Live from the TRPL #3: Arthur Brooks and Robbie Lauf on The Strenuous Life and the Search for Happiness

ARTHUR BROOKS:

We don't have a supply problem of conservation. We have a demand problem of conservation. People are just simply not as interested as they've been in the past. But when people do go out into nature, as Teddy Roosevelt clearly found when he left New York and came to North Dakota, sense of meaning rises dramatically. And here's the funny thing about it. You actually won't find the meaning of your life out there, but if you're out there without your devices in your mind and with nature, the meaning of your life will reliably find you.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Welcome to Live from the TRPL on Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library officially opened its doors on July 4th, 2026. And in the days leading up to it, the brand new auditorium hosted some really special talks, interviews, and panel discussions. These featured a striking lineup of voices, including historians, conservationists, architects, and political leaders. I wanted to give our podcast listeners a chance to hear some of these great speakers. So we've put together a short series, six episodes over six weeks. This episode comes in two parts, beginning with a talk from Arthur Brooks, the happiness scientist and bestselling author, now a professor at Vanderbilt University. He walks the crowd through three lessons, one he's drawn from Theodore Roosevelt's life, specifically the time he spent in beautiful Madora, North Dakota, where he rebuilt himself after suffering great loss.

It's that same beautiful place where the library stands today. Arthur makes the case that TR had the science of a good life figured out a century before Harvard researchers did, and he brings the same wit and energy to the stage that made him one of the most sought after speakers on happiness in the country. Then Robbie Lauf, the executive director of the library joins him and the conversation opens up into faith, genetics, ambition, and what it means not just to be happy, but to be fully alive. How did a man who fled New York City find himself in the Badlands and what does it actually take to do it yourself? You're about to find out.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Thank you to all of you. Thank you to Robbie Lauf. This is an amazing thing. What an incredible achievement. I saw this a little over a year ago when it was under construction and I said July 4th, 2026? I don't think so. I was wrong. Robbie Lauf is always right. And what a triumph this is. I know that we're all enjoying it together and really enjoying something that is a gift to America from all of you and from the people who are here. One round of applause for Robbie Lauf and all the people here. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library has asked me to come here and talk about happiness because that's actually what I write, speak, and teach about. I'm actually a happiness scientist of all things. And they asked me to come here and talk about happiness and Theodore Roosevelt. How do these things connect?

If I do my job in the next 25 minutes, I'm going to give you Theodore Roosevelt's three secrets to a happy life that you can use and that we could actually use more of in this great country of ours, I dare say. Hold me to that. I want to give you something that you can go away with that I actually teach and think an awful lot about. And as I've been reading over the past year, more and more, I've written in my last book about Theodore Roosevelt. It's so interesting that this has enriched my own life and I'm going to tell you why. For the last seven years, I've been teaching at the Harvard Business School. I've just moved to Vanderbilt University to teach happiness to MBA students, to business school students. And you might think that doesn't sound like a business-like topic, but the truth is that love and happiness are the business of life.

You are all entrepreneurs living your best possible life, much like the great Teddy Roosevelt did, designing your own life. But you have to know what the reward that you're looking for is, and that's not money or power or fame, that is indeed love and happiness. In my work, I'm always looking for the best possible examples of people who've done this better than other people. And there's no better example than the man for whom this presidential library is named. And the place where he actually found the strategy for a life of a man fully alive was, as you know, because you're here, Madora, North Dakota. That philosophy, that strategy that he actually found here is a strategy that we can all live with in our own lives and maybe put America back on track. Now by birth, as you all know, you've gone through the exhibits of this incredible place.

Roosevelt was not a natural outdoorsman. He was a dandy from a wealthy family at the fanciest of schools, going to the best possible parties in New York City. There's no New York City out here on the contrary. I know that's not an applause line, guys. Come on, you guys. All right. All right. That's enough of that.

But he had ambitions to do wilder things. He had a wild heart. Now, he wanted to do big game hunting in Africa, which he ultimately did, and go down the Amazon, which he ultimately did. But he scratched that itch initially early in his life by coming right here, which was the wildest place he could possibly reach in the western most reaches of what was America at that time. In 1883, of course, as you all know, he came here on an expedition, and here he found in his words, a desolate grim beauty. Completely captured his imagination, couldn't get it out of his mind. He went back to New York City where he famously, as you all know, was faced with tragedy on February 14th, 1884 when his mother and wife died on the same day in the same house. And he quite famously wrote in his diary, which is here with an X over the day, "The light has gone out of my life." In despair, he ran away.

Actually, he ran back to this beautiful place to find himself, to find something nobody really knows. This time he was not seeking adventure. He was trying to understand a life that he felt had been ruined and he had to go someplace where there wasn't the noise of New York and the people that he knew. He was alone with his thoughts here. I realize there's a lot of people here today, but it was pretty much empty then. And he said in retrospect that he found what he was looking for. He wrote later, "It was here." And he meant here, not in this room, but perhaps where this room stands, that the romance of my life began. Why? Was it because his life was so quiet and so peaceful or did he perhaps find a good therapist in the Dakota territory?

