't
actually think there is a secondcurve.
My job is to tell them there is,but it's going to take a lot of
faith. It's going to take a lot of
faith, a lot of courage on your part to understand what it is.
And it has a certain set of skills that are very definable
that you didn't have before thatyou have now.

(48:11):
And there's a certain set of skills that you had before that
you're not going to have now. And that means you need to find
the, the, the teacher version ofyou, which if you're a lawyer
and you're a hotshot litigator, you solved every case by
yourself. You were a ninja in the law firm
by the time you're 50. Five, you should be the managing
partner, right? Because that means you're going
to have to find the next generation of talent and train

(48:32):
them, identify them, train them,make them great.
That's what Crystallize Intelligence actually is able to
do. That's when you go from it from
innovator to instructor. Now a lot of people.
Even if they do believe. There's a second curve.
They don't want it. Because they have a lot of ego
involved in what they used to dowell, and that's A and so
there's a couple of different things.
There's the faith that there is something else, and then there's

(48:56):
the humility to actually do a new thing that you're initially
not great at. Yeah, with a growth mindset,
totally. Totally.
And those two things, I mean, one, faith is, you know, faith
is a faith is a theological virtue in Christianity, you
know, faith, hope and love. And Saint Paul said faith, hope
and love and these three. But the the greatest of these is
love, right? But faith is there, It's there,

(49:18):
it's there. I believe it's there.
And then humility is a heavenly virtue.
So in Dante and Dante's Inferno,the very pit of hell is the
worst of the seven deadly sins in US.
Pride. And pride is funny because this
is important for the midlife chrysalis, right?
It's important for us. But people have in common who
are struggling to make a change.In Dante's Inferno, at the

(49:39):
bottom of Mount Purgatory, whereDante's going down and down in
the bottom, he finds Satan. And that's going to be really
scary. Like Satan's going to be dancing
around with a pitchfork and the clothing hooves and lots of fire
and poking people with us. Not for Dante.
He gets down. You already find Satan half
frozen in a lake of ice and completely unaware of the

(50:01):
presence of Dante and Virgil. So Virgil is his guide down
Mount Purgatory and completely unaware because he's in such
he's writhing in such pain. And the reason he's writhing in
this pain is because he can't dislodge himself from the block
of ice. And, and he has wings on his
body and his wings are flapping so he can dislodge himself, but
that creates wind and lowers thetemperature and makes the ice

(50:21):
harder. And here's the point, That's
pride. That's pride.
He cannot dislodge himself from pride.
And this is the the ancient biblical idea where, where God
says to his most heavenly of theheavenly angels, the Archangel
who's Lucifer, his greatest one,his boy, his best one, right?
He that he says to Lucifer, you must serve.

(50:44):
And Lucifer says in Latin, because apparently Satan speaks
Latin, non serbium. I will not serve the ultimate
expression of pride. I will not alter what I'm doing.
I will not bend to your will. I will not change.
So that's what that's what Dante's trying to get at in this
incredible image of being frozenin the block of ice.

(51:07):
So people watching us right now,OK, forget the theology, right?
Are you frozen to your waist in a block of ice, writhing in pain
and making it worse? That's what it's like to be
stuck on the first curve. What's the prescriptive advice?
Humility. That's the humility, because
that's the heavenly virtue that combats the deadly.
Sin that that's the character quality, but what is the What
are the prescriptive tech? Let's say you've got.

(51:29):
Humility, and it would be practical.
And frankly, yeah, be practical.And the humility, frankly, and
frankly maybe that's part of thereason we have these midlife
crises, we have all these challenges in midlife is to
basically humble us as my friendRichard Rohrer, who was taught
here a year ago at MBA. And great one following up.
Amazing that. But he said, you know, a

(51:50):
humiliation today, hopefully mild.
So the idea of humility opens the door, but then once you step
through that door, what do you do?
So the question, the answer to that question, goes back to the
science, the social science, which is looking at the people
who solved it by accident. What do they do differently?
And then we do it on purpose, OK, That's, that's what it all

(52:12):
comes down to. It's it's, it's mimic the
immunity that some people have naturally by creating a vaccine.
OK, so but. Here's the vaccine, and there's
a whole bunch in the book, but here it starts with #1 taking
the step from 1 curve to the other is actually affirmatively
doing that, recognizing that what made you great is not your
future. And that's.

