Gallup Senior Scientist Arthur C. Brooks, professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, rejoins the podcast to discuss his latest book, From Strength to Strength. Do ambitious strivers suffer down the line, in terms of their happiness? Is there something we can gain from our moments of suffering -- and what can we learn from our weaknesses? Why do we need friends -- and what is the difference between real friends and "deal friends"? Brooks discusses all of this and more.
Below is a full transcript of the conversation, including time stamps. Full audio is posted above.
Mohamed Younis 00:07
For Gallup, I'm Mohamed Younis, and this is The Gallup Podcast. This week, we catch up with a Gallup senior scientist and explore his new book, From Strength to Strength. Dr Arthur Brooks is a man who needs no introduction but really deserves one. He's a musician, professor, executive, author, moviemaker, thought leader and so much more. Arthur, it's really great to have you back on the podcast.
Arthur Brooks 00:31
Thank you Mohamed. Great to be with you. Great to be with my friends at Gallup. I look forward to it. Every contact that I get, I get happier when I'm talking to Gallup. And by the way, this, the organization has been so good for me as a social scientist because I'm, I deal in data, you know, I talk about facts. I'm not shooting from the hip; I got to know what I'm talking about, and Gallup makes it possible for me to know what the facts are, with -- what people are thinking, what people are feeling. It's the best data-gathering organization in America.
Mohamed Younis 00:58
You're so kind to say that, and it's really a great segue to talking about this book. You know, a lot of people know us because of the political world, and you're no stranger to that world as somebody who ran one of the most preeminent think tanks in town. George Gallup's real passion was measuring how a life is lived and, you know, kind of predating the term "wellbeing," really trying to figure out, you know, we can count transactions, but how are people's lives really going? So it gets right to the heart of your book. I just want to start off with this awesome book you have and a list now of amazing compendium of amazing books you've written: From Strength to Strength. What inspired you to write this book?
Arthur Brooks 01:41
Well, it's, you know, as a social scientist, I'm looking at human behavior of others. But at some point, I gotta turn my toolkit on myself. And when I was in my mid-40s, mid- to late 40s, I was asking myself, What is the next few decades supposed to look like, quite frankly? I mean, do I keep doing what I was doing and hoping that I'm going to get the right result by sheer serendipity? Basically I was asking myself this. I'm trained as an economist. And if you, Mohamed, as you say, What should I invest in to make sure I can retire securely? I can tell you more or less what you should do with your 401(k) plan. But there's no 401(k) for happiness. Well, I figured I'm supposed to be the guy to make the 401(k) plan for happiness. I'm a social scientist. I know that, I know the basic data on the categories of things that people do, how it makes them happy or not. I said I'm gonna go look at the happiest old people. I'm gonna see what they all do. And I'm gonna look at the happiest, the unhappiest old people, and by the way I'm going to look pretty much exclusively at people who tried to do a lot with their lives -- the strivers. And the reason is really selfish: I'm a striver. You're a striver. The Gallup people are strivers. Americans are strivers, quite frankly. So I'm gonna look at people who've done a lot with their lives, and I'm gonna look at the ones who didn't turn out very happy and the ones who did turn out happy. And I'm going to look at the habits that the happy people have. And I'm gonna put together a happiness 401(k) plan. And that's what this book is. That's what I wrote.
Mohamed Younis 02:58
I loved how you first broke it out as really at the heart of your argument are these two curves of intelligence. Tell us about them. How do they operate? Why are they needed, etcetera?
Arthur Brooks 03:09
Well, one of the things that I noticed that really caught my attention early on in this research is that after about age 70, the population breaks up into two groups. Now before age 70, from about early 50s until 70, most people get happier. Before that, it's really variable. And a lot of people think they're gonna get happier from like 22 to 52, and get, you know less well -- it's actually most normal that you slightly decline in happiness from early 20s until early 50s -- not a lot; just a little. But after early 50s until about 70, almost everybody gets happier. Then the population, it turns out, breaks up into two groups. And by the way, this is all based on Gallup data. Half the population gets happier and happier to the end, and the other half gets unhappier to the end. And you find that strivers -- the people who work hard to be successful, do the most of what they possibly can, want to be successful in their jobs; sometimes they want to be admired, they want to be compensated, they want to do well -- they tend to be on the lower branch later on, and I don't want that to be true. But that's kind of a striver's curse.
