The Checkup with Doctor Mike
The Shocking Lessons He Teaches His Harvard Students | Arthur Brooks
25 Jan 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How does AI affect happiness?
People ask all the time about AI, you know, how will AI affect happiness? And the answer is, well, a lot of people are using it as their friend, lover, or therapist, which is exactly wrong. Look, there's one thing in life you can't simulate, which is meaning.
Welcome back to the Checkup Podcast. Today's guest is Arthur Brooks, behavioral scientist, Harvard Business School professor, and one of the sharpest minds on what actually makes people happy.
He's also the author of a new book called- finding purpose in an age of emptiness.
Which is available for pre-order now. This guy is a quote machine. For example, did you know that heavier men are happier on average?
It's not because of the food gentlemanly paunch.
How about that liberal women tend to be sadder than their conservative counterparts? Why is that? We cover it and so much more, including whether I should keep participating in these Jubilee debates, the male loneliness epidemic, and how to treat my teenage patients who believe in nihilism. There's seriously something in this episode for everyone.
Huge thanks to Microsoft Dragon Copilot for sponsoring this video. You spent a lot of time talking to people who are brilliant, successful, wealthy. What's been your take on their mental health state in terms of happiness and negative feelings, perhaps?
It's mixed. Okay. And it's one of the things I tell my students. My students are master's students at the Harvard Business School. They start with a misapprehension about happiness, about well-being. They think that if they achieve worldly success, then happiness comes for free, that it comes automatically. And I tell them on the first day of class, here's how it works. Shoot for happiness.
And by the way, this is going to create panic for all strivers watching this. Shoot for happiness, and then you will be successful enough. And they go, because of that last word. Because of that last word. Because enough is antithetical to what we're trying to do in the hustle culture, in the culture of pure work excellence. And so the result of it is that many of my students do fine.
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Chapter 2: What misconceptions do Harvard students have about happiness?
And the reason you can't be cosmically happy, you can't, that would require a complete absence of negative emotions, which exists. So you survive, Mike. I mean, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness are the basic negative emotions. They exist and they're produced in the limbic system of the brain for a reason. They're an alarm system. And if you didn't have them, you'd be dead in a week.
If you never felt any fear, I mean, you'd be run over by a car. If you didn't feel any sadness, you'd have no relationships at all. No friends, no employer, no nothing. If you feel no pain, you will keep touching the hot stove. It'd be a problem. You know, it'd actually be a problem. And you're not going to avoid negative experiences. because that's part of life on earth.
If you're not having negative experiences, it means you're dead, which is not the greatest alternative, I suppose. And so the result is that we have to recognize that happiness isn't the goal. Happiness is a direction, not a destination. The second thing to keep in mind is it's not a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness and positive emotions are evidence of having a lot of happiness.
The way to understand happiness is kind of take it like we take the macronutrients in our diet. So if I said, what's Thanksgiving dinner, you wouldn't say the smell of the turkey, but that's feelings compared to happiness. The smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner.
Thanksgiving dinner is a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat, or a list of ingredients or a list of dishes, depending on how scientific you are. Our background says, yeah, it's like past the protein month or whatever. So when you think happiness, do you think neurotransmitters? Neurotransmitters play into it, as does basic neurophysiology.
But I think more in terms of the macronutrients, as in the component parts, the things that you need in balance and abundance, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three big parts of it. And I actually have tests that I'm able to administer that I've validated, have really high construct validity, to show that you're probably, I mean, all of us,
can get better at one or more of those macronutrients. Learn more about it, get better skill, understand it, change our habits, share the idea with other people and actually get happier. So I'll diagnostically look at people and say, yeah, you're real high on satisfaction because you're a striver and an achiever. Satisfaction is the joy you get in an accomplishment after struggle.
So you're super high in satisfaction because you're doing all these things that are awesome and you've struggled a lot to get them. I mean, you actually made sacrifices for them. But you might be, I don't know, but you might be lower in enjoyment of your life. And enjoyment is not the same thing as pleasure. Or you might struggle with meaning. What's the meaning of my life?