(52:32):
And, and people do that naturally, they say, yeah, used
to be good at that. I'm going to do a different
thing now. Some people do it, most of us.
And when I was stepping away from AEI, that was super scary
because people were literally telling me.
They were literally telling me you're making the worst mistake
of your life. You're never going to have this
adulation, this level of influence.
You're never going to be this successful.

(52:53):
You're never going to make this amount of money.
Whatever it happened to be, someof it appealed to me, some of it
doesn't. Didn't.
And, and, and so that was scary enough, but it was my brain that
was telling me don't, don't do it.
Don't do it, don't do it. I remember I was sitting on a
plane going from Dubai and I waspraying.
I said Lord. I'm so afraid and and it's
ridiculous. It's like you're afraid to stop
being the president of a think tank.
How absurd with all the the crazy things that are happening

(53:16):
in the world. But again, we're we're that,
that stuff. That's the first step.
Now. Now we get really, really
practical. Here's what all 2nd curvers
naturally do, and they're really, really good at it that
the rest of us struggle for. Mother Nature lies to us
constantly about our happiness. Mother Nature is a liar,
psychopathic liar. Why?

(53:37):
Because we're we're, we're not built to be happy.
We're built to be. To pass on our genes by finding
mates and by living another day,by finding nutrition in the
ancestral environment in a placeto seen 250,000 years ago, which
our brain still is. That's what we're supposed to
do. And happiness, Mother Nature
doesn't care. But Mother Nature tells us that

(53:57):
if we satisfy our urges, then wewill be happy.
See, that's the that's the little trick that keeps you
striving even when you're unhappy.
Is that little, that little glitch, which isn't a glitch,
it's actually a feature, not a bug in the mental matrix.
OK, So what some what Mother Nature tells you to do is that
if you want to be happy, you need to accumulate more, you

(54:19):
need to have more, you need to experience more, you need to
dominate more, more, more, more,more, more, more.
And I get it, because that's that tendency will let you pass
on your genes by having more animal skins for the winter and
flints for hunting and Buffalo jerky in your cave and more,
more females will think that that's a pretty interesting
thing, etcetera, etcetera. And you might pass on your genes
the next generation. I get it.

(54:40):
But the truth of the matter is that that's not what makes
second curvers happier. What they have figured out is
this weird trick of not having more but wanting less.
And this is hard to do when you have the means to have more,
when you can buy a boat, but say, I literally don't want to
boat even if it's free. Because you have the presence of

(55:01):
mind, the equanimity to understand that that's going to
make you heavier. See, see, this is the mentality
not of adding brush strokes to the canvas of your life, but
chipping away the marble that isthe beautiful sculpture.
That's you, which will not be truly beautiful and complete
until you've chipped away all the marble.
That second curve stripe, that second curve success is chip,

(55:22):
chip, chip, chip. Sorry, chip.
First curve success is adding brush strokes.
Second curve success is chippingaway.
And that's what these people do naturally.
So for the rest of. Us.
What do we need to do? Start chipping away.
What do we need to do? Wants, not haves.
Wants. Work on the wants.
Want less, Want less. And sounds like I'm asking
everybody to become a Buddhist, which I'm not.

(55:43):
But that's every major religioustradition.
That's every serious philosophical tradition.
I mean, read Aristotle. That's what he's talking about.
Read the Buddha. Read all the Saints.
Read anybody who actually has a nutritious understanding of the
best life. And they're talking about wants
management. Yeah, that's what it comes down
to. And again, it doesn't turn me
into some sort of, you know, go live in a commune.

