1KHO 750: The Life We Forgot How to Live | Dr. Arthur Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life

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Real ingredients, real hydration, ready for the whole family. I've read five of your books. I've read the happiness files, the conservative heart from strength to strength. Build the life you want, love your enemies, and you have a new book out called the meaning of your life. I've talked about different topics dating like an entrepreneur. So much, I've talked about the whole t-shirt, the t-shirt, and you smell like you can smell who you're supposed to be attracted to for the DNA match.

The spell taps, the t-shirt, yes. And how like dating apps are not good for that. But I do have a really important piece of information that you may not remember. But I talked to my brother the other day, and as it turns out, I can do the van Clyburn. The van Clyburn. I don't even know if you remember that from our last conversation. So what we talked about was the fact that you started off your adult life as a musician and then flip-flopped England back to school. And I did it the opposite way, and I've always been in my heart like, well, I'll go back to it. And then I thought I was aged out of it, and it turns out that there is the main one is for certain ages, but they also have one for amateurs that could be any age.

And I thought that's a really cool thing. That is a cool thing. So for our listeners who are probably paying attention to this, the van Clyburn competition is the premier piano competition in the world. And if you win the van Clyburn, if you win the Tri-Covsky competition, the Munich competition of the van Clyburn competition, you get a career as a soloist. I did not know that they had an amateur version.

“Yes, yes, so it's super, I was excited about it, because I think one of the things that happens in life is you kind of get caught up in the regular path that everyone else does.”

And then you look back and you're like, "Oh, maybe I missed some different opportunities." And to the point of the other books, you know, your intelligence does change over time. So it can be harder to get back into it. But I, I thought it was cool. It actually came about because our daughters are doing this piano competition here in Michigan and Kalamazoo and February. And they have an adult division where you can do duets. So I called my brother. And I was like, "Hey, what if we do this?" You know what my brother plays piano to?

But what if we do this duet, you know, in our forties at this local piano competition? I was like, since I've aged out of the van Clyburn and he was like, "No, actually, you haven't." They have like an amateur division. So anyway. Your dream is still alive, Jenny, you're obsessed. And your books help me to dream. So I want to talk about the meaning of your life. You're talking about young people that are entering into their 20s, you know, and these are the age of our kids, you know, that are heading into the adult world.

“And they're struggling to find meaning. I talk to this man recently and I'm curious what you'll have to say about this.”

His name is Tim Elmore, and he talks about working with younger and younger generations. So really helping people to be empathetic and understand where they're coming from. And one of the things he said was like when he was entering the workforce, so he's maybe 50. When he was entering the workforce, he knew what he was working for. He wanted to have a home. He wanted to have a family.

And he felt like the work that he did would contribute to those things. What he says now is a lot of Jenny, they may not have that. You know, the cost of living has gone up the cost of home ownership has gone up. And so in some cases, they feel like they don't really know. What kind of what am I doing?

Yeah, that is a problem to be sure, but it's really a distraction from the real problem, from the real meaning problem, which is the same problem that we all have by the way. The difference is that people, your age, and then people might come older than you, we remember the before times. And the before times is before everybody was living in a simulation.

The problem is basically one in how the way that we've rewired our brains,

What's happened is that to find the meaning of your life, you need to be living in the right hemisphere of your brain. That's for all the mystery and the love and the happiness and the meaning and the faith. And all of it, the right hemisphere of the brain. The left side of the brain is for you to tasks and distractions and efficiency and stuff. This is all the what and how to.

This, the right side of your brain is the why, why, why, why. And guess what we've done, we've pushed everybody into fake dating and fake friends and fake work and fake gaming and fake fake fake fake.

And so we're never around other people.

The result of it is we're living in a simulation. We've changed our brains and there's one thing you can't simulate. And that's the meaning of life. And now people like I feel so empty. I feel so empty.

And so they start looking for explanations. It's like, oh, it's because the climb is all goofed up. It's because the houses are too expensive. Uh-uh. It's not it.

You know, I'm telling you, when I was a kid, I'm going to sell like an old fart now. You know, like the Kyeloga River and Cleveland caught on fire, man. We had to roll up the windows on the freeway in LA. I mean, the climate is better than it was when I was a kid.

“Life is better in many ways than it was, but here's where it's worse.”

Life back in those days was in real life. And now it's a simulation for our kids and for a lot of us as well. And that's what we got to break out of. Okay, so that's what the book's about. And that is a really big question.

How do you break out of it? One of the things that you talk about is boredom. So actually, that's something that we talk about a lot. First of all, parents are scared of boredom. But there is this wonderful book.

It's called Beyond Winning and the authors. It's a co-author book. And they say, when your kids are bored, you have not failed. And I thought, gosh, that's such a message that we all need. When they're bored, you have not failed.

And the tricky part is that in generations passed, there was no choice but to be bored sometimes. So you were in traffic or you were in church. Whatever, you're in school, wherever you're at. And you had periods of time that nothing filled.

And so naturally you were bored. They're used to be no choice. Right, correct. How do you choose it? Well, see, this is a problem.

