Thank you, Hitendra. What a delight to be with you. Nice to see you again.

It's been really interesting, I have to say. You know perfectly that when you're putting your book together, it's an interesting topic or you wouldn't be writing about it. The key question is, is it just interesting to me or is it interesting to a lot of other people as well? I have had a number of conversations and I practiced with the argument of the book a little bit in the pages of The Atlantic. So I knew that there was an audience for it, but I wasn't quite ready for how intense the interest was in this particular topic. The truth of the matter is that as a specialist in happiness, I teach the brain science and social science of happiness at Harvard, but there's a lot of interest in that for people in the first half of their life. But there's very little about happiness and the strategies for happiness in the second half.

The whole idea that most people have is that, live right, play by the rules, win, succeed, bank it and die happy. That's kind of the whole idea. It's just simply wrong. The idea that you can let happiness take care of itself means that if you do a bunch of things right in the first half, the second half will be just fine. Looking at the science on this and looking at the practice and biography, history and the deep spiritual teachings on this, it's quite eye opening for a lot of people. So the interest has been high.

Yeah, that's right. A long time ago, maybe ten years ago now, when I was first starting to travel to India a lot and I was talking to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, one of the things that you need to understand as a Westerner, he told me, it was quite interesting, he said that, "You've really done well in the West, investing all your time and energy and resources and developing business practices and technology. We have 6000 years of history investing in spiritual practices." Now, the reason that that had a big impact on me was, number one, it was a profound insight and one I greatly appreciated. But the second point was, you can invest in whatever you want and you will get a return on it. That's the key thing when it comes to our happiness and spiritual development and the development of our love relationships.

Let me put it in more base and trivial terms. We need a 401k plan for happiness. That's what we actually need. You're not just going to hope that your money takes care of itself. You're going to be broke when you're old, if you try to let your income take care of itself. The same thing is true with your happiness. You need to have an understanding of what you should accumulate, what you should invest in, what your relationship should look like and we need to spend more time investing in the happiness in our lives and not just assuming that everything will take care of itself. If we do, we're pretty lucky early on.

Yeah. This is actually the same story I used to open the book, which is that I overheard a conversation. This happened about eight years ago. I was just about to celebrate my 50th birthday at the time. I was going through kind of a dark night of the soul as things were going well in my career. I was the CEO of a big non-profit organization, I had to raise a lot of money and travel around and give speeches, and I felt like kind of a big shot. But I realized that I didn't have any retirement plan for my own happiness at all. I was just going to keep doing the same thing over and over again until I stopped and then what? At this time, I was on an airplane all the time, like so many people are and I overheard a conversation behind me on the plane of an old elderly couple. I couldn't see them because it was dark. It was a night flight. But I could hear them and I could tell there's a man and a woman, and I could tell by their voices that they were elderly. The man was explaining to whom I assumed was his wife, that he might as well be dead. His wife was trying to reassure him all this time. Then he would say, "Nobody cares about me, nobody remembers me." She says, "It's not true." It was clearly true.

I was thinking to myself, this must be somebody who's disappointed with his life because he didn't do very much. He wasn't a Hitendra Wadhwa, a big shot entrepreneur and college professor. This is a guy who didn't get the education that he wanted, didn't start the companies that he wanted and so now he's near the end, disappointed. Well, the lights go on at the end of the flight, we all turn around and it's one of the most famous men in the world. It turns out that this is somebody who's done ten times as much of his life as I ever will. He's rich, he's famous. He's not controversial. He's beloved and respected for his heroics. He's a true world hero for things he did in the sixties and seventies and I just heard him telling his wife that he might as well be dead and everybody has forgotten him. This is the point. How many famous people do really well as athletes or entertainers early on and then die broke. That's this guy! It is basically what has happened. Except, it's not with his money, it's with his happiness. And I thought to myself, if this guy doesn't have it made in the shade, what chance do I have? It came at a perfect time.