Obviously not. What he found, where he found himself was in these severe landscapes in isolation and in hard work, in danger and in punishing conditions. He wrote lots of letters to his family, so he knew what was going on. It was a very famous letter he wrote during the four years that he spent here finding himself. He was experiencing all kinds of travails and dangers. At one point, three outlaws stole his boat. He tracked them down and apprehended them single-handedly. So proud of himself that he wrote to his sister on that day, "I am as brown and as tough as a pine knot and feel equal to anything." That's a man fully alive writing that. I don't think I've ever felt as tough as a pine knot. I don't even know what a pine knot is, but I want to be it. You can feel the enthusiasm in his writing over these four years, and it formed him to become the man that he was.

After four years, he returned and became the famous Theodore Roosevelt of history, the hero of the Spanish American War, the Secretary of the Navy, the governor of New York, the Vice President of the United States, a job that he hated, and finally the President of the United States, a job that he loved. Throughout it all, however, he was a public philosopher. And this is where it gets really interesting for the work that I do. He wrote everything down and told it to audiences all over the world about what his secret was for living a good life, the strategy he was pursuing that he had found in the wilds of North Dakota where we sit today. Let me give you an example of one of the lessons that he taught that he learned here later on. And again, these are famous examples. You know these quotes.

You're all TR fans like me. So I only want to remind you of a couple before I get into what the real lessons are for our lives. One of his most famous speeches, the one that I think it's read by Oprah Winfrey actually here, is the man in the arena.

He's saying in that famous speech that sad, ineffective people, you know what they have in common? They never shut up and they never act either. It is not the critic who counts, he says in the man in the arena, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could not have done them better. Rather, the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena. If he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Now here's his point. You can live a comfortable life watching from the sidelines, talking about everything and sniping at others, or you can shut up and go do stuff like TR. Now, obviously the second path, doing stuff is the hard path. And that's kind of the point.

He talked about this again and again over the course of his life. He recommended looking for difficulty because things that are hard are hard. That's the point. He found that difficulty in Medora over the comforts that he left in New York. That's what formed him as a man. And he said later, a famous speech in 1899 he gave in Chicago, "I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease." I wish the president has talked like that still. "I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort of labor and strife. The highest form of success comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man, and today he would have included women who don't shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil. "Now I could go on.

I don't have all day. Robbie Loft is over there and he's going to get mad if I just read you all the quotes that are there in the museum. What I want to do is tell you the lessons for happiness that from my standpoint, Teddy Roosevelt's philosophy can teach us and can teach us better than any amount of empirical, statistically based social science, which is my bag. I'll give you three examples. Here are lessons that we can actually take away. And I want you to be thinking about this as you go through the library and you go through the museum about not just how wonderful it is and how inspirational it is, but how you're going to live differently because you've experienced this. I'm going to give you three ways that I'm living differently because of this. Lesson number one, you want to find yourself?

It's out there. It's outside.

I wrote a book recently called The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. And I've been hearing for years, years and years from young adults who are in the explosion of mental illness that we see today of generalized anxiety and clinical depression, who are looking for the sense of the meaning of their life that's increasingly hard to find. Where do I go to find the meaning of my life? And I say, go outside. Kids today, the average 12 year old in America today spends between four and seven minutes outside. The percentage of Americans spending time outside in nature has steadily declined since the 1980s. This is as we've actually had more opportunities to go outside, where conservation efforts have been largely successful, where this marvelous country has been looking out for its green spaces and doing so in many cases really well.

And yet we're not availing ourselves of this. We don't have a supply problem of conservation. We have a demand problem of conservation. People are just simply not as interested as they've been in the past. But when people do go out into nature, as Teddy Roosevelt clearly found when he left New York and came to North Dakota, sense of meaning rises dramatically. And here's the funny thing about it. You actually won't find the meaning of your life out there, but if you're out there without your devices in your mind and with nature, the meaning of your life will reliably find you. This is especially true for actual wilderness compared with green spaces, urban spaces. Roosevelt could not have found his soul by strolling around Central Park over lunch in New York City, I dare say. I realize that's a controversial statement and yet they all need to come here.

I'm glad they're not here because that would be too much. But this experience and this kind of gift is something we all need no matter where we live. The wilder it is, the better it is for your happiness. Now why? Because we actually know from modern neuroscience that being in nature actually makes your brain work properly. The brain that you possess has two hemispheres. They do different things. On the left, you process technology and information and how to and what, and all the modern things of life and all the things coming through the screen on your phone. The right hemisphere of your brain is your intuition, your mystery, your meaning, your love, your happiness. The why of your life is the right hemisphere of your brain. All day long, we're on the left. The average American looks at her or his phone 205 times a day, and that doesn't just make meaning harder to find.