Which is very, very common among strivers to have real trouble with meaning. And so I'll use a battery of assessments to figure out where people need work, and then we'll talk about putting a scientific plan together in their life to get more of it. And so that's how I think about this whole basic idea.
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Chapter 3: Why do successful people often feel unhappy?
It's interesting, at least as a theory. Is there some sort of genetic distribution that could be happening here in terms of strivers versus people who are happy with low levels of success?
It's very possible. It's very possible. One of the things that I find is that strivers, real strivers, like uber successful people, they're all a little... Crazy. And by that, I don't mean that clinically.
Chapter 4: What is the relationship between happiness and worldly success?
There's not some clinical- That's not psychosis. It's not. No, I don't mean psychosis. I don't mean that actually something diagnosable that needs clinical attention. But what they are doing, generally speaking, is that they're doing something that doesn't pass personal cost-benefit calculus. They're doing something that systematically is very, very, very costly.
And the reason for that, generally speaking, is that there's a little bit of a pathology
the mentality of a lot of really really successful people and they a lot of them have this sort of this same story super strivers are deeply afraid of failure and they're deeply addicted to winning and It usually starts when their kids their little kids they come from a lot from immigrant families not always but from from pretty exigent parents
And the parents administer, they can be great parents. It's not to cast aspersions, but they only really get attention and affection from their parents when they do extraordinary things. Like all A's on the report card. Like you made the baseball team, first chair in the orchestra.
And their little brains wire in this period of unbelievably high synaptic plasticity, which when you're a kid, that love is earned. Love is earned. From the people who matter the most, your love is earned. And so that gets into this whole, the idea of you're not a human being, you're a human doing.
This leads, if they're very gifted, into this success addiction, where probably they get more dopamine from doing something that's extraordinary and getting the rewards, getting that sense of being admired, that sense of affirmation from people. just like other people do when they use drugs and alcohol or certain rewarding behaviors. And that becomes pathological.
That turns into success addiction, a secondary manifestation of which is workaholism. So when I'm meeting somebody my own age, I'm in my early 60s, I meet somebody my age, they're like, I can't stop, I can't stop. I work 80 hours a week and my employees, they don't love me, they're afraid of me and I'm alienating my family. My wife and I are roommates.
I have a cordial relationship with my children. I don't even love my job, but I can't stop. That's classic workaholic behavior. I dig into the success addiction that's behind that, the self-objectification, the fear of failure that comes along. And there's almost always a kind of insanity behind that.
There's a craziness, the sort of same kind of pathology as I would see with somebody who abuses drugs or alcohol.
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Chapter 5: How can we improve the doctor-patient relationship?
And I said, well, that's because they're reading responses and they're just grading the responses as opposed to having the human experience.
Yeah, that's right.
And again, I don't know if I'm just arguing for my own self-survival at that point.
No, but also, I mean, I think what's ultimately going to happen is going to be really good. I mean, I'm a real techno-optimist on this. That doesn't mean I'm a short-term techno. I'm a techno-pessimist in the short term and a techno-optimist in the long term.
At the end of the day, what this is gonna be able to do is to facilitate real human beings making real human contact in the doctor-patient relationship, where we have the highest standards of tech and knowledge that's actually behind it, algorithmic knowledge behind it. And we can really, really, really count on it. And this is kind of what we want.
We want the best of all possible worlds, but that's gonna mean that we're gonna have to have higher standards of empathy among physicians. which we don't. I mean, a lot of the reason that people have trouble with their doctors is their doctors treat them like a number. And I just happen to be lucky, economically lucky enough to have a physician that doesn't have a billion patients.
And so I can text him and he answers me. And when I see him, I talk to him for an hour and a half if I want to, and he's interested in my research or whatever. But I have a relationship with a guy. That's so valuable. Totally, totally. But I realize that most people don't actually have that.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of AI on healthcare trust?