I'm turning 50. Things were going well, but I didn't have an exit strategy. I thought to myself, what am I doing here? I'm a social scientist. I have a PhD as a social scientist, I might as well put it to some good use and create a strategic plan for my own happiness. And that's what happened.

It was me-search, not research and I didn't intend to publish it. But my wife found a bunch of my notes planning out the second half of my life and she said, "I think you should publish this. Maybe somebody will be interested in it." That's how it came to be a book.

Yeah. We're putting together stock markets and they're looking into the structure of the human soul.

Actually, what surprised me the most pleasantly, came out of what surprised me the most negatively, which is often the case. When I was doing the research, what I first found was that the first question that I asked is, generally speaking, left up to chance, do people get happier or unhappier as they get older? What you find is that most people get slightly unhappier from their early twenties until their early fifties. And then most people start getting happier in their early fifties until they're about 70. And then, the population breaks up into two equal-sized groups. One group keeps getting happier and the other group starts back down. Now, here's the thing that really surprised me. I would have thought that the group that keeps getting happier after age 70, in the last quarter of their life, are the people who did the best in life before. The high achievers, the strivers. But it turns out there's a strivers curse. There's research that shows that the people who are most likely to be disappointed with their lives are the people who are identified as the highest performers early on. The reason is because you can't live up to your own expectations if you self-objectify and become a success addict, a workaholic early, you'll never live up to your number one expectations, number one. Number two is that you have a big party early on. And the one thing everybody knows is when the party's over and the higher you go up, you never do anything with your life, you won't know when it's over. But if you go really high, sooner or later, you're going to have to come back down. It's going to hurt when you do. That's the reason that I write about the strivers' curse. That's the bad news.

The good news is, nobody has to have a certain set of skills. Now you've got to go against Mother Nature. This is something that any religious person who's listening to us now or any spiritual person listening to us right now knows is very normal. That idea that if it feels good, do it. Going with Mother Nature is terrible advice. The reason is because Mother Nature wants you to just pass on your genes. You must do much more than that and sometimes even fight against your tendencies for you to actually have a happy and a good life. The hardest thing to do, naturally, is to sit and meditate, for example, that's completely contrary to human nature. And yet, when we master it, we transcend human nature and actually can become better than we would naturally be. We get beyond the animal essence of who we are to become truly human. This is the whole idea of finding Atman so we can be one with Brahman and so we can become more divine, less animal in every way. So here's the passive point.

What I found over the course of the book, and the most surprising thing is that, number one big surprise is, the highest strivers, contrary to what they always tell you, are most likely to have a bad surprise. But that surprise is not inevitable with the right skills.

Yeah. This comes from the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century Catholic saint. But really it comes from Aristotle. Aristotle was saying the same thing as the Buddha. Buddha and Aristotle were contemporaries, and they were talking about almost the same thing that left us to our devices, we have idols. Those idols have divine characteristics, but they're not divine. Those four idols are money, power, pleasure and honor. By honor, he doesn't mean in the contemporary sense of serving with honor. It means fame, admiration or prestige.

Money, power, pleasure and prestige, these are the divine like characteristics that seem sort of godlike but aren't. Aquinas said that left to our devices, if we don't search for God, then we will look for those things. Now, the problem is that they don't satisfy, which led the Buddha at the same time, more or less as Aristotle, to say that life is suffering. The first noble truth of Buddhism, it's actually Dukkha, which in Sanskrit means dissatisfaction. Life is dissatisfaction, sticky cravings for inadequate things. Aquinas, taking from Aristotle, who is saying the same thing as the Buddha, was saying that left to our devices, we will be attached to things that cannot satisfy us. This is the first giveaway that we must not be in a state of nature, that nature is beautiful and nature is good. But we must transcend nature with our divine powers, because we have this unique ability to actually connect with these divine characteristics that can lift us above our base nature. That's why the Buddha talks about the eightfold path of getting beyond attachment, which leads to dissatisfaction and why Saint Thomas Aquinas, later echoing Aristotle, says that we need to turn around for money, power, pleasure and honor to start walking toward God, walking away from those things.