It means we're not even asking the questions because our brains are broken. So what do we do? We find that when people are actually out in nature, the right hemispheres of their brain are illuminated. You've found that, right? Leave your phone at home, get up before dawn, walk as the sun is rising. Life suddenly starts to feel more meaningful. You want to know the meaning of your life? Get out there. One special malady that nature solves, by the way, is the malady of social comparison. My students talk about this all the time and probably so do you. This is the problem that we have. Other people seem to have a better life than me. How do I look to other people? It will destroy your happiness. It's very commonly attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, the following quote. We don't know if he actually said it. He might have.

He might as well have. The internet said it, that comparison is the thief of joy. Sounds like Roosevelt. So how do you fix that? Wonderful study from 2008 that people in urban environments were 39% more likely to say, "I'm concerned about the way that I present myself." 39% more than people in rural and green environments. My friends, that's confidence. That's the life you want. You want to care less, so do I.

And that leads to lesson number two, which is doing more of these things and talking less. With modern technology, all we do, we talk all the time. Well, we don't necessarily talk, maybe we type. We have something to say about everything constantly. We talk about the politics and the weather and the entertainment and we're giving our opinions. Meanwhile, we do less and less. We're more sedentary. We're less physically active. This is weirdly a historic. If you look back to the history of your own family, you'll find that that has nothing to do with the talking lifestyle with the way that your great-grandparents were raised. I don't know that much about my great-grandparents. I know my great-grandfather, Leroy Brooks, was born in Olathe, Kansas in 1862. He married the sheriff's daughter, Mary Ellen Brooks, and they had a long and happy marriage. And as far as I can tell, he had a happy life.

I don't know much about him except the fact that he was outside all day long. He was a farmer. And I'm going to make a guess that here's something he never said to Mary Ellen at the end of a long day. I'm completely sure he never said, "Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today." Because his brain was working the way it was supposed to. It wasn't broken by modern life. He was doing, not talking, and this is how people were evolved to live. Now you might think, doesn't talking about things make us better off? The answer is generally no, it doesn't, especially when we're complaining, especially when we're discussing our problems. This is what psychologists call co-rumination, and it's associated with increased depression and anxiety. Now what's the problem with all this communication? It reminds you of what you don't like and it demobilizes you.

Doing things is what psychologists call behavioral activation. See, we have all this jargon and that's how we get tenure.

But these are simple ideas. Teddy Roosevelt would've said, "You don't need a PhD for that. Do more, talk less." Taking positive action creates a sense of efficacy, of effectiveness. So stop talking, complaining, gossiping, stop posting, go do something productive. What kind of thing? Well, that's lesson number three, something hard and the harder, the better. Happiness is, as I mentioned, what I teach and on my first day of class, I ask my students to define it. I have 180 students in my class. I have 400 in the waiting list. There's an illegal Zoom link they think I don't know about. And on the first day of class, I say, "You worked hard to get into the science of happiness class. So define it. What do you think you're studying?" And I cold call them, that means I pull a student out of the class and I make them answer the question, whether they're prepared or not, makes them intensely unhappy.

And they always say the same thing, "Oh, professor, I can't put words to it, but I know it when I feel it." And I say, "That's beautiful and that's wrong. And that's good news that that's wrong because happiness isn't a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness, like the smell of your turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. Real happiness, it consists of three things, enjoyment, meaning and satisfaction. Don't go looking for happiness. Go looking for those things. Enjoy your life. That's not the same thing as pleasure, by the way. Pleasure is an animal thing. The secret to happiness is not pleasure. Pleasure won't lead you to happiness. Pleasure will lead you to rehab. No, no, no, no. You need enjoyment, which takes pleasure and adds people and memory. And that's a beautiful thing that you'll get here as you're touring this museum and being in this beautiful place.

The second is meaning. I already talked about meaning. Meaning is the why of your life, but last but not least is satisfaction. Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment with struggle. It's the funniest thing about homo sapiens, our species, that we don't find sweetness in our accomplishments unless they're hard. You see this all the time, as a matter of fact. My students are clever and could easily cheat on my exams, but there would be no satisfaction in getting a good grade if they did so. On the contrary, they measure the sweetness of their achievement on the basis of how hard they worked. You know this because this is what you taught your kids. You taught them when they were coming home from Little League practice in the back of the car at 4:30 in the afternoon and they wanted to stop at the Dairy Queen.

You said no. And they said, why? And you said, "Because it's not good for you," which was a lie. It's not technically a lie. The lie is that that's not the reason you weren't stopping. The reason you weren't stopping is because you didn't want them to ruin their dinner so they would come to dinner hungry and dinner would be a reward and they would learn in their little synaptically plastic brains that good things come to those who wait. Joy of an accomplishment with struggle. If you were actually honest with kids, you'd say, "We're not stopping at Dairy Queen because I want you to suffer." Now, most people know this. I mean, we're good neuroscientists about this, aren't we? Most people know that regular strenuous activity, hard physical work has been found in all kinds of research, but we know this intuitively to be just as efficacious in many cases, more effective for managing depression than even medication.