Arthur Brooks 04:06
So the first thing I wanted to know is, why is that? And the main reason that that happens is that people who do really well and work very hard to be successful early on, they're developing something that social psychologists call "fluid intelligence." That fluid intelligence is your ability to get better and better at what you do in your 20s and 30s. It's your innovative capacity, it's your ability to focus, it's your ability to solve problems faster and faster and better and better. And so anybody who's working in a knowledge or creative profession, from doctors to lawyers to data scientists to managers to, you know, almost anything -- electricians, for that matter, or air traffic controllers -- I mean, it goes on and on and on, and you find that they get better and better in their 20s and 30s because of this crystallized intelligence. The problem is it peaks in your late 30s or early 40s and starts to decline, because of the structure of the prefrontal cortex of the brain. And that decline, the way that it tends to exhibit itself is not that anybody notices that you're not as good as it used to be, but you notice that you like it a little bit less.
Arthur Brooks 05:04
And so like when your dentist starts taking Fridays off, that means that he's on the bad part of his fluid intelligence curve. You know, he's usually 45 years old and he's like, I don't know what, but I'm just bored. I mean, I don't like it as much as I used to. I'm making good money, I can afford to golf on Fridays. And what's happened is that what used to get better and better and easier and faster is not anymore, because this fluid intelligence is declining. And he notices it, even though that you don't. He's not drilling the wrong tooth, he's just not making progress. And not making progress is really not fun. And what happens for people who are on the wrong branch of happiness later in life is they never get off that first curve, and they always try to get back to where they were. And they're frustrated because, you know, what goes up must come down and, you know, if you go up a lot, you're gonna know you're not there. Look, if you don't do anything with your life, you won't know when it's over. But if you do a lot, man, you're gonna come down, it's gonna, it's gonna be really, really lousy.
Arthur Brooks 05:58
So the first thing I talk about in the book about the happiest people, look, the unhappiest people never can get over that decline. The happiest people, they learn something, usually by accident, that there is a second intelligence curve behind the first one that requires different focus and different skills, which is called "crystallized intelligence." That crystallized intelligence is not innovative capacity, it's not focus, it's not working memory, it's not all that stuff. It's your ability to, it's your wisdom curve, it's your ability to teach, your ability to take facts and recognize patterns and put them together into coherent stories. It's your ability to serve and manage others. It's really, you know, what you'd expect when older people are really good. You don't expect them to remember things as quickly, to solve problems as quickly, to focus as long; what you expect them to be able to do is to have wisdom -- to not solve any problem, but to know which problems you should solve. That's what older people are good at. And happy people, they walk from one curve to the other.
Arthur Brooks 06:58
So they go, you find is that happy older people, they start off as innovative startup entrepreneurs, and then they graduate to being venture capitalists. So they're managing entrepreneurs, they see the patterns, they're the teachers and mentors. They go from being the researcher in the university department to the master teacher in the university department. They go from being the star litigator, the cowboy, the ninja to being the managing partner who's, who's acquiring and recognizing talent and telling people what to do, telling people actually what, where they should be pointed. And so, and every profession has these two curves in it that you can exploit. But if you don't know, you try to live in the past, you try to stay the star from the first curve, you're going to be on the wrong branch of happiness when you get old.
Mohamed Younis 07:40
You know, one of the things I love about your content, whether it's an article, it's a book, your talks is how interdisciplinary it is. Like I was even trying to think of how to introduce you. It's like, I don't know -- like this guy is an economist, he's a philosopher. It really is all connected, yet we live in a world, especially the world of strivers where it's about like super-duper perfecting your craft and being the guy who's like hole-in-one every hole, 18 hole. You know, and what you're saying is that first curve can only take you so far. And if you can't really get to that next curve, it's not like your life is horrible, but you live in this postclimactic phase of your life where you always think back to like, Oh, remember the time I was killing it and, you know, whatever the -- talk to us about that.