“See, the way that the human brain works is that we have a set of structures”

called the default mode network that turns on when we're doing nothing. And that's so, the human brain is built to be bored. Because when these things turn on, then we're actually thinking about things. We're considering things.

We're understanding things that we otherwise would never cycle to do

because we're distracted from this. But we don't like it. People hate being bored. I mean, I have a call, I get Harvard who. He does studies on boredom.

And he took a bunch of people and put him in the lab. He brings in a bunch of undergraduates and pay some. Because they'll do anything for 20 bucks. And they have to sit in a chair in a room. And there's nothing to do for 15 minutes,

except that a little box. And if they press the button on the box, they had self administer an electric shock. So he's looking at the difference between, it's like, what do you prefer boredom or pain?

And a quarter of the girls shock themselves. Two-thirds of the guys shock themselves. Of course, because boys are shocked in themselves all the time. And one guy shocked himself a hundred and eight times in 15 minutes. He's a sick twisted freak, so he got thrown out of the study.

But you know what's going on here, that people hate boredom so much, so we invented anti-boredom devices. That's what's actually going on. Now, you're a great grandfather, Jimmy.

I guarantee you he never came home to your great grandma and said,

"My job was super interesting today." But I also guarantee you he didn't come home and say, "I had a panic attack behind the muel today." That's not what he said, because that didn't exist. And that didn't exist because his brain was working the way

it was supposed to work. And that's what we need to get back to. And my book is all about all the ways to actually live in an extraordinary way that used to be ordinary. Yes, historically normal.

That's where a lot of the answers are.

“So with kids, you know, I think you set time aside, right?”

You have time aside that's in your calendar, that no one touches. And I just read a book by a woman named Heather Schumacher, and she was talking about how kids need at least an hour, chunk at a time.

It has to be at least an hour. In 30 minutes isn't going to get them into deep play, but if it's an hour or longer, that's going to really be beneficial to them. So she's saying don't interrupt it with snack time,

make sure that they have this lengthy time. Okay, so for kids, you know, we have got a little bit of say so in their calendar. But for young adults and for adults, what are you saying?

Leave your phone in the drawer. Well, what you need actually, you can't, you're not going to tell them to, they're deeply addicted to their phones. We all are.

Yeah. And there's a reason for that. Our brains work with a neuro-modulator called dopamine. And we can get addicted to all sorts of stuff. We get addicted to junk food.

We get addicted to gambling, drugs, alcohol, all sorts of behaviors.

especially when we're looking at it,

and we're participating in it using our, our screen-based devices,

“which that's why they're built the way they are.”

It's to make us addicted. So we get time and app, and that leads to revenue. I got it. So what that means is that we actually have to detox

and help our kids to do it. There's a bunch of ways that we can do it. There's not one school in America at any level from kindergarten through Ph.D. that should allow any phones in the classroom.

And by the way, no phones at lunch because you actually need people. You know, at the beginning of the day, they should lock down the phones and the end of the day you take them home.

And just that break from it is really important. And then we actually need families to be thinking about this. You know, not taking phones into the bedroom. You shouldn't have midnight.

That's destroying kids sleep. As ruining their ability to commute with the right hemisphere of their brains. This is the biggest problem. As phones in the bedrooms is a matter of fact.

Not no phones in an hour before you go to sleep. But hour after you wake up. No phones during meal times. No phones during school. This would solve our problems, Jenny.

This is what our brains would start flickering back on on the right side.

“And we started to have these experiences.”

And then we can actually talk about what does love mean? What does mystery mean? What does faith mean? All these conversations that actually literally

have dropped out of the conversation because of this. Because no one has time to ponder and they're not in the right hemisphere. This is kind of what we're doing with our life.

I know. Is we're setting aside time to be outdoors and it solves quite a bit. So you do talk a lot about beauty. Right.

And you talk about this in actually a lot of your books. But beauty, this is nature. This is art. This is music. This is stories.

You know, there's beauty and so many things in friendship and family and faith in meaningful work. And you talk about that. You have had a life dedicated to art and beauty. Long before you focused your scholarly life on happiness.

You said you were dedicated to art and beauty. You were, you would paint. I mean, this is, this is so beautiful. You learned to read music before written language. You are classical musician for over a decade.

This is something that is missing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, beauty is a funny thing because beauty is, it's an effortable. It's heart. You can't quite explain it. And you know, people want to understand

what a right hemisphere of your brain experiences. You hear beautiful piece of music. Or you look at a beautiful sunset and you want to cry and you don't know why. The reason is because you're having a right hemisphere experience.

And that's a deeply meaningful thing. When you're only looking at screens, you can't get that. And if you only look at pictures of these things

or six second reproductions on TikTok of the music.

Or whatever you're looking at, you're not going to be, you're not going to be consuming that in the right part of your brain. There's three kinds of beauty that we need more of. We need natural beauty, which we have to go outside to get. We need artistic beauty, which we can get from the,

from the, from the written word. We can get it from art. We can get it from music. And last we need moral beauty, which means we need to, and these are the things that actually will exercise the,

the sort of the, the luminousness, the right side of the brain. These are three different ways to do it. And we need more of all of these things.

“That's why you're, that's why what you're doing is so critically important.”