You want to fix things, get some sunshine, get out in the clean air, pick up heavy things, run around? I'm not telling you not to take your meds, but that stuff's free. All it takes is an effort. Now, a lot of that is interpreted as being purely physiological in terms of how exercise affects blood serotonin levels. But the truth is that I have little doubt that this also has to do with witnessing yourself in a time of hardship and strong and capable enough to do something hard and to do something uncomfortable. And that is most certainly what Teddy Roosevelt experienced in the hard life of the Badlands. All this is good personal advice. Go get lost and find yourself. Shut up and do stuff. And the harder, the better. Those are good personal lessons, but as a social scientist, I have to believe that this three part strategy has the capacity to improve our lives today.

And I think that probably Theodore Roosevelt himself were he to come back to life today would have greater ambition for these ideas and ambition for us on our 250th anniversary is the greatest country in the world on how to make America the kind of country that he wanted it to be when he was president of the United States. I have to think that if he were somehow to come back, and I don't mean the AI that's over there, which is pretty creepy, but the real deal, if he were with us today, he would have noticed, well, a few pretty big changes in the way that Americans are living today and he wouldn't approve. For example, he would have noticed the weird preference that we have to stare into a little screen rather than going outside. What's that all about? He would have noticed the talk, talk, talk approach to life in a therapeutic culture.

And he probably would have noticed a strong and rising emphasis on comfort and self-care to treat our not coincidentally skyrocketing levels of mental health problems. Teddy would, I think, envision a renewed country based on his simple life philosophy, a philosophy in which we're excited rather than scared by the uncertainty of the future, a country where we're disinterested in stupid inane trivialities that fill our days and minds and distract us from being fully alive in which we're in search of challenges to create things that are honest and good at home and abroad. I think he would demand leaders with heart and grit to live these values personally. He would want leaders like him, as tough as a pine knot, strong, honest, and willing to tell us what we, as American citizens, what we need to hear, not just what we want to hear. He would lead us into a better, freer, more prosperous future, even if that's difficult and that's painful because sometimes that's the point of being an American.

Now, I also have to wonder, how would we react to that? If he really honestly came back today and said the kind of stuff that he said, bully, how would we react? Many, I have no doubt, would probably take to social media to denounce and cancel the old rough rider. And you know what? Maybe they would kind of succeed in doing so at least for a while. But if they did, you know what he'd do? I don't really know, but my suspicion is he'd shrug and come back to Mendora and that wouldn't be so bad, would it? Thank you very much.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Well, Arthur, this is a delight. I think I've told many people that we built this institution to have people like Arthur here. So first, can we give a round of applause to everybody's guru? Well, first, we're just so grateful to have an incredible crowd here and I can't see them, but I bet it's big. But I would just say I just had a great time over the last few months reading your newest book.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Thank you.

ROBBIE LAUF:

The Meaning of Your Life.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

And you've been working together —

ROBBIE LAUF:

It's been a light period.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Well, since over the past five years, by the way, seven years ago, Robbie and I worked together at Harvard. He was a student at the Kennedy School and we were working together in my research, as a matter of fact. So we've known each other for a long time and I've been an admirer of this man. Look, I knew seven years ago this was going to happen.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Me too. You hang around Doug Burgum enough and that's how it goes. But the first thing I noticed about your book is you start by talking about something, I'm going to get it right here, umheimlich, which is an experience of feeling that something is not quite right.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Right.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Things are kind of going the wrong direction. I couldn't help but notice that that was in the fall of 2019 when you met me, which felt hard. But as a professor focused on happiness and as a guru on happiness to millions and millions of people, could you just say what that felt like to experience umheimlich?

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Yeah. So umheimlich is a German word, means you don't feel at home. It's the creepy sensation where you go someplace familiar and it's not right. And that's how I felt when I came back to academia in 2019. I'm a lifelong academic. I'm actually a third generation academic. It's the family business. My father was a professor, his father was a professor, and it was kind of what I was meant to do. It's the best. And over the first decade of my career, it was the happiest place. You remember in college that it was happier than outside of college. You were making friends, you were experimenting with ideas, you were falling in love every week. It was great. And I left. I left for 10 years because I went to run a big organization. I became a CEO of a large nonprofit in Washington DC called the American Enterprise Institute, a Think Tank.

And I didn't think much about it because I was completely occupied, but I knew that by the end of it I had to come back to academia. It was my happy place. So I came back, I took a professorship at Harvard expecting to go back to the world of happiness and I found it's like a plague had run through my village. I saw what a lot of you have seen with young adults with the explosion of depression and anxiety, and that was the not at home feeling. But of course that was an opportunity. I'm a behavioral scientist. I did my PhD 30 years ago looking forensically at problems and seeing how they're actually opportunities. So I said, "Aha, this is an opportunity for renewal. This is an opportunity for something good." That's what entrepreneurs do. That's what Theodore Roosevelt did with his own life and that's what I want to do with my own career.

And so that set me in search of what was actually wrong and what we could actually do to make it better.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Well, I think TR, when he came here, his second trip in 1884 was experiencing a far more severe version of Bundheimlich. Originally when I wanted to have this conversation, I was like, "I don't want to diagnose TR." And the more I though about it, I'm like, "Let's do it." Could you talk about, as a man who's learned more about TR, he ran from everything. He abandoned his newborn daughter. He wrote in his diary, which we have in this institution here, "The light has gone out of my life." And he began exhibiting extremely risky behavior. This is a man who is known for what his teeth looked like. He smiled so much. Tell me about what you think he was going through in that moment and how he shifted it.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Yeah. So people suffer a great deal, a profound sense of loss. Us is a normal part of life. Indeed, suffering is the most inevitable part of life. And the interesting thing about it is not that it happens, not that pain happens, but what you do when pain inevitably finds you. Some people will try to escape it over the course of their lives, turn to drugs and alcohol or dangerous behaviors. Why? Because they're trying to anesthetize themselves. They're trying to eliminate the pain from their life, which is an exercise in futility. I mean, you don't have to be a social scientist like me to know that this is the case. We have brains that react to negative emotions and negative experiences on purpose. Those negative experiences and emotions keep us alive. If you didn't feel fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, grief and loss, if you didn't feel these things, your ancestors would not have passed on their genes, but they're terrible.

The real question for whether our lives are high quality or low quality is what we do inevitably when pain finds us. Now, ordinarily what most people do is they try to eliminate their pain and run away first. Just exactly what Teddy Roosevelt did in 1884 when he experienced all this loss. He abandoned his daughter. He lost his mother and wife, and he headed back to the Badlands to try to either find himself or lose himself or whatever it happened to be. But what he wound up doing was, over the next four years, was doing what the great sages and philosophers have always done at the end of the day when they became enlightened. He stopped trying to eliminate his pain and he started lowering his resistance to that pain. See, here's an interesting point. This is a Buddhist concept that actually works. That pain is inevitable.

Suffering isn't. Suffering is pain multiplied by resistance to pain. So you have two choices when you're in a lot of pain, when pain finds you, you can try to eliminate it by running away from it or drinking it into oblivion, or you can actually stop resisting it. And in so doing, you can find the meaning of your life. And we find a masterclass in the latter, in the second part of his time here in the bad lines.

ROBBIE LAUF:

I think you're right. But the little dichotomy that he has too is that TR of course started to embrace the pain in the strenuous life. But the same time, he avoided the word Alice for the rest of his life because of the sadness he had. He didn't share with people what he went through. Talk about people who have that intense dichotomy.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Yeah. And that's a partitioning that a lot of people do. I mean, no man or a woman is perfect indeed. And it's absolutely possibly the case that he did avoid that to his great detriment. That's actually not leaning into that is a mistake that we could all make. I would be shocked if he actually didn't have some of these big mistakes in his psychological profile. We can't know. We can't go back. You can't ask the AI over there, so what gives with Alice?

ROBBIE LAUF:

You actually can ask that.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

You can ask that.

ROBBIE LAUF:

We don't know if the answer's accurate. He'll

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Change the subject.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Yes, he will.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

So we have to assume that that was his weak point.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Well, tell me, so that's super fascinating, but for me, another book you wrote that was when we were together when I was working for you was From Strength to Strength. And TR was notably our youngest president, which I think is incredible. He got to that office unexpectedly, perhaps not for him or people who met him in the Badlands, but because the president was assassinated. He retired from the presidency at 50 years old, which is a good 35 years from being president today. He struggled with it. He continued to yearn for that fulfillment and meaning. He went to the Amazon, he went to Africa, he ran again. He created a new party. In 1919 when he passed, he was the front runner in 1920 to be president again. And these things I think were all great. And by the way, great storytelling, sells a lot of tickets for the institution, but was it healthy do you think at all times?

Maybe just describe it.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

A lot of you are fantastic strivers, really good at what you do. Many of you, particularly those who have had these wonderfully charmed lives and you've been blessed to be able to support this great institution. And by the way, if you haven't supported the institution, there's a brochure under all your seats.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Thank you, Arthur.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

It's a problem with strivers that comes along with their success is that they often don't know how to stop. Sometimes I feel like I'm the striver whisperer because I've written so much about the addiction to success. And one of the things that you often see, one of the troubles that you often see from people who are large achievers is they start to get all their sense of stimulus from their outside accomplishments and they don't know how to be alone in their heads. Part of that often comes from their young children, and some of you can probably relate to this, who are really good at getting good grades or good at sports or good at music or good at something and you conclude that love is earned. Love is earned by your own merit and personal accomplishment and responsibility. And of course that's wrong. Love isn't earned.

Love is a free gift, freely given. But a lot of people who chase and chase and chase for the rest of their life have never been able to come to terms with the love that they actually seek. That's possibly the case, especially later in life for Teddy Roosevelt, for some of us too.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Well, I think that's a fascinating topic, but additionally, something you said during this speech I'm going to go to bed thinking about tonight, which is we don't have, as somebody tying this to conservation is we don't have a supply problem in conservation. We have a demand problem in conservation. That's summarized what Johnny Morris has been saying, what our panel on conservation leadership said this morning, I think extremely well. Could you tell me if you agree that there's a supply or demand problem in happiness? Do you think that there is currently the same yearning to live a happy life as there has been in the past?

ARTHUR BROOKS:

I think that the yearning to live a happy life has always been the same and it always will be the same. I think that we are born to want love and happiness. The trouble is we don't know what they are and we don't know how to pursue those things. And those things become more elusive when we use our brains in a way that evolutionary biology has not intended them to be used. It's actually getting harder in point of fact, but we want it just as much. And so the things that we can actually do to bring happiness to us are largely to live in the old ways, to live in ways where we can have faith in our lives and family life and real friendships and to pursue our excellence by earning our success and serving other people. These are the old ways basically. So I don't think there's any problem with demand.

I think that simply our perception of the supply of happiness has become more elusive, which is why happiness has been in gradual decline for several decades.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Well, you also mentioned, I think, something that TR struggled with and also embraced at many different parts of his life, which is his faith. One of the secrets I know about you is you have a tremendous faith. TR ebbed and flow at his time at Harvard, was a deeply faithful person, lost his father, like many people do, struggled with his faith immensely after. And then towards the end of his life again, began re-embracing it. Tell us a little bit about the metrics and science behind, not even just picking a specific faith, but faith itself in achieving happiness.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

So when I talk about the habits of the happiest life, it's not true that habits are everything. The truth is that half of your happiness is genetic. Your mother literally made you unhappy.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Not you, mom.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

But that's not bad news because I could give you all sorts of information. Half of your tendency to abuse alcohol is genetic, but that means you need better habits if you have that tendency. A quarter of your happiness is according to your... It goes with your circumstances. Happy things happening right now in your life, you'll be a quarter happier and sad things happening, you'll be a quarter less happy, but those things are transient because your emotions are not made to stay around. A full quarter of your happiness really does come from your habits and those are things that'll give you systematically better circumstances and allow you to manage your genetics. So this is really all you need to know. And those four happiness habits are what I just laid out, faith, family, friends, and work that serves other people. That's what it comes down to.

Now when I say faith and direct answer to Robbie's query is I don't mean my faith. I like mine. I'm a Catholic, most important thing in my life. I'll go to my grave with the scriptures on my lips and so will my wife. But as a scientist, I will tell you that the path is to transcendence. Left to our own devices, we're stuck in a psychodrama of our own boring, tedious day-to-day existence. My job, my car, my money, my television programs, my lunch, me, me, me. It's tedious. You need escape from that. You need peace and perspective. And the only way you're going to get that is by standing in awe of something bigger than you. Maybe that's the stoic philosophers. Maybe that's the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. Maybe that's walking outside in Madora, North Dakota. Maybe that's a vipassana meditation practice if that's your thing, or maybe it's the faith of your youth.

But the truth is that you need that and it's very clear in the life of Theodore Roosevelt that he looked to transcendence in the hardest parts of his life. And what he found there was the solace that I see in the studies, but I can also see in my own life are key to peace and perspective.

ROBBIE LAUF:

I'm glad you brought up genetics because I happen to be married to a very naturally happy person and her brother as well. That must be

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Annoying for you.

ROBBIE LAUF:

It's pretty great. I got to be honest. It's pretty great. But the more I get to know myself, and a lot of it's been through reading your work, is that I have some awareness of I have to work for happiness and potentially because that's river. You've shared that, and frankly, a lot of people don't believe me when I tell them that because I think I exude some amount of joy. I try to, but I work very hard at it. Talk about how you recommend people work for their happiness who aren't just waking up every day naturally yearning and succeeding in it.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Yeah. It's easier for some people than others. There are affect profiles. Affect has to do with pervasive mood and some people are just natural cheerleaders. They have intense positive emotionality and weak negative emotionality. My wife is one of those people. It really is annoying by the way. I, on the other hand, tend to be a moodier, darker, more brooding person, high highs and low lows, and by the way, so are you. You're the mad scientist emotional profile of everything's intense. Nothing is neutral. Everything is great or terrible. And that's great when it's great. You're doing

ROBBIE LAUF:

Great.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

And that's not great when it's not great. I get that. But the whole point is, and this is one of the lessons, one of the Roosevelt lessons, the point isn't to be happy all the time. The point is to be fully alive. There's a great saint, Saint Irenaeus in the second century. I liked them when they used to name boys Irenaeus, that's a manly name. And Saint Irenaeus famously said that the glory of God is a man fully alive. Today he'd say a person fully alive. He didn't say a happy cheerleader, good for them. He said to be fully alive. That's somebody who's as hard as a pine knot after getting your boat back. That's a person fully alive. I guarantee you he wasn't happy tracking down those delinquents and tying them up and taking them to the sheriff and all the stuff that he had to do on that day.

On the contrary, he felt that aliveness. So you join me in struggling on a lot of days with negative emotionality, with a darkness within you, wake up and say, "This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it to be sure. Thank you for these wonderful blessings of this day and thank you for the trouble today too." Because like Teddy Roosevelt, I say, "Bring it on."

ROBBIE LAUF:

Well, he experienced a lot of trouble. I think one of the most interesting things as a place he experienced such significant trouble was during his vice presidency, which was forced upon him after experiencing so much success as the governor. And he looked so much for happiness that he enrolled in law school. Imagine being so sad that law school looks fun.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

I know. I know. It's true.

ROBBIE LAUF:

My God.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

I hear JD Vance is going back to law. He actually been through law school. I hear he's going to -

ROBBIE LAUF:

I'll let you take that one. Yeah. So something that I think is just so I've experienced so much through this project is it has never felt like work. And I've had jobs, not at the governor's office, at McKinsey, where sometimes it felt like work. TR though the vice presidency felt like work, not because he put more effort into it because he didn't find meaning and purpose. Talk about just the importance of passion and connecting it to your work.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Yeah. I do a lot of work on calling because I work with young people who are about to pursue their fortunes and a lot of them make a big mistake. I mean, my students for the past seven years have been MBA students at the Harvard Business School and they've come to the conclusion that if they have earthly success, money, power, fame, then happiness will come for free. It'll come along automatically and that's wrong. That's actually incorrect. I tell them on the first day of class, seek happiness and then you'll be successful enough. And of course that makes them panic because of the word enough. Enough isn't in the vocabulary of the striver to be sure. But the truth of the matter is that you can actually find enough when you actually find your calling and your work as a case study in this, Robbie.

How do you find your calling? By looking for two basic things in a way that you earn your daily bread, whether it's as running this fine institution, bringing it up from nothing, living this particular dream, whether it's being a professor and a public speaker like I am, whether it's Teddy Roosevelt, is to look for work in which you find two characteristics where you can truly earn your success, where your life creates value and in value in the lives of other people. And most importantly, where you serve others, where you're needed. The essence of dignity is to be needed. The problem as was articulated by Teddy Roosevelt and then others was that in those days at least, the essence of being unneeded was Vice President of the United States. There was little to do. There was little to serve. You're marking time. It was fancy parties.

I can't think of anybody in history who would be less interested in fancy parties and doing nothing than Theodore Roosevelt. If I were to diagnose that, I would say he was neither earning his success nor serving humanity. And the result of that was that he was profoundly depressed in the role and came alive when he became president of the United

ROBBIE LAUF:

States. Yeah. Well, I don't know, many of us probably were here on your first visit to Medora and Fargo, which was fantastic. And again, this is all to get you here every year. But my instinct is that you brought something up that I think is one of the best stories and summarizations of this project and this place. You called this place a pilgrimage, which I think just synthesized my experience very well. Sometimes we talk about that maybe Western North Dakota is hard to get to, that this is a place that is difficult to get to, and that might be part of the success, but maybe just talk a little bit more about why pilgrimages are so important.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Every religious tradition has pilgrimages and they all involve walking long distances. You might think that's so strange, but if you actually look back to homo sapiens and the ancestral environment, the human brain has been more or less in its current form since the middle pleistocene 250,000 years ago when all humans lived in small bands of kin related hierarchical groups of 30 to 50 individuals. They all lived in that particular way. It was about hunting and staying alive. And the secret to hunting for our ancestors was actually walking after prey. We're a walking species. Ambulation is the human advantage, that and intelligence. And it's an interesting thing because most people don't know if you can track an animal, you can walk it to death. There's a gazelle out there. Yeah. I mean, if you can actually track it, walk and walk and walk and walk and walk and you can walk 14 or 15 miles and it will finally be exhausted and you can spirit and bring it home and thrill your mate in the cave.

That's the secret. Now the result of it is that ambulation has this almost mystical quality for human beings. We love to walk and we find ourselves. What we're looking for kind of finds us, and this is why every religious tradition, the Shinto tradition, the Hindus, I travel a lot to India. I go to India every year and I've seen Hindu, Menticant Hindus on the road toward Matura, the town of 5,000 temples. And in the Catholic tradition, my own, there's many pilgrimages, the most famous of which is the Camino of the Santiago across Northern Spain, which I've done and I recommend to all of you, but it doesn't have to be a religious tradition either. We need a secular civic tradition of these kinds of pilgrimages, places where we can go to experience nature, to see the wilds, but also to walk and to remember who we are as a people.

This reconnects us to our biological roots, but can also reconnect us to our national, our patriotic roots as well. And I can't think of a better place to do it. Look, I've been to a lot of presidential libraries. This is unique. This feels like a pilgrimage when you come here. This feels like a destination where I can find what I'm looking for or more appropriately where what I'm looking for can actually find me. And what is that that I'm looking for? I'm looking for the future of America like you are. I have the same fears that you do. I have the same anxiety about what we're actually trying to do as a nation. So where am I going to find it? In a place where I can hear the wind and where actually can see the sky and where a great thing actually happened in our national culture because of a great man.

That's why I think this is a pilgrimage, much the same way as many religions understand the concept.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Well, we're coming to the end of our time. I have just two more questions. First would just be, you've got a room here that frankly built this institution, that what they did made this possible. I'm looking around, I see literally every face. I just can see a memory of how they made this place special and important. You've led a globally important think tank that frankly wasn't globally important when you started there. You got it there. What would be your dream for us for this institution and for what we can do here? And what advice would you give the TR Library?

ARTHUR BROOKS:

No, I appreciate that an awful lot. I mean, it's interesting because you have to call yourself a library in a museum, which are probably the worst marketing ever. On the other hand, Theodore Roosevelt's great marketing. Those are two great words for it. I think that the ambition is actually not for people to find the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, but as I mentioned before, to find themselves and to find their country. I think that's really what the ambition is, to have people come and feel renewed, not because they learned important parts of history or they learned a bunch of facts, but they learned what the vision of the man was and what the inspiration of the country was actually at the time. And when people feel they need that boost in confidence, when people feel like they need the inspiration because they're patriots and they want a better future for the country, that they actually know where to go to fill up the tank.

I think to market it in that particular way, to understand it in that particular way, to promise this to other people. And why do I know that's successful? Because I'm here right now and I'm kidding that and so are you. We are people who can actually spread these ideas to others. And if that's actually the way that it's... There's never been a presidential library that's been built 107 years after the death of the president, and there's a reason for that because it's really not about Theodore Roosevelt. It's about what he represented. Take that to America and America will benefit and it will be your gift to the nation and our nation's gift to the world. So thank you. That's some good advice.

ROBBIE LAUF:

I want to finish, this institution is, I think if there was a word that has been embodied into us by one of our very early leaders is it's all about gratitude. It's gratitude for this place, gratitude for the people who made it, gratitude for people like you who've gone under your way and fall in love with North Dakota. He told me it's the best Dakota on his way in, that was pretty nice. I told him we know, but I want to finish with just asking you today on this eve or two eaves away from our 250th birthday, what are you grateful for with America?

ARTHUR BROOKS:

It's interesting because I was actually asked that by the periodical I write for. I'm a columnist at the Free Press.

ROBBIE LAUF:

I did not know that.

ARTHUR BROOKS:

And they asked me to comment in 150 words, why do I love America? And it's interesting because that's actually a question that I can answer, but through the eyes of the person I love the most in the world, which is my wife Esther, my wife Esther, who wanted to come and wishes she were here, and we'll be here next time.

I immigrated in the United States. I re-immigrated. I left as a young man. My mother was born in the other Dakota and I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and I left in my early 20s to Spain. I was a professional classical musician at the time and I was actually chasing a girl and playing concerts and living a relatively Bohemian lifestyle. I had never given a thought to why I love America. I'd never really given a thought. I did not love America, don't get me wrong. I wasn't one of the young Jacobins that thinks the place is terrible. No, not at all, but I never gave any though. And I went and I lived in Barcelona for a bunch of years and married the girl I had chased there and started my family and we came back in my late 20s and I reimmigrated to my own country.

I saw this country through fresh eyes, through the eyes of my Spanish wife who didn't speak English and had no education, not even a high school education, not even a high school diploma. And we were poor. We didn't have any money. We had tumbleweeds going through the checking account. We needed her to work and she was afraid because those conditions, there's no jobs in Spain for somebody like that, doesn't speak the language. And she had four job offers in the first week, all minimum wage, but that was plenty fine. And she came home and said, "I took a job today." And I said, "What is it?" And she said, "Teaching English." And I said, "Why did they hire you?" She said, "Well, number one is because you people have no standards." But she said, "The real reason they offered me the job is because I could relate to all of the poor people who had just come here to this country and who wanted to be here because I was learning the language myself and because I was raised in poverty by a single mother in a broken home and because I didn't have a high school diploma and yet I wanted to be here." And so they hired me and that was the beginning of a journey of my love affair with this country through the eyes of my wife who's an American by choice, and now the most patriotic American that I know is her.

Why do I love America? Because this is a country of ambitious riffraff, and that's the way I want it to stay.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Well, if you need a little bit more love for America, I would buy this book, which we have copies of in our store, but I would just say thank you, Arthur. I'm grateful for you. I'm grateful for this incredible institution. I'm grateful for this country and to spend - God

ARTHUR BROOKS:

Bless you, Robbie. This is an incredible achievement. This is a complete triumph and this is your day.

ROBBIE LAUF:

Thank you so much, Arthur.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Listeners, so glad to have you along for Live from the TRPL, our special six-part series from the library's grand opening. You can find more interviews and talks like these online at trlibrary.com/video, where you'll also see the library's opening ceremony, drone shows, news stories, historical footage, and so much more. Check it out, and thanks for listening.