Arthur Brooks 08:31
Yeah, I know I see this all the time. I see this in the lives of some, you know, it's interesting, when you look at the biographies of some of the greatest achievers of all time, one of the things that's never in their biographies is how happy they were when they got old. They only talk about their incredible achievements and how famous they became and, you know, and how we revere them in retrospect. But I talked in the book about, for example, Charles Darwin, who was, I mean, he was the king of the Mambo. When he was 27 years old, he came back from abroad. He had been five years collecting samples of plants and animals on this, on the voyage of the Beagle. And what he was doing was he was coming up with this theory of why, you know, what would connect the fossil record with contemporary animals. And of course, what he came up with is what we all know: the theory of evolution, the theory of natural selection. And he dropped this intellectual bomb at 27 and just dined out on it for 25 years. He was the most famous, most successful, richest scientist in all of Europe. He loved it. And then he hit a wall. And the reason he hit a wall is because he couldn't keep up -- his own field was getting more and more mathematically complex and, you know, he didn't know that much math or statistics. And so it passed, his own field passed him by. And he didn't have the ability to keep learning in the same way that he would have before because he was no longer on a good part of his fluid intelligence curve.
Arthur Brooks 09:42
What he should have done was graduated into becoming sort of the grand eminence, the greatest teacher of his generation. But he didn't have the humility to do it. He didn't have the presence of mind to do it. And he spent the last 20 years of his life feeling like a disappointment. You know, he didn't enjoy his life the last 20 years. He was buried a hero because of what he had done decades earlier, not what he was doing then. You know, it's like, you know how we are as strivers. You ask yourself, "What am I doing for me lately?" But I talk about other people that cracked the code. They were able to become the greatest teachers of their generation. But now I talk to very successful people in Washington, D.C. and New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and Omaha and every place in between. And I see people, I meet people who are my age, I'm in my late 50s now, and they're trying to live in the past. They're trying to get their groove back, and they're really, really frustrated. And now I know what to tell them -- the first habit of the highest happiness people in old age is they walk from one curve to the other.
Mohamed Younis 10:38
And what's awesome about the book is you basically take the reader through the steps that you can apply to kind of bridge your life from that one part to the other. One of the -- and I'm obviously not going to have to go through all that; I want people to read this book. It's amazing. One of the things that was really deep in the book is I think of you when I always think of happiness research, wellbeing research. But you took us to a place where pain, life crisis and suffering really plays an important role in bridging that curve for a lot of us, not for all of us. Talk a little bit about that and explain to us what workaholism is.
Arthur Brooks 11:18
Yeah, well, to begin with, suffering is something that's really misunderstood in our society, and especially among young people today. It's crazy, you know, back in the 1960s, the hippies used to say, "If it feels, good do it." And, you know, that's pretty life ruining, pretty terrible advice, quite frankly. But there, if you have a model like that today, it would be, "If it feels bad, make it stop. If it feels bad, treat it immediately." And that's also bad advice. And the reason for that is that happiness is really a combination of three things: enjoyment of life, satisfaction and purpose, life's purpose. And nobody finds their life's purpose without pain, without suffering, without going through the tube, man. You gotta, you gotta sacrifice. You gotta feel some discomfort in there because you're not gonna know what you're made of, what, how you're resilient, what you can survive. You're not going to look deeply into yourself when it's just, when you're at the party.
Arthur Brooks 12:09
And so the result of that is that, you know, inevitably suffering comes our way and we have to recognize it as such and use it, as opposed to simply trying to blot it out all the time, simply trying to mute it, to numb it, or, you know, God forbid, to run from thing to thing to thing to thing, so that we never even see it. So that's one of the hardest lessons I need to, I have to teach my students. I teach a class called "Leadership and Happiness" at the Harvard Business School. And one of the things that I'm harping on the entire semester is love your suffering, love your suffering, because you need it. You absolutely need it.
Arthur Brooks 12:42
Now, you don't need to have unnecessary suffering -- and that's what people do who are trying to cling to the past. And one of the ways that they do that is by trying to numb the sense that their, that their fluid intelligence is in decline with their addictive work behavior. I talk an awful lot about three common syndromes that, and this is one of the reasons that people can't get from one curve to the other is because, just like anything else, you can't, you know, move on in your relationships with your family or spouse or friends if you're a hopeless alcoholic. And the same thing is true with people who are deeply, deeply addicted in their work relationships. So you find that the people who are stuck on the first curve, they tend to be super hard-core strivers who have objectified themselves as just work machines. And gosh, I mean people listening to us, you know who you are. And usually it follows the same pattern. Your parents said that you're, you're the winner. You're the, you're so smart, you get A's, you know, tiger parents, whatever happens to be where you gotta go out and do everything that you're going to get into the best schools, you're gonna get the best jobs, you're going to get the perfect grades. And so you tend to start seeing yourself as a success monster.
Arthur Brooks 13:48
Now, the problem with that is that to keep that up is a ton of work, and you're not a full person. And a full person, you know, this is one of the problems with any sort of addiction, you're, you're basically serving one relationship, which is the thing you're addicted to -- whether it's drugs or alcohol or gambling or pornography, or whatever terrible thing you're addicted to. And in the case of workaholics, it's usually success. It's not just work per se, it's success at work. And so I recognize, I show in the book, all of the syndromes that you can see -- all the addictive behavior. And then the key thing is, how do you get past it? Because that's what we really want. So that's what the book is about is how do you get past your work addiction, your success addiction, so that you can start stepping on to the next curve?
Mohamed Younis 14:27
One of the awesome things about the book, and really in a lot of your work, is your Eastern and Western use of philosophy and concepts of spirituality throughout in explaining our experience on this planet. One of the things that's fascinated me at Gallup in our work on wellbeing globally is expanding the concept of wellbeing to go from sort of pleasure to things like balance. How important is kind of including that kind of paradigm shift in how we think about our lives and wellbeing in bridging those two curves?
Arthur Brooks 15:07
Well there is, there have been ancient philosophical schools, both East and West, that I talk about a little bit in the book, but I talk really a lot about in my research and other writing. So there was an ancient Greek school that said that the secret of happiness is just as many well, good feelings as you can get. It's the balance between good feelings and bad feelings. And so if you get a lot of pleasure and you get a lot of peace and nobody bothers you, things are going to be well. That was from Epicurus, who started the Epicurean school of philosophy. We tend to think of it as people who like good food now. But it's, like it went a lot deeper than that. It was basically to, you know, get rid of the bad stuff. And it's actually a terrible life philosophy, for all the reasons we talked about a minute ago. But also just to live a full life, it's really important that we have all of these different experiences.
Arthur Brooks 15:54
I talk an awful lot about the, even the dimension of happiness, which is enjoyment. It's not pleasure. It's not going from pleasure to pleasure. It's pleasure plus elevation plus cultivation of our true human experience. You know, your Thanksgiving dinner gives you a little bit of pleasure when it fills your belly. But it becomes a lifelong memory when you enjoy it with the people that you love, and you have a full experience of it. You don't remember how the turkey tasted, but you remember the love that you felt for Aunt Marge, even if she couldn't stop talking about politics or whatever. I mean, this is the key to a real full life. And people who are trying to be fully alive, they have to pay attention to these multidimensional experiences. And that's a lot about what I talk about in my work.
Mohamed Younis 16:36
You also talk a lot about weaknesses, our weaknesses, and how to use our weaknesses or think about them differently in terms of how we can connect with people. Because we live in a world that's all about strength, focus on your strengths. You know, it's this world of like hyper-CV, like what are you, what are you the best at? And I thought it was great that you got so deep into like our weaknesses and how they can actually be a bridge.
Arthur Brooks 17:01
Yeah, you know, it's like one of the things that really helped me a lot in my career is CliftonStrengths, by the way. And, you know, I took it when I was a brand new CEO, first year on the job. And then later on, when I, when I developed an actual relationship with the company, I got a coach who helped me a lot. And this was like in my ninth year as a CEO. And wow, I'd really changed a lot, but I understood myself really, really well. When I do that work -- and I've given it to all of my graduate students at Harvard too, I love the, I love it. It's the best personality and tool for understanding our strengths. But one of the things that I do, of the 34 strengths, I do look at the Top 5 for sure, but I'm also really interested in the Bottom 5. And you know, maybe we should develop a tool called CliftonWeaknesses, because, and it's, like, I know it would not be a big seller.
Mohamed Younis 17:43
But it's needed.
Arthur Brooks 17:45
Totally, and the big reason for that is that you are not a full person if you're only focusing on your strengths. People can't relate to you; you can't make deep human connections. Human connections always come from being a full person, including your weaknesses. So it's interesting, you know, when I, when I talk to people, and when I'm making friends, for example, I'm not going to connect with people by saying, "I'm a professor at Harvard." That's a, that's, I'm really happy about that. I'm really grateful.
Mohamed Younis 18:10
Wait, I love that you use that in the book. I was, I almost dropped the book when you talked about this concept of elitist, and then you mentioned Harvard. But yeah, take me through that. So what happens when you tell me, "I'm from Harvard"?
Arthur Brooks 18:21
Yeah, people are like, Oh, you're a smart guy, obviously, but I can't relate to you. It doesn't exactly make you a man of the people, you know? And the truth is, I'm just like everybody else. I had this conversation the other day on Oprah Winfrey's podcast, her Super Soul podcast. We were talking about that. We were laughing about this very thing. You know, we have the same needs and the same desires and the same appetites and the same sadnesses and the same loneliness as everybody else, no matter who we are. Mohamed and Arthur and everybody else, and the President of the United States. And when you're only playing up to your strengths, then you're alienating other people, because you're walling off the parts of your personality where we can actually connect with one another.
Arthur Brooks 18:55
So now, you know, when I'm talking to somebody for the first time, I'm not talking about, you know Harvard; I'm talking about my kids that I'm worried about a little bit right? I'm talking about, you know, and I'm you know, it's like my kid, I don't know if he's gonna fail math, or you know, whatever it happens to be, it's, which isn't a weakness. It's a human element is basically what this hasn't. And quite frankly, that's the stuff that I think about the most too. I don't lie awake at night going, huh-huh -- Professor at Harvard! No, I'm thinking about stuff that's bugging me and, you know, the things that I'm afraid of or the things I'm sad about, just like everybody else. You gotta, you gotta connect over those things because that's how you're gonna make connections. And love is happiness, and that's what we need.
Mohamed Younis 19:36
You also talk a little bit about friendships and loneliness. One of the things that really hit me in between the eyes when I was reading the book is how a lot of guys are lonely and don't have friendships. You also mentioned your conversation with your son about this concept of a "real friend" or a "deal friend," which I loved. How important are friendships that go beyond, "I need something. Hey, call me when you have an opportunity for us to work together?
Arthur Brooks 20:02
Yeah, this is an ancient idea. Aristotle was talking about the different kinds of love. And Greek is a much better language for love than English. English is very impoverished when it comes to love. And, you know, we don't even quite recognize it. You know, in the bible where there's a famous scene in the Bible at the end of the gospel of St. John where Jesus has come back from the dead and is talking to St. Peter. And he keeps asking St. Peter the same question over and over again, "Do you love me?" He asks him three times, "Do you love me?" And it's like, why does he keep asking the same question over and over? Because it was written in Greek. And the ancient Greek actually had different words for love that meant different things. And, and that's a really important, there were 11 words for love in Greek, in ancient Greek. And Aristotle talks about the different, the importance of different kinds of love with different people at different times. And one of the things he does is he creates a kind of a ladder of happiness that comes from different kinds of love. And the lowest part is this transactional philia -- the business, the "deal friends" that we have. Now, it's important that we have them. We got to get along, and we got to get along with our fellow coworkers and our bosses, and that's all good -- and our distributors and our partners, whatever. But you can't be content with that.
Arthur Brooks 21:12
And strivers have a tendency to see people as instruments to help them. And when you do that, when everybody exists and is walking around the planet to improve your career, all you're ever gonna have is "deal friends." Just deal friends, man. And, and he, he goes up the ladder -- at the top are the people which he calls the "perfect friendships," or the "friendships of virtue." And those are the people that are just useless to you. You just love them. You know, they're not useful. They're just not useful. And, and so what do you do? You do stuff together that's not useful. You go to baseball games with people that you really, really love, like your kid or your friend. And you, and you talk about -- they don't, they're not going to help you in your career, and so you don't see them in an instrumental way. Your love for them is really intrinsic; it's very virtuous in this way. That's just real friends. That's just real friends. And guys are pretty bad at that, and strivers especially -- men and women -- are horrible at that. You know, they basically use people a lot. I don't mean to cast aspersions, because I'm guilty, guilty, guilty. You know, it's like, what can that person do for me? Maybe we can work together. Oh, there might be an advantage there. But man, if you, all you have is deal friends, and you don't have real friends, you're gonna be lonely. And loneliness is one of the greatest barriers to finding happiness in life.
Mohamed Younis 22:28
And I'll end with this. One of the really powerful dimensions of the book is also spirituality. And you talked a little bit about how spirituality a lot of times will kind of come back in our lives at this turn in our lives, wherever it is, to make the turn from these curves. And I'll also tell listeners the, one of the really cool things about this book are all of the stories you tell about these famous people -- musicians, scientists -- that you never, I never really knew. And it really makes so much of this relatable. But talk just about spirituality. Of course it's always been at the heart of what you do. Why is it important to this concept of strength to strength?
Arthur Brooks 23:07
Yeah, so spirituality is really important to me in my life. I'm a Roman Catholic, I'm a practicing Catholic. It's literally the most important thing in my life. But I, as a social scientist, I treat it a little bit differently. You know, there's a very interesting book right now by a neuroscientist named Lisa Cohen called, The Awakened Brain. And it's a book that really shows that, that any sort of spiritual or transcendental practice, it's, it's associated with brain activity that's healthier than it's -- your brain is really awake, your brain is ready to heal. Your brain can do all kinds of things that it can't when you're not trying to walk some sort of transcendental path.
Arthur Brooks 23:43
So I got to asking myself, you know, what's the difference between happy and unhappy people when they get older? And sure enough, this is one of the big characteristics. Not that they're all Catholics, not that they're all Muslims, not that they're all Jews. No. Not that they're all Eastern practitioners either, but that they have some transcendental path that's either religious or maybe even nonreligious. They have a philosophy that's bigger than their quotidian, boring, tedious day-to-day lives. See, the thing is, Mohamed, that if all you focus on is my job, my career, my friends, my money, my car, my commute, my -- it's so boring, and yet it's obsessive. You need relief. And the only way to get relief is for you to zoom out and see your life in context and your age and your relationships in context -- to remember. I work very closely with the Dalai Lama, and I have for a long time. In our work, we've written together, and he always says to me, "Remember, you are one in 7 billion." And by that he does not mean that I'm a speck or an ant or an insignificance; what he means is, Zoom out, man. Enjoy the view of earth from outer space. That's what that means. And then you'll put yourself into proper perspective, and only the transcendental path will do that. Every happy older person is walking some sort of philosophical or spiritual path. That's just -- I just haven't found exceptions.
Mohamed Younis 25:02
All right, I'm going to cheat now because you mentioned the Dalai Lama and you dedicate the look to your guru. Who's your guru?
Arthur Brooks 25:08
There's a, later on in the book in the, in the chapter on spirituality, I talk about how I was, I was studying with a southern Indian Hindu Yogi in a little town. I I found this guy in a little, I mean it took, took a lot to find this guy because he, you know, he's not a wealth-seeking rock star. He's a guy who has a huge following but he's always moving from place to place. And he doesn't meet Westerners because, you know, space cadets trying to, they're on their next startup. No. He's serious about faith and spirituality. And he finally took a meeting with me, and I finally found him. And I walk into this house in this little tiny town in rural, place called Palakkad, rural Kerala in central Southern India. And you know it's like made for TV. He's like, you know, I see the guy, he does the namaste greeting to me, and he says, "I've been waiting for you." I mean, it's like I'd never met him before. Anyway, so I'm talking to him for hours, hours and, and just asking questions. And, and he was incredibly helpful to me in so many spiritual ways.
Arthur Brooks 26:04
And he said, he said, "Tell me who advises you on your spiritual walk?" And I said, "Well, it's my wife Esther. You know, she leads me in paths of righteousness; she takes me to Catholic mass every day. I go every day with my wife that we pray our rosary together, which is meditative Catholic prayer. We have a spiritual practice, and she is my spiritual leader. And he says, "She's your guru." And, and she is my guru And she's the, my guru, I hope, is the person on whom I will lay my eyes as I take my dying breath and to whom this book and all my work is dedicated.
Mohamed Younis 26:37
There couldn't be a better note to end. That's Arthur Brooks on his latest book, From Strength to Strength. Arthur, it's always a pleasure to have you with us.
Arthur Brooks 26:44
Thank you, Mohamed. Thanks to the whole Gallup gang for incredible work that you're doing making -- life better for lots and lots and lots of people. including me, I'm honored to be part of the team.
Mohamed Younis 27:00
That's our show. Thank you for tuning in. To subscribe and stay up to date with our latest conversations, just search for "The Gallup Podcast" wherever you podcast. And for more key findings from Gallup News, go to news.gallup.com or follow us on Twitter @gallupnews. If you have suggestions for the show, email podcast@gallup.com. The Gallup Podcast is directed by Curtis Grubb and produced by Justin McCarthy. I'm Mohamed Younis, and this is Gallup: reporting on the will of the people since the 1930s.