You're a right hemisphere show. Yeah. And the interesting thing, I do feel like those are the types of things that people would act off first. So they go, look, I don't have enough time. Well, obviously, everyone's spending time in their phone.

You feel like you don't have enough time. You probably have more time than you do. But, but you feel like you don't have enough time. So what are you going to cut out? You're going to cut out time outside.

You're going to cut reading novels. You're going to cut out playing music. You're going to, people are just cutting out. I mean, the average time that a kid is outside is four to seven minutes a day,

Arthur, four to seven minutes a day. They're on screens for four to seven hours. Those are the statistics. So we've got this backwards. But I think it's hard to convince people, especially in a day and age that's rapidly

changing to say, hey, you know, I know you could be spending more time on your flashcards, or you could be preparing for the SAT, but actually you should be listening to music or you should be taking a hike. I just think people are confused about how could that even be important

in such a technological age? Yeah. And everybody, you know, we're making these a bunch of very confused decisions with our kids and grandkids.

Today you say, we want them to be more economically efficient at the cost of their happiness. That's a big mistake. Are you kidding me? They're going to be fine.

If they're by the way, I got the data. If they're happy, they will be successful. That's the truth.

But if they're more economically efficient going into it, but depressed and anxious, they're not going to do well at all. It's a big big, it's a trade-off that isn't even making a cost benefit sense

that people are doing all the time. And so, John Height talks an awful lot about this. John Height has this, but you know,

the anxious generation. I know you've talked about this in the show. And he talks about two things that have really hurt us a lot. Number one is the screen-based childhood.

And the second is the end of the play-based childhood.

My book is about, okay, what happens to your brain when you do it? And what you really want when you don't get that? And what you want is an understanding of the meaning of your life.

“That's why people are so sad and anxious.”

They don't just like, "Why am I on a live?" For what would I give my life? What is it worth actually living for? And nobody's answering this question?

Nobody can answer it for you. You got to go find it outside. You got to go find it in your family relationships and your friendships and your love and finding your calling and suffering.

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There's these two men. Their names are Ned Johnson and Dr. William Sticksred. And they talk about that young people are experiencing a massive lack of control. Because they're, you know,

they're being told what to do almost all of their waking hours. And even screens have a lot of control, right? Like the YouTube is going to take you to the next video. Netflix is going to suggest the next thing

that you should watch. And they talk about, in addition to the screen-based childhoods, and the lack of play-based childhoods, they talk about a performance-based childhood.

And now that got thrown in the mix as well. And so we have a lot of people who are throwing out beauty for the sake of external, almost like college resume readiness. And I think that's why it's super interesting

because you're working with the premier. I mean, these college students and some of them are in their PhD programs and they're feeling lost. Yeah.

And so the performance-based childhood is also not the way to go.

In terms of it being the most important thing

and well, degrading or deleting beauty. Yeah. Well, I mean, the performance-based childhood is all what to do, what to do, what to do,

“and you ever answer the question, why do you do it?”

The why side is the right side. The why side is the mystery in life. And actually discovering that and understanding that is really important. There are other things that we're not doing

by the way, young people are less and less and less likely to actually fall in love in their 20s than they were in the past. Which is, I mean, man, when I was in my 20s, that was like, that's all I cared about.

Everything was secondary to that. Because I wanted the romance. I wanted the mystery and part of the reason was because I was highly attuned to the, you know, hemispheric lead, and where I was supposed to be living.

My brain was working the way it's supposed to work for a young man, is the way that that happens. But no. And so what you'll do instead of romance, and this is the really striking thing

that we're seeing a lot of today, especially with young people, is the advent of huge amounts of internet pornography, for example. That's substituting for actual romantic relationships. And all it is is a,

is a left brain simulation for the ultimate right brain need is what it comes down to. And it does work. It doesn't work. The more people look at pornography,

the more anxious they get, the more lonely they get, and the more depressed they get. Always, always, always. That's the whole problem, isn't it?

Arthur, a left brain simulation. Simulation and simulation. We're in the matrix, Jenny. Yeah.

“For a right brain need, what's moral beauty?”

Moral beauty is when you actually see people serving others. When you see people, sacrificing for other people.

Moral beauty is an incredible thing.

And when you witness it, you actually get something. There's a psychologist at Lewis and Clark University in, in Idaho, his name is Rhett Deesner. And I know a little bit because I'm great friends with his nephew.

His nephew is Rain Wilson, the actor. Who played white shirt in the office. And Rain Wilson and I are great buds. And so he introduced me to his uncle who's this famous psychologist, who does work on Moral beauty.

And he talks about how you actually feel a physical sensation of warmth in your chest when you see people giving to other people, even though they don't need to. When you see an act of kindness for somebody else, when you witness it,

it makes you feel like a better person. And what it's doing is stimulating all of these primordial sensations of altruism and goodness and all the things that you really want in your life. Does that relate to parenting? Because I read a statistic actually just today.

That said, it was a Pew Research study that came out in 2023. And it said that 47% of adults ages 50 and younger are not interested in having children. Right. I know.

And that really does.