(56:06):
I wouldn't unless the commune were like the modern elder
Academy, then sign me up. But this is this is important.
That's the first big skill is learning how to do that.
And so there's a lot of ways to do.
It I mean, I don't. Have a bucket list.
I have a reverse bucket list on my birthday.
I have a list of things I'm going to stop doing this year
and it's just. Chip, I'm free.
No, this, it's the it's, you know, we spend the first half of

(56:27):
our life accumulating. Yeah, and we are meant to spend
the second-half of our life editing.
I love the way you put that. The first time I heard you say
that, I thought that's just. Discernment, I mean, with that
wisdom that we've built along the way.
And, and so there are kind, there's certain kinds of careers
that are better suited for a second curver or for someone
who's later in their life. It's being a teacher or it's
being a coach or a therapist or anybody who is good at being

(56:52):
able to connect the dots. You have a pattern recognition
instruction based profession, which there is a version of that
in anybody's career. There's a version of that,
right? You don't have to change
careers. I mean, I'm pretty good at
changing careers, but at least Ido it a lot.
You don't have to. I mean, it just means that you
have to see yourself in a different way, which will not be
as sexy. I get it.

(57:14):
We don't valorize venture capitalist the way that we
valorize entrepreneurs. The startup entrepreneur gets
all the ink. The venture capitalist, on the
other hand, is happier, generally speaking, because
nobody's slipping pizzas under the door, you know, in the
middle of the night to the venture capitalist.
The venture capitalist goes hometo his spouse and and and and

(57:34):
you know, has a unless it's a complete maniac workaholic is
living his best life. But I think part of it also is
it's not just the skills that shift over time.
It's also the sense of purpose, the the sense of being in
service, the sense that, you know, I'm not doing this for
myself. I'm doing this because it feels
good to be, to have generativityin my life.

(57:54):
And Erick Erickson word about the premise that part of what
we're supposed to do as we get older is to, you know, propagate
this species with our wisdom to.Younger people, there's a reason
that people get more religious as they get older.
You know, it's what it's you can't quite distinguish between
if you're if you're really a skeptical 20, something between

(58:16):
the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and.
Jesus, it's like, yeah, whatever.
It's all you know. You know the difference when
you're 60, generally speaking. And the reason for that is
because you're looking for the generativity.
You're looking for the source. Even if you're not theologically
rigorous in any sort of way, youintuitively know the difference

(58:36):
between what's just myth that's fun and what, what what is what,
what are the stories that actually come from a fundamental
cosmic truth. Maybe you don't quite know what
the details are, but when when people say you're made in God's
image, the Godhead is inherentlycreative and generative.
God is love, and so are you. People can be like, tell me

(58:58):
more. Two last questions.
One is if you could have a magicwand from a policy perspective,
that would allow the United States to recognize that midlife
is a life stage that deserves aninvestment in it.
Just like retirement has a huge investment as a society, just

(59:21):
like adolescence huge investmentas a society.
There are three life stages thatactually emerged in the 20th
century, adolescence, retirement, and midlife.
Midlife has been the Rodney Dangerfield of life stages.
What would you recommend Washington, DC do to help people
in midlife live a better life ina generative kind of way?

(59:42):
So I'm going to betray a lot of my bias this year.
I would recommend the Washingtonget out of the way of people a
lot more than it does. Yeah, Washington is.
They're not just Washington. Government is in people's way
all the time. It has a particular concept of
how we're supposed to do the things that we do.
And I'll give you a perfect example.
What's education? Well, this is the thing that was
actually. The way that we can see it was,

(01:00:03):
was, was. Was invented by, you know,
Bismarck or something in the 19th century where you take a
bunch of kids at 5, put them together with a whole bunch of
other kids who are 5, like Lord of the Flies from the very
beginning. And you take them through a
curriculum 30 at a time with thesame people until they're until
they're 18 and then probably foranother four years after that

(01:00:25):
where they actually socialize and are raised by other 18 year
olds. Which, by the way, is stupid and
dangerous. I mean, it's a bad system.
It's just a bad system that, that all kinds of people,
especially boys who tend to be highly kinetic learners, fall by
the wayside and are then diagnosed with some sort of, you
know, disorder because they, they guess what, they don't like
it and it doesn't actually work for them.