Again, neither the Buddha nor Aristotle, nor Saint Thomas Aquinas, or for that matter, Saint Paul, the apostle who said the love of money is the root of all evil. He didn't say that money is the root of all evil, but the love of money is the root of all evil. There's nothing wrong with money or power necessarily, or pleasure or prestige. It's attachment to those things.

We should be able to live in a world with those things, to use them as a force for good, to lift up other people while not becoming attached to those things ourselves. That's the trick. That's what the Buddha was trying to get people to do on his eightfold path and what Christianity and Hinduism have been trying to get people to do for thousands of years. It's not easy. But it turns out that if we follow one of these paths through these attachments, life is so rich and we will have lifted ourselves up from the base nature. In doing so, we can have this last half that's infinitely better, more satisfying, more pleasurable, more meaningful than anything we could have found in the first half.

Yeah. I started off like most kids. I mean, we all have the things that we're interested in and that we're good at. My real passion as a child was music. All I wanted to be was a great classical musician. I was a French horn player. I had been playing violin and piano since I was 4 years old, and at 8 or 9, I took up the French horn. I was good at it. I resolved this very American thing. I resolved to be the world's greatest French horn player.

I studied for hours a day. I went to the best teachers. I went to a conservatory when I was 18 years old, which is what you do. I promptly dropped out of my required classes and was invited to pursue my excellence outside the conservatory. Actually, I dropped my required music theory classes to take tabla lessons, which is North Indian, Hindustani classical drumming. It was incredibly useful and very satisfying, but it turns out it did not fulfill my academic requirements and one must do that too.

So, I went on the road as a professional musician. I went professional at age 19 and I did that all the way through my 20s without having gone to college. But I found that instead of getting better and better, I was getting worse. It was weird. I mean, it's what a lot of athletes find and musicians do as well. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong. I needed to go to better teachers. I needed to practice more or whatever it was, but nothing seemed to work. So, I had to come to terms with the fact that my dream, whether it was a quixotic dream or ridiculous dream, wasn't going to come true, that I wasn't going to get better. I wasn't going to progress in my career. Dejectedly and embarrassingly, I went back to college. I didn't tell anybody about it. I studied by correspondence. I got a degree in economics without telling anybody except my wife, because I was ashamed of the fact that I was running away from my music career.

Finally, I left music and started my PhD and for years I didn't tell anybody about this because it was the great heartbreak of my life until I realized, I love being an economist. I love being a social scientist. It's the most amazing thing and really what it came down to is this. Here's how I finally made peace with it. My favorite composer is Johann Sebastian Bach, the world's greatest composer of the high baroque, maybe the greatest composer ever lived. He was asked near the end of his life why he wrote music. He said that, "The aim and final end of all music is nothing less than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the soul." And I said to myself, I couldn't have said that when I was a French horn player, but I can say that now. Today, I'm talking to Hitendra Wadhwa on a podcast, and I feel like I'm talking about things that can glorify God, that can refresh the soul. And so finally, I can make Bach proud. I couldn't when I was a French horn player. Maybe I can, as a social scientist.

I think that's right. One of the big mistakes that a lot of people make in modern life today is to separate out the creation from the creator artificially, to define some sort of exclusivity between faith and reason. Real iron sharpens iron in very important ways and to understand the nature of the divine and in ourselves, having our own human genius be a simulacrum for that divine nature. I mean, what a beautiful thing that it is. I see a real impoverishment in the way that a lot of people in the West talk about science and technology and all of these things as if they were a substitute for our reality. And on the contrary, they are complements to it. Spirituality is the basis for what we actually can do with our human genius, in my view.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that we need to be natural. One of the things that religious or spiritual people do, they tend to be bad at naturalness because they're self-conscious about it. If it is part of you, don't hide it and don't call attention to it unnecessarily or unnaturally either. Make your spiritual journey as natural as putting on your shirt. Make it part of what you do. That's a really important thing.