“All part and parcel of the same thing because when you when you don't”

understand intuitively the importance of love, then you'll start to try to analyze the importance of love. And you'll do a cost benefit calculation kind of like the piano of love. Profit loss baby. And I'm sorry, having kids doesn't work out that way.

It's not like this is 100 years ago. We're going to work on your farm. That's not the way it's going to work. You have a bunch of kids. You didn't have a bunch of kids because you want to

employ these Jenny. You want kids. Because they're wonderful and terrible and they're right. They're right. Yeah.

But you don't know. You're going to go fishing with them. I told people about that. You know, like, I can tell you every fish they caught. Yeah.

You can't put a price tag on that though. That's the problem. I know. And the reason is because the price tag comes on the left hemisphere of the brain.

The love comes on the right hemisphere of the brain. And if that switched off, you're going to look at the cost benefit calculation of having kids and go, Uh-uh. Uh-uh.

No, no, no, no, no, no. That's too expensive. You know, I can't buy a house like my dad did,

although, by the way, your dad lived in a crummy house when he had his first kid.

It's all right. And it's going to-- I mean, we lived in a one bathroom house in a pretty dangerous neighborhood. And it's like, and so-- Right.

Same thing with the criminals running through the yard. I know. I know. I know. Yeah, for real.

I live in a queen in a hill in Seattle. On the north side, not the fancy side, not the Tony side, the crummy side. There was a Chevy up on blocks next door. That's still same Chevy, same blocks. And I'm 61.

Yeah. Yeah. But the promise is that no one can really understand that until you're in it. So you make these decisions based off of cost benefit. Yesterday, we got a banjo.

I'm super excited about that. We got a banjo, and our middle daughter, who is 12, grab the banjo. And I think it's pretty easy to play the court.

Never played a dark picked it up.

Start strumming. And she's singing amazing grace with her banjo. And then the older sister plays guitar. So she came down and all these picks and little slides. And I was like, this is the pinnacle of life.

That's what's all about you. But you can't-- you can't know. What it's all about. And here's the thing. Well, if I asked you, okay.

Analyze it. Give me the cost benefit. Why the benefits are so much higher in the cost? Anything you would say would trivialize it. And the reason, by the way, is that your language centers are on the left side.

“And so if you said, you know, why do you love your husband?”

Anything you tell me won't make sense.

You love your husband. And you understand that you love your husband. And he's your soul mate. And you're the last person he's going to see is he takes his dying breath. And that's life.

That's the life we want. And that's the life we understand unless we-- unless we switch it off. And that's what we've done. Artistic beauty, natural beauty, moral beauty. The goal is just right brain, right brain.

Can we start to try and balance that out? And the right brain things are the fun things. So it's such a worthy goal. It's such a life enhancing goal. We've got kids that are heading into adulthood here very shortly.

And so since there's a lot of parents at listen, and I think they would love to know about work. And I think your story really got me thinking about what should I have-- You know, could I have done it differently? But more than that, like letting our kids be maybe little less practical.

Right. They'd you say, what do you love? We've got a one kid that really likes filmmaking. I'm like, well, A, I was going to take that job. That would be my practical, right?

Like my practical was like, I got a math teacher. I mean, how am we practical get you be? But you talk about looking for your calling. Can you talk about what that looks like for, you know, a 17 year old, a 25 year old? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the whole point is, look, there are-- You're going to make-- you're going to have to make practical decisions in your life. We do that all the time. You can't eat twinkies, you know, all day, every day. You need to make practical decisions about your life and your health.

And you're going to have to-- you're going to go to study something. And you're going to study some things that you like and study other things that you don't like so very much.

“The whole point is you need to-- there's a very-- an important concept in Japan.”

You probably heard about it. It's called an E.K. Guy. We were heard about that. Yeah, I heard it from Michael Ester. Yeah, for sure. And so it's what you love and what you're good at and what you get paid for and what the world needs.

And all those things together. Oh, and also, it's the blue zones. The blue zones, guys. I might have said there were no Dan butner. Dan butner. But it talks about it. Yeah, exactly.

But you need to look across all those dimensions. What you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what they'll pay it to do. And, you know, two of those things are practical and two of those things are left brain and two of those things are right brain and that's the way we're supposed to work. But as you cut off everything, except what they'll pay you for, you cut off everything, except that.

Life is just a luxury man. Life is just no fun at all as the wind. You don't have to do it. I don't care what anybody says you don't have to do it. Yeah. It's right. So then it's really tricky though.

I mean, that's where we're at, which is first of all, I guess kids maybe seem like they need a little bit more guidance than they used to.

Or maybe I'm just over mothering, but I'm not a big, over motherer. So, you know, it's like how much guidance do you give and then, you know, like practically speaking, what do the 17 year old? I know. So, I mean, and some 17 year olds are a real handful and some of them not so much. Everybody's got their own, and I had all of them, you know? Yeah.

Two kids that were pretty well behaved in high school and I had one that was a complete dog's breakfast. I mean, it was a problem. You know, I did with all of my kids was basically, what are you going to do when you graduate from high school to find answers to the questions? Why are you alive and for what would you give your life? What are you going to do?