Yeah, I don't think doctors are suddenly gaslighting their patients more often, but I do think the healthcare system as it exists in the United States sets up doctors to let patients feel like they've been gaslit more often. Because we get less time with patients, there's administrative burdens that have skyrocketed. So there's a disaster on that front.
To me, the earliest evidence of humans not trusting AI for health information comes from the billionaires that we've talked about several times. Elon Musk created his own AI LLM, or at least he owns it. Yeah, Grok. And- Very cool. So it gives accurate information a lot of the time. And you could ask it such a simple question.
What percentage of health claims made by Secretary Kennedy are accurate? And he'll honestly say the majority are inaccurate. Yet Elon Musk, who owns this platform, doesn't take that into account and supports Secretary Kennedy. So if they're not taking advice on this scale, are they going to take advice about their cholesterol, about antidepressants? I think no, because the evidence is showing no.
It's a problem. For sure, it's a problem. Plus, there's all kinds of... There's too many cases where... I mean, doctors are people too. And doctors can get into fads and panics too.
Chapter 7: How does societal perception of happiness impact mental health?
I mean, this whole idea that we hold doctors up to be outside the culture, that's insane. In what way? Well, it's insane. It's like, well, the doctor, even if there's a fad and a panic about something about the coronavirus epidemic or about anything that's going around about medicine that...
that doctors fall into particular modes of thinking that might or might not be correct, just like the rest of us do, because we're open to these fads and panics, but to hold doctors up as being beyond that, as somehow not being beholden to these cultural trends, that's an unreasonable thing.
That means we need to be discerning when we're dealing with our doctors as well and not put faith in them as if they were faith healers.
I started doing this thing, at least I've done it twice, where I went surrounded by a group of people who disagree with me. The first time I did it was versus anti-vaxxers or at least vaccine skeptics. Recently, I did it against Secretary Kennedy supporters or Maha supporters.
And there's people in the scientific community that say that I'm doing a disservice because I'm holding up science and conspiracy theorists as if they're one.
Yeah.
I don't think that is the case for the human mind. I think we can hold two contradicting opinions at the same time and understand the balance, seek to understand better. Where do you land on that?
I'm more on the free speech side, a lot more on the free speech side. I'm a center-right capitalist and teaches at Harvard. Full of conservatives up there. And the truth is that I think that we can handle all kinds of information. And the answer to speech that's incorrect is not banning it. It's more speech is what we need.
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Chapter 8: What role does love play in our lives according to the guests?
We need more information. I think we can actually handle that. And the problem with the whole cancel culture that we have that was originally very much of a left-wing phenomenon, and now, of course, it's a right-wing phenomenon, too, because everybody's got to get into the party of cancel culture.
Yeah.
Is the whole idea is that when something, there's good and there's evil, there's right and there's wrong. It's binary thinking. It's religious thinking about scientific or political things, which is always a mistake. And the way that you deal with it is- Well, it's cognitive distortion at scale. You throw out the heretics. And don't throw out the heretics.
It's like beat the heretics in their game, man. It's like be an actual expert. And the trouble is that when you don't expose yourself to people with whom you disagree, you become kind of- intellectually flaccid. You're not good. You're not able to make these arguments.
Unsharpened sword.
You asked me a bunch of questions about atheism and God. And if I actually didn't listen to the smartest atheists in the world and take them seriously and treat their arguments with respect and the possibility that they might be right, there's no answer. There's no conversation. There's nothing I can do except... repent or die, Mike, which is pretty ineffective.
In the science world, that is what is said so often. I mean, I see public health communicators that go on the same three channels, I'm sure you know what they are, where people agree with them. Yes. And then when I go on Fox and Friends and people say, how dare you go on a platform that spreads misinformation? That's their opinion.
And I say, well, if I'm saying accurate things, why are you upset at me for going to a group where they've largely been misled or perhaps been misled? Why are you upset at that? And yet people will be upset at me.
And you want to hear, by the way, you want to hear. I mean, you need to hear what people think if you think it's incorrect. You need to actually hear it in their words.
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