For example, one of the things that I've dedicated myself to doing is, I give about 175 speeches a year outside of my lectures, and I make sure that nobody will leave any speech of mine not knowing my spiritual views. That's really important. I'll just say it naturally and casually and in an undramatic way. For example, I'll talk about the habits of the happiest people. There are four things that the happiest people practice every day. Accounts they put an investment into every day, if you want to talk about happiness 401k. That's their faith, their family, their friendships and work that is meaningful as far as they can earn their success and serve other people. Those are the four accounts. Faith, family, friends and work.

When it comes to faith, I'll say, "You have to figure out what that is, but don't skip a transcendental journey. My journey is I'm a Roman Catholic. It is literally the most important thing in my life." But I know as a social scientist that the benefit comes from getting away, from zooming out from yourself to see the majesty of the human experience from the point of view of something bigger than you. If you're an atheist, maybe you're studying the stoic philosophers, maybe you're studying secular humanism. If you're spiritual but not religious, maybe you're starting a meditation practice or walking in nature or analyzing the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Or if you're like Hitendra and Arthur, maybe you're an adherent to the work of Paramahansa Yogananda and I of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The point is, do something. Do something because your heart wants it and you need it and the data say that the happiest people have a transcendental walk in their lives. That's how I present the material.

Nicodemus is a major figure in the Christian gospels. He's a Pharisee. As most people who know anything about Christianity and the New Testament Christian Bible know that the Pharisees were kind of the bad guys. They were the very strict Jewish believers that were always tormenting Jesus and his followers. But there's a lot more to it than that. Part of the reason is basically this. This is a little bit of background that probably most of the listeners don't know.

The Pharisees were a highly mystical sect of ultra-orthodox Jews. They had actually taken on mystical characteristics of the Zoroastrians during the Babylonian exile and after the Persians had taken over and allowed the Jews to practice their religion freely in Babylon. The Persians, many of whom practiced Zoroastrianism, a lot of those characteristics were taken on by this sect of Pharisees called Jews. And that meant the resurrection of the dead and saints in heaven and the afterlife and all these things. They brought those very mystical views back to Israel, and taught these things. Now, Jesus and His followers came out of the Pharisaical tradition. The reason is because this really was their community. Then the Christians who took it on after the death of Jesus Christ, were the ones who continued to maintain these Pharisaical views.

So really, the Pharisees today came from the Zoroastrians through a certain sect of Jews during the time of Jesus, and now today are still encapsulated in modern day Christians. It's a very interesting thing. Another point that's really interesting that you know really well, but maybe many of our listeners don't, is that the Zoroastrians were kicked out of Persia a few centuries later and went to Gujarat on the east coast of India and are today called the Parsees. A very mystical sect. A very interesting and a very beautiful spiritual tradition. This is how much we all have in common between India, Persia, ancient Palestine, modern Europe and North America. We all have these mystical views that really tie us together.

Now, Nicodemus was a holy man. He was a big shot among the Pharisees and was listening to Jesus and he just can't get it out of his head. He knows what he's supposed to do, which is to say, we got to get rid of this guy. This guy is telling us that we're bad news and he's standing up to us in a way that's impermissible because we are the leaders and we should be respected, etc. But he winds up going to Jesus at night. This is the story of Nicodemus at night. He finds Jesus at night. He just got to listen to him. He just says, "Lord, tell me more." And all throughout, you see this little by little conversion. Then at the very end of the New Testament, when Jesus is crucified, Nicodemus is one of the people who cares for Jesus's body, which suggests that now Nicodemus has actually become a follower of Jesus. Interesting, isn't it? But it's all of this intermingling of these incredible spiritual, cosmic traditions, these mystical traditions that have taken on all over the place and our ability to persuade each other and to love each other in all these interesting ways is really encapsulated nicely.