Where are you going to go to find the answers to those questions and the reason for that journey is those are the two meaning questions. Those are the meaning of your life questions. If you don't know the answers to that, it means you have a meaning crisis, but that's good news because now you know what to go looking for.

“Nobody can tell you the meaning of your life. You have to find it yourself.”

And the way that you find it yourself is by opening your brain and letting stuff wander in by asking these two questions. There's an interesting thing actually about that. You know, when I was a kid, there was this very famous gorilla named Coco the gorilla who learned a thousand words of sign language. Does that's, does that ring a bell for you? It's just like that.

Yeah, it was that she, she, you know, got when Coco the gorilla died, she got a bituary in the New York Times. She had two national geographic covers, a thousand words. That's a lot. That is a lot. You're going to ask her questions. What do you want to do today in Cocoa?

And people are like, that shows that there's not a fundamental difference between nonhuman primates and human beings, homosapiens, but that's completely wrong.

Here's the reason.

There's one thing that Cocoa gorilla, the gorilla was never able to do.

And then no human animal can do. And that's, she never asked a single question. Never once. See, here's the thing. Here's the big mistake that we make in the age of AI in the age of tech.

We think to be true to be truly human is answering questions. That's wrong. That's wrong. To be human is to ask questions. Answering questions is what machines do.

It's what monkeys do. Asking questions. Only humans ask questions. You want to know why? Because the big questions are over here.

Because the big questions are in the mystery, in the mystery, in the myths of life itself.

“And so if you're all about pondering these big questions, like, why am I alive?”

What's the significance of my life and to whom? What's the coherence? Why did things happen the way they do? For what would I give my life? For what would I die?

Well, literally what would I die for? These are the kinds of things and coming to an understanding about that. By living your life and going outside and having relationships and having big, having big, pretentious conversations with your friends and you're going to discover the meaning of your life? That's how you find it.

That's a powerful answer.

It's not what I was, and I didn't have any expectations of what I thought you were going to say, but I wasn't expecting that. Well, because part of what we do is I'll be like, "Here's a budget." That's what we're doing. I'm like, "How much would you want to spend on going to the movies?

How much would you think your insurance will be?" That's part of it. That's good. I just want to have not asked why are you alive? Yeah, why do you think you're alive?

“It's funny because in my son Carlos, my middle son, my problem child,”

he found answers to that by putting away his phone and going and doing heart things outside. Sitting in a bush with a tarantula on his arm three hours behind the scope of a sniper rifle. He became a Marine sniper after high school, and he came back after four years with answers to his questions. He had answers. He couldn't even have a social media account.

He was doing dangerous work. Hey, everybody, look at me. I'm at a forward operating base in the middle east. No, you can't do that. The result of it is he came back.

He was 23 years old. He married, had a kid at 23. Now he's 25 in his two kids. And his answers. I mean, why do you alive?

Because God made me to serve other people. For what would you give your life? Simple. My faith and my family. And, you know, my fellow Marines and for the United States of America, man.

And how do we know it's not lying? Because he put his life on the line. He did those things. He did those hard things. He did those real life things that people used to do ordinarily.

And now those things were extraordinary. And those are the experiences that we have to give our kids. And of a confidence that we're giving them the life that they need. I love hearing about the different ways that people can do life. Because it just expands your mind.

Like when I learned that you traveled and played French horn. I actually don't know anybody who plays French horn. It's one of those instruments that you know of. Yeah. But you're like, I don't know anybody who plays that instrument.

And you did it from age 19 to 31. There would be a lot of people that would say that they wouldn't say it out loud. But they might think, oh, that's kind of irresponsible or you're galvancing around the world. But when I read it, I thought, well, there's more paths that you can take than be really told. And then you can still be successful and you can still pivot and you can do other things.

But what an incredible set of time.

And so I, you know, an incredible 11 years. And so when you're then your parent, you think, well, should I, you know,

“should I be really pushing my child into this four-year college experience?”

Like if something else pops up, that seems like it might be interesting. You know, what I encourage there. And I think your story, your personal story really helps. It helps. You said this.

And I read it in the last one that we were doing, but I thought this was such a good quote. No matter how you find your passion early on, pursue it with a white hot flame. Dedicating it to the good of the world. But holds your success lightly. Be ready to change as your abilities change.

Do the most interesting thing you can. So you, you had an unconventional educational journey. And it gives other people, I think, the permission to do that as well. And then love. That's this, you know, this other big piece.

And you talk about the pillars that can contribute to happiness and being happier. One of them is love. Dating is a tricky topic. So you've got adult kids. In my world, there's a lot of judgment.

First of all, it's like, why are you letting your kids date? Is your, well, they are only, are they 15? Are they 17? We're not letting our kids date till they can afford a home. Like, okay, so start us there.

You know, the marriage numbers are going down. Everyone's getting married later. Is any of they have to do with dating?

You know, dating.

“And part of the reason is has everything to do with the fact that we took a very, very complex, right,”

bring thing, like, courting and falling in love.

And we turned it into a left brain, technologized exercise. That's why we did it. And that's one of the reasons that when you're actually using dating apps, you have a lot more deal flow in a lot less attraction. So I talk to young people all the time.