(01:00:46):
So what government and, and, andGod bless the sentiments behind
this. I don't want to be completely
condemning on this because what we wanted was universal
education that would pull up ourwhole society.
And for many people it has, but it's rigid and inflexible and it
doesn't understand how people actually learn and it doesn't
learn. Help us to recognize that life
is about lifelong learning. Interest is a basic positive

(01:01:09):
emotion. It's one of the basic emotions
that gives people the most positive affect, interest.
We're built to learn, but a lot of people go through life
thinking they don't like to learn because school was such a
negative experience and they're not impelled to learn when they
need to learn the most after they leave school, which is when
you're a little younger than youand me, When do you need to go

(01:01:29):
back to school? 50I This is so So my public
policy idea is this. I think we got to figure out a
way in which people can save forwith tax advantage savings that
allows them at age 50 to have a gap year or have a gap month.
Just have some midlife atrium, to use the Mary Katherine
Bateson term, a space where people can reimagine and

(01:01:53):
repurpose. Because part of the challenge
with people getting to that place of the second curve is
they don't actually have the resources that were the tools or
even the awareness to know, you know what, as Carl Jung said,
that you can't, you can't live the afternoon of your life based
upon the rules of the morning. And so I, you know, that's my.

(01:02:14):
Yeah, that's great. I mean, I I agree with that.
I'm, I'm skeptical of the government can't get its mind
around that. What I really, really, really,
really want is I want more chip connoys.
I no, no, I mean, it's like whatyou just said was that there's
going to be an infrastructure oflearning in people's midlife to
help to understand what the second life is, all the
second-half of life is all about, just like elementary
school is about what it's going to be like to what it means to

(01:02:35):
be a functioning member of society as a young adult.
That's what you're actually learning.
And you need something that doesthat.
And what will do that? Entrepreneurs will do that.
What will do that? Private enterprise should be
able to do that. And when we have an
infrastructure of education thatsays no, no, no, no, no, tax
system doesn't favor it. The healthcare system doesn't
allow it. The public education

(01:02:55):
infrastructure doesn't understand it.
I mean, that's why we need that's how entrepreneurship
solves those problems. If we could get out of the way
of it. We just need midlife wisdom
schools. What we need is to scale and and
you know, we're doing 60 people here, yeah.
Right now, that's great. But 60s, not every money yeah,
you know, what would it mean to be able to do this by the.

(01:03:15):
Thousands every week in two locations and we're doing online
programs as well. And there's replication.
And there's replication and Yeah, no, we're, you know, MEA
is, you know, by by far the largest midlife wisdom school in
the world. And, you know, people from 60
countries have come here. We have 56 regional chapters.
But the path would be easier if someone could say, wow, I can

(01:03:38):
take some time off to do this. Right?
So last question, someone comes up to you and says I'd like to
have tea or coffee with you nextweek and I would love to have
hear one wisdom bumper sticker with Arthur Brooks wisdom
fingerprints all over it. And what's the origin story of

(01:04:01):
it? What?
What is the piece of wisdom thatyou feel like has been hard won
in your life? People often ask sort of what if
you could, if this were a bumpersticker, what would it be?
Right? Because not everybody's got the
time. So I thought.
For years and years and years tobegin with, because this is my
behavioral science background. What do you believe that's not
true? And how does it turn into

(01:04:24):
something that's similar, that is true?
What is the formula that's falsethat's holding you back?
And what's the formula that's true that's similar?
The counterfeit formula for anything in life, by the way,
looks an awful lot like the realthing.
So that's one of the reasons that when people take opiate,
synthetic opiate drugs, that they mimic the feeling of love,

(01:04:46):
right? That's the reason that adventure
is mimicked by slot machines or online betting or, or, or
Internet gaming. The things that are true and
good and right in life, they have a, they have a fake
version, right? A cuckoo bird version.
You know, that actually is really, really bad for you
because it's a simulacrum. And once you understand the

(01:05:07):
simulacrum, you can get back to the real thing.
So here's the counterfeit formula.
Here's the counterfeit formula. Here's what Mother Nature says
is going to make you happy and fulfilled and grow as you get
older. Use, use people.
They're there for your satisfaction.
They're you're there for your advancement.
Love things, more stuff, baby. And worship yourself because

(01:05:29):
you're the center of it all. Like love things, use people.
Worship yourself. So simple, right?
Here's the real formula, the real formula based on the best
behavioral science and all of the wisdom, religious and
philosophical traditions of any value.
Here it is. Use things with abundance and

(01:05:49):
joy. Use them, but don't love them.
Why? Because you love people.
People are made for love and only people are made for love
and worship the divine because that's the only thing worth
worshiping. And I'm going to tell you what
that is. That's part of the journey.
That's part of your the journey of your life.
That's the path you're walking on.
That's your pilgrimage. Your life is a pilgrimage and

(01:06:12):
you're walking on this pilgrimage toward that thing and
The thing is going to find you. And So what does that mean?
That's what you got to figure out.
But that's the formula that resist the beguiling 300 fit
formula. Because it will beguile you,
man. It will just.
It's like. Chip, chip use.
People love things. Worship yourself and you'll get

(01:06:35):
more miserable and you'll get stuck and you won't advance and
you won't find yourself and you won't know why, and all you need
to do is change the verbs and the nouns.
Just change the verbs and the nouns.
That's the bumper sticker. Just change the the verbs and
the nouns. Yes, I I love it.
I love it. Arthur love you.
Thank you. I.
Love you too, Chip. Thank you.
Thank you for what you're doing.You're doing a great service for

(01:06:56):
all the people who are here, butalso the fact that you're
propagating these ideas with this podcast and the people who
are discovering it is having a. It's having a big impact on me
in my life and a lot of other people too.
Thank you, we'll spread the word.
I will, I do. Spread our word, I always will.
Thank you. Well, that was amazing.
By the way, it's hard to get a word in with Arthur.

(01:07:19):
He's, he's so full of thoughts and expression of what he wants
to say that I didn't ask, get toask him all kinds of questions.
I wanted to ask him if I had thethree observations.
The first one is just a really obvious 1.
And I, we spent more time on it than I was actually planning.
But it's, I think worthy what hesaid afterwards, not on air as

(01:07:42):
he said, this was a different kind of podcast because normally
he's asked the same old questions.
But my first observation is thatthis is a guy who didn't
graduate from college and he's now a famous PhD academic until
he was 30. And he has had a series of
career changes through his life,from French horn player to

(01:08:03):
academic to CEO of a huge think tank in Washington, DC, to now
being a well known author and speaker and having a whole
enterprise of 13 people and his company, you know, the Arthur
Brooks Enterprise. And the bottom line is it's a

(01:08:24):
good piece of evidence that if you are not successful in
traditional ways in your 20s, you're you can find that in your
30s forties or beyond. And it wasn't that he was
unsuccessful, but, you know, being a French horn player was
not going to ever make him a lotof money nor much notoriety.
So you can do career changes multiple times in your life and

(01:08:45):
they can be very different from one to the next.
The second thing I think I learned from him was the idea
that this second curve that he talked about in in from strength
to strength, going from fluid intelligence to crystallize
intelligence is not just about what are you better AT and what
do you have more skill around based upon your neuroscience,

(01:09:06):
your brain, but it also has to do with what's important in
life. For a lot of people, there's a
second curve in terms of purposefulness.
David Brooks, not related to Arthur Brooks, talked about the
first, the first mountain in life being success on the 2nd
mountain being purpose. And so I think that that's
really relevant here because it's not just that as we get

(01:09:27):
older, we are more adept at skills that rely on crystallized
intelligence or in essence connecting the dots.
It's that we want to actually provide some generativity, the
idea of generating something forfuture generations.
And then finally, I just have tosay, I, I, I asked him the

(01:09:48):
question, but I didn't think about this.
This is a big part of the, the final part of his book, From
Strength to Strength. He said that his bumper sticker
would not be using people, loving things, and worshiping
yourself, but his bumper stickerwould be learning how to use
things, love people, and worshipthe divine.

(01:10:10):
And that absolutely describes him.
I think it describes living a good life.
So how do you learn how to use things, love people, and worship
the the the divine instead of using people, loving things, and
worshiping yourself? Hope you enjoyed this episode
and we'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to The

(01:10:31):
Midlife Chrysalis. The show is produced by Midlife
Media. If you enjoyed this episode,
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