Well, it's that all of us need to be open to transformation. All of us need to be open to change. We can do it during the day or we can sneak off and do it at night. Most of us actually have so much pride that we're afraid of people seeing our transformation. This is really the point. We're ordinarily kind of Nicodemus at night. There's a lot of literature on this, a lot of social science literature that shows that most people maybe start to become more religious after about age 40, which is weird, because nobody believes in the Easter Bunny or the tooth fairy after 40. But, we're more likely to believe in mystical things that we can't see after 40. Part of the reason is because life is messy and we're more likely to become more comfortable with the messiness of life, including the inherent contradictions in our imperfect beliefs that are captivated by our imperfect brains after age 40. But one way or the other, most people get more spiritual after 40, but they're prideful, and they've made commitments against their religion in their youth and of these crazy religious faith paradigms and all the bad stuff. So, they have to be like Nicodemus at night. They've got to sneak off.

I've met so many people that say, "Yeah, I'm going to church, but I'm not telling anybody." Yeah man, you're Nicodemus at night. And I'm sure it's the same thing in India when people are coming back to the Hindu faith or their Muslim faith that that they're not telling anybody about it because they're big intellectuals but secretly they're starting to pray and sit in meditation again, etc.

Yeah, that's true. It's interesting that all of Elvis Presley's Grammys were in the category of gospel music. Not in rock and roll, but in gospel. The reason is because that's where his heart was. At the end of the day, we're all tempted and we're all falling and we're all a big mess. But, what we really want is that truth. It's what Aquinas was talking about, he says that, "We're drawn toward the Godhead" Brahman for Hindus. But it's so hard. So we turn around and start walking backward toward the money, power of pleasure and fame. But we're drawn and drawn toward it. And this is the interesting thing. I realize that not everybody sees it like I do, but we all do want something that is more transcendental. That's the hunger that I think it's important for all of us to respect in ourselves and to feed.

Yeah. I'm not a very super sentimental guy, but there are three topics that are hard for me to talk about, which is music, my children and my faith in God. It's not hard for me to talk about it. It's just hard for me to remain scientific in this way because I'm immediately transported. I'm immediately taken to a tender space when I talk about these particular things. I don't know if it's my weak point or my strong point, how do you feel about this? How do you relate to that?

Mukunda is a diminutive name in Bengali, right?

To begin with, my view is that there are a lot of great ideas out there. There are a lot of compelling ideas, there are a lot of clever ideas. For example, if I read an academic journal article in psychology that introduces me to a new idea that I'd never heard before, I say, "Oh, that's very interesting. Let's see if it stands up." And the way I'm going to see if it stands up is to see if it's replicated on different populations using different data sets. And even better, if different disciplines start looking at it in different ways. The same thing is true for spiritual truths, for spiritual empirical regularities in the world. I'm interested in my own tradition, for sure. I believe in my faith, I love my faith and I embrace my faith. But I really want to see many of these ideas from other angles as well. From the vantage of a social scientist, statistician, from other religions, from other philosophical points of view, from the point of view of people who have no faith, from the point of view of biography and in the experience of other people. What I try to do as a scholar in my writing is to look at everything from at least four angles. Sometimes, it'll be through music, social science, faith and philosophy. Sometimes, I'll be bringing in a biography. Sometimes, I'll be bringing in mathematical modeling. I want at least four dimensional reinforcement of an idea before I accept that idea.

Now, one of the things that I'm talking about in this book is that the first half of life is fundamentally very different from the second half of life. I was looking to see whether or not I really believe this hypothesis. Support for this hypothesis took me to India and an ancient Hindu teaching called The Ashramas. The Ashramas is a teaching that life comes in four chronological parts. One follows on the other. They're not necessarily all the same length of time. As a rule of thumb, think of it as every 25 years. In a perfectly balanced life, you live to 100. The first quarter is called Brahmacharya, that's the student. You're learning. You're a sponge, you're becoming a full adult human.