My average student is 28 years old. My graduate students are 28 years old. They're like, I go on tons of dates and I'll like any of them. I don't like them. I don't like the guys.

The women will say, I don't find them attractive. And it's like, there's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. You go out with somebody and you don't know why you like them. And the reason is because your right brains are communicating with each other.

And that's a really important thing. Because when your left brains communicate with each other on a dating app, you're not going to make a good connection. You're not going to have the right attraction. You're going to be too alike.

You're not going to be complementary to each other. That's why. And so you find that now 62% of couples that marry this year will have met on dating apps. And the people who made on dating apps are they have less stable marriages. And that's because they're based less on this cosmic attraction.

You know, it's like, when I met my wife, we didn't literally speak the same word of same language. Not one word. And I was completely in love and I couldn't tell you why. I just, I was in love. I was in love.

I quit my job in New York and moved to Barcelona because she lived there. And she's like, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm here because I want to spend the rest of my life with you. She's like, well, let's think about that. But can we learn the same language?

But no, no. I mean, and it has everything to do with the mystery that actually goes into it. I mean, I'm not, I'm not a crazy sentimentalist. And I'm not superstitious. But I know how the brain works.

And the brain does not work to attract each other. These are the analytical left side. That's not where it happens. And that's what we've reduced it to. Now, some app makers are actually getting better at this.

I've been talking to some app makers who don't want to maximize time and app. They want to have people meet each other. And then spend maximum time off the app in person coding. That's super important.

“And so I think we're going to get there.”

But we're not there now. It's an opposite. It's complete opposite. That you and me in person. And then you're going to say, I am going to move across the world.

And I'm going to live in this other place because I've interested in this girl. Who hasn't even like committed or anything. Nothing. But you can see then how it will be so different from the app. And then you're expecting that.

You're kind of expecting to meet in person and sparks are going to fly. But they don't. So I would imagine that gets pretty discouraging. Yeah, because you're trying to solve the problem. You don't solve a romance.

There's a whole range of experiences in our life that we can't solve. Problems that we can't solve, we can only live with. You can't answer certain questions. You can only understand them. You can ask me, why do you love your wife?

And I can say, I don't know, but I understand that I do. I mean, I can give you answers, but they're so lame. Oh, she's so good. She's just good mom. And she's so good to me.

It's like, I could be talking about my third great teacher.

There's no mystery in that. It's what it comes down to. And that's the, that's the thing that we need to comprehend. And then we've gotten rid of that we've really, I mean, eradicating the mystery from our lives has been enormously costly.

Because we've eradicated the life from life. Yes, enter the whole, the whole, that goes back to the whole t-shirt thing. Because you would have to smell them. Right. And you can't do that through an app.

I've even been like, boys, boys, if you wear all that clone. I'm like, people can smell if you're supposed to be attracted to each other or not. Well, actually, the nose can still, the nose still knows the nose. The nose that will creep all the nose. And it really, really can, it can cut right through.

And you can, you can disguise it a little bit.

“But the truth is that it will, it's funny.”

The natural human aroma will mix with clones and be completely obnoxious if it's a bad match.

Isn't by the way, one of the reasons, Jenny, that you should never pick your own perfume.

Because what you pick your own perfume, you pick something that smells really attractive to you. And something that smells really attractive to you reminds you of the person you're in love with. And the person you're in love with says that smells like my sister because they have a lot of the same biological markers. And then in the major historic compatibility complex, that's detected by the old factory bulb in the brain. That's what's happening.

It's like you're doing something that reminds you of him. He doesn't want to smell him. He doesn't really want to smell his sister. Don't pick your own perfume. Let him pick your perfume.

Super practical. Super practical, but just another one of the things that's in person, like you have to be in person. You say, let humans make your matches instead of machines. And that friends were good at it because the friend understand you and they understand the other person.

I mean, what do you think then about young dating?

I think young dating is fine. It needs to be supervised appropriately, of course. You know, you don't give us, like, give your 14-year-old kid a car. And you also don't, you know, leave your 14-year-old completely unsupervised on a date. Because that can lead to all sorts of problems, especially when you have younger girls and older boys.

Younger girls and older boys. That can be a pretty dangerous situation. Because they're not responsible. Their limbic system is not connected entirely synaptically with their pre-frontal cortex. They have strong emotions and bad judgment.

Strong emotions plus bad judgment equals big mistakes, is what it comes down to. But just in the same way that they do all kinds of adult things, but supervised until their adults is what it comes down to. This is just potential judgment. You know, it's just thinking or thinking in a, you know, you don't protect them forever. But you get them more and more and more freedom.

So they can make appropriate mistakes that are not catastrophic.

Yeah. And I would imagine just more FaceTime, more FaceTime with people, more FaceTime with friends, more FaceTime. You know, in dating situations that are appropriate for their age, because that's not happening. I mean, the kids are home. That rooms are on their screens and so to have all the interaction you need practice with it.

“And you need to, you know, start to learn who smells good to you.”

Yeah. And that's also by the way, the predators are on the screen. The real predators out there are climbing through their phones into their bedrooms by themselves. That's what's really actually going on. TikTok is predator city man.

I mean, it's a real social media apps are a huge problem. And their predators who are trying to exploit them, their predators who are trying to radicalize them and propagandaize them. Their predators who want to turn them against their parents. Their predators who want to confuse them about who they are as people. That's really what's going on with these things.

And, you know, the place that's a lot safer is outside running around. It's true. And you say, okay, one of the things you say is date like an entrepreneur. And do you think that there is a correlation between how easy screens are? Because you just talk about suffering.

The screens are pretty easy. They make a easy video games are easy. You respawn or, you know, all the different things people talk about. But then we don't have this practice and actual real life relationships. Or we give up too quick.

We give up pretty quick because we're like, oh, that didn't work. And that didn't work. And maybe by the time three were done. Yeah. So, you know, you talk about that. And you also talk about suffering. Is that related to, not that there's less suffering, but there's less.

Maybe challenge. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely less challenge. Because it's cognitively less taxing, but more stressful.

“When your social life is on a screen, cognitively less taxing, but a lot more stressful.”

So, you get more stress, but you learn less is what it comes down to. Now, the suffering thing is really important to keep in mind.

Because suffering is one of the most important ways that we do learn the meaning of our life.

And the therapy industrial complex in this country has told an entire generation of parents that if your child is feeling sad and anxious or something wrong with your child is got to get fixed. That pain has to be eliminated. And that's completely wrong. That is completely wrong.

I mean, I tell my students, look, your students are Harvard. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy. You know, the truth is it's hard. You're doing a hard thing. And you're going to suffer when you're doing a hard thing. Now, it can be dysregulated, it can be exaggerated, clinical depression,

and generalized anxiety or real maladies. But the truth of the matter is that if you say I'm sad and they take you to a mental health professional, and they say we got to get rid of that, they're misguided. They're doing the wrong thing. Your child is not going to develop.

Your child should cry. Your child should feel a broken heart. Your child should feel stressed out. It has to happen. There's no other way that we're going to develop.

And if they don't, then they're going to kind of a social peanut allergy. They're going to, they're going to, they're going to get the college. And then they're going to want, they're going to demand safe spaces, and you know, fall in with the microaggression crowd. And then we're going to wonder why they're in campus counseling and getting Medicaid.

And college, that's why. That's why. And then I feel like it's got to be harder to answer the question of why my life. Totally. There's no answer to it. When you're hanging out on the left side of your brain, there's literally an answer. There's nothing.

There's no understanding of that at all. Why are you alive? I don't know just to distract myself. Just to go to work. Just to do what I did yesterday. Just to eat this thing and drink this thing and watch this thing.

“That's why really it's just to pass the time.”

That's why I'm alive. Sorry. Not good enough. It's really sad. It's okay. No, because now we know. Now we know. And we know what to do with, we need public policies.

And that's what John Heights stuff is all about. About actually prohibiting prohibiting personal devices and schools. And. But we also as parents and young adults themselves can do all kinds of things.

It's not that hard. I see people people detox from their devices. Get bored the right way. Start asking big questions. Start working to fall in love and real life.

And their life is like. Holy cow. This is life on earth. I had no idea. Yeah, you prioritize right brain activities. Totally.

And that's what this book is. It's a guide book. Your own right brain. Where you get to look. This is what you do.

This is what literally do these six things. Your life's going to change. The book is called the meaning of your life. Finding purpose in an age of emptiness. Talk about transcendence.

That's something that we've never talked about on the show.

Yeah. Transcendence is all about standing in awe of the universe. Looking at the world and the universe that's bigger than you. You know, one of the worst things that actually happens in our technologist world is it makes you the star of your universe. It's all about me.

It's all about my followers and, you know, my virtual friends and my internet experiences. And that plays to a tendency that mother nature has imbued in us. It's called the psychodrama. And the psychodrama, it's all me, me, me. Because, you know, in ancient time, 250,000 years ago thinking about yourself is how you pass on your genes and survive another day.

But you'll be miserable because it's boring and tedious and scary and awful and sad to be thinking about yourself all day long.

“You need to transcend yourself by looking to the divine and serving others.”

That's how you do it. There's two ways to transcend yourself upward and outward. And so I talk an awful lot about this with young people about starting a spiritual journey. I talk to families about how they can actually do this is a great, great blessing to their kids. I talk to kids all the time about what it means to actually serve other people and live and bonds of love with other people.

And, you know, what actually that means and what they do is they start to realize that my ordinary day on day details in my life are actually pretty boring. It's like, it's just I don't want it. I don't want it. There's nothing out there's nothing in my notifications that can get my attention the way that looking up into the cake. You know, it's like, get your kid a telescope. That's going to be a lot more interesting than TikTok because they'll say, you know, after 10 minutes, your son is going to be like, dude, I'm a speck on a speck on a speck.

That's so interesting. That's so wonderful. Astronomy 101 is the most popular class on my campus for a reason. And it, as it makes people small and one of the things that I find with my students is they don't grow up at any religion at all, but they start praying for the first time. And it's like, wow, what's going on here?

I don't understand what's happening to my life here and the answer is you're transcending yourself and transcending yourself.

Nature feeds into it. Oh, yeah. We, um, right now I've talked about this before on the show, but we sometimes will collect monarch caterpillars. And then we keep them inside and we feed them the leaves and they grow real big. You know, they start off as the little egg. We need to even find them as the egg and to eat the milk weed and keep feeding them. And in just a couple weeks, Arthur, they've gone into the J shape on the top of your little container.

And they shut their last skin and it's like this green emerald green. Like Wizard of Oz green, gold dots, you know, and then in a couple of weeks, you can hang them up, you can hang them around your house. A couple weeks, the green turns translucent and you can see through it and there's black and orange.

“And you know, I think, you know, even if you're a creative person, even if you're like a, you know, a science fiction writer.”

I mean, this is one of the most remarkable things in the entire world that there was this caterpillar that crawled in eight this milk weed. And now it flies and it's changed colors and it has a probis guess and it tastes with its feet. And it knows where Mexico is. I mean, we're in Michigan. I don't know how to get to Mexico. You know, and I think it's like that itself.

Right. I like I could get to Indiana, but that type of thing, which is one of the most simplest things. And you're going to see that all over the place, right? There's butterflies everywhere. It's not something that's like a mountain pass or, you know, some river rapids or something that you might not see. But you're going to see butterflies and then that makes you think, how is this here?

You know, and it's so extraordinary. It's so amazing.

The problem is that online the universe is little.

The universe is an extraordinary. The universe is a little boring, is a matter of fact. It's just sort of in your phone. That's where the universe is. You go outside and you experience this and the universe is out there and never stops.

So where do you want it to do? So you want it to be little and stops in your phone or going on forever. Where you could keep going and keep going and you'd never find the end of it. And that's an exciting adventure. That's your life.

“The truth of your life is that the experience is that you can have and the things that you can marvel at.”

The miracles that you can witness never stops, but you better get out. You better get out.

And you're going to be shutting off otherwise. And you know, that's the problem. We got a crack and we're cracking right now. It's like we're tricked because the phone does feel infinite. There's infinite amount of content that you can consume.

There's always a new YouTube video.

These are all interesting things that we've dropped. We've dropped into the course of the 2018. There's wisdom here with teenagers. I'm a study that shows. I didn't do study. I just saw the data that most teenagers would pay to get rid of all social media if nobody had it. And you want to know why? Because they know it's terrible.

Yeah. They know it's terrible. They have that because they have to have it. It's an arms race. It's like the nuclear bombs between America and the Soviet Union.

And everybody in the Soviet Union in America. And you know, I stayed. When I was a kid during the Cold War would be like, I wish nobody had a nuclear bomb. But if the Russians have it, I'm glad we do.

“And that's how kids are kind of in this, in this, this arms race of communication and missing out in a formal, et cetera, et cetera.”

But they would. They're smart. And they know that it's taking the meaning out of their lives. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like we've just dropped it all.

We've dropped in nature. We've dropped play. We've dropped faith. Yeah. We've dropped dating.

But we got reals. Yeah. And so this is why this is why we're having a hard time. And our young people, especially, are having a hard time. Because they may know nothing different.

I know. And that is a tragedy. They don't remember the before times. Yeah. Yeah.

They didn't mind. And even your age, remember the before times. Remember the goodness of it. I mean, this is why in an age of technology, you do a podcast called The Thousand Hours. Right.

Because you're a countercultural. This is a countercultural show. It's what it comes down to. And we all need to be more countercultural. We're not going to get rid of technology.

What we're doing is we're learning how to use technology, prudently, which human beings are very good at. And we've always done. You know, I mean, there were people in 1895. I read an article in The New York Times from 1895 that said that this new

fangled device, the telephone, is going to ruin all of social life.

People are never going to leave the house.

They're going to be holding their, they're going to be listening to their phone. They'll be going to church on the phone. They were saying things like that. And it's hilarious now because the phone is nothing more than a tool.

“And the truth is that the internet will be used as a tool as opposed to a”

simulation of real life. But it's going to take another part of a generation actually get us there. And I just want to get us their faster. Yeah. Neil Postman said something similar.

And he was as futurist. And I don't know if I'm going to be able to find it. But he said something about he thought he was like computers. He was talking about it in terms of computers. He wrote a book in the 80s called I'm using ourselves to death.

And he said something about, you know, computers who knows. But he said no medium is excessively dangerous. If it's users know what the dangers are. Yeah. He said to ask is to break the spell.

Are you asking? I mean, that's what you talked about at the very beginning. Are you asking questions? And are you using a tool as a tool? Yeah.

Or are you using the tool as an ended itself? And that's about human life itself. If you use money as the end in your life, you're going to become miserable. If you use money as a tool, it can great great happiness.

“If you think about the influence that you have over your kid is what is the ultimate final end of your parenting.”

You're going to be a crummy mom. That's just what it is. But if the control you have over your kids is as a vehicle to actually lift them up. And the bonds of happiness and love. You're going to be a great mom.

All of these things are tools and if you mistake the tool for the goal, that's a big, that's a problem. You're going to be creating these problems and that's all it is. That's all it is. And I'm talking about the neuroscience of how this whole thing works. But it conