Arthur C. Brooks

speaker

1,407 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Arthur C. Brooks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Blocks: I Wish I Knew w/ Neal Brennan · Happiness Expert Dr. Arthur C. Brooks · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

And what's that look like?

That looks like people who don't know how to retire.

And interestingly, you'd think it's the people who had the best lives would have the greatest likelihood in their working lives, would have the greatest likelihood of being happier after 70.

They're not.

So that's a real winner's curse problem.

If the more success that you had in your working life, the more likely you are to start down in your happiness after 70 because the party's over and people don't know how to, people who've had a lot of professional success really, really struggle.

That's kind of the, that's the Darwin effect where Darwin peaked and he couldn't make any more progress and he was super depressed because even though everybody was still telling him he was a great scientist, he felt like he was a charlatan.

And so I wind up having to help a lot.

That's why I wrote that book, From Strength to Strength, in 2022, was to figure out how to help people actually move on with their lives so they wouldn't get stuck and wouldn't be depressed.

So there's Carol and Charles Holohan, who are social psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, married couple.

They do work on the burden of high achievement.

People who are identified as super high achievers before the age of 20 are more likely than average to be disappointed by their lives when they're 80.

not because they sucked, but because it's really, really hard to live up to your own expectations.

And sooner or later, somebody's going to take the punch bowl away.

You're going to miss a step and you're going to feel crummy about it.

So you got to take measures if you're a high achiever, you, to make sure that as you get older and your personality is getting better, that now you're in your glory, you're a few years old, you're going to get like another 15, 20 years where your happiness is going to rise and rise and rise.

But you have to take measures now to make sure it doesn't start back down again.

I know, I'm awful.

Well, here's the thing about comedians.

I've got the data on comedians.

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