The second is called Grihastha, which means the householder. That's money, that's family life, that's sexual life to create children. That is all the delights of the world. But that's not the end. That's only the halfway mark. Then things start getting interesting because then you get your second adolescence. Your second adolescence is the transition to Vanaprastha that comes from two Sanskrit words Van and Prastha, meaning retiring into the forest. It doesn't necessarily mean literally retiring into the forest. What it means is metaphorically stepping back from Grihastha. That's super hard to do. Most people want to stay in the household and spend money, working and family life, kids, relationships and possessions forever. You get stuck in there, but you have to start moving back from that. Vanaprastha is stepping back to more cosmic, more transcendental realities in your life. That's aged 50, by the way, according to the theory of The Ashramas. Most people don't do it.

Now, why do you want to do that? Number one is intensely interesting and satisfying and an unbelievable adventure. It doesn't necessarily mean you stop working. Of course, most of us have to keep working. The whole point is you need to start concentrating more on more supernatural, more metaphysical verities, in addition to the things that you're doing, such that the last quarter is called Sannyasa and that's enlightenment. In ancient times, men of means in India would leave their families, their wives and children and go sit at the foot of their master in a Himalayan cave and become a monk basically for the rest of their lives. Now, I don't recommend that at all, but my point is, if you are going to be bathed in the cosmic light at the end of your life, enlightenment, you've got to train for it. That's like the Olympics. To train for that, you actually need to be reading. You need a basis of moral living, a contemplative practice, a practice of learning more about wisdom. That's what this third quarter is all about.

There is a Hindu teaching about, you do it by yourself or you can take your wife. Obviously, that's the option I'm going to take. I'll just say how that played out in my own life.

I've been married for 30 years. The love of my life is the person on whom I will be gazing as I take my dying breath, I'm sure. As we were both entering into our Christian Vanaprastha together, we talked about it, we prayed about it, we went away on separate silent retreats together. And afterward my wife said something that was the most beautiful and the most heartbreaking thing that she's ever said to me. She says, "Finally, you're not the most important thing in my life." Which is exactly what I needed to hear. Finally, the divine has taken the sensuality in my life. It was heartbreaking and it was the most beautiful, fulfilling moment that we ever had in our marriage.

This is the short version of what we've been talking about here today. It actually starts with the world's mistaken formula for happiness. The world tells you that to be happy, you need to do three things. You need to love things. You need to use people and you need to worship yourself. In other words, you're the center of everything. You're divine. You need to use people. You step over them and use them for your gratification and for your advancement. And you need to love the things of the world. That's the secret to happiness. But it's completely wrong. That's the secret to abject misery.

Now, the truth is that the right formula is very similar. It's similar enough that it's easy to make a mistake. You need to basically transform the nouns and the verbs. The right formula is to use things. There's nothing wrong with the abundance of the world. It's so wonderful. Use it, don't love it. Because, love is guaranteed only for people. Love people. Use things, love people and worship the divine. There's a lot to figure out in that. How do we love people? How do we worship the divine? What is the divine? How do we use things without loving them? Well, that's the adventure of life Hitendra. That is the journey that we're on. We get to figure out how to do those things. The why is because love and happiness can be and should be our destiny. That's the why. The what; use things, love people, worship the divine. The how; that's what we have got to figure out.

One of the great things about being at a place like the Harvard Business School or you at the Columbia School of Business is that we recognize that trouble is actually an opportunity. That's how the entrepreneur thinks. We have a lot of trouble in the world today. We have a lot of bitterness and we have a real crisis of unhappiness in the world today. What I'm most looking forward to and what I'm dedicating myself to doing for the next decade is using the science of happiness to fight the problem of worldwide declining happiness and seeing it as an opportunity to bring us together and lift us up as people. I'm dedicating my ideas to love and happiness, to lift people up and bring them together, using science and using spirituality in tandem with each other. That's my big adventure. I'm excited every morning when I wake up.

Thank you, Hitendra. Thank you for what you're doing. You're lifting people up every single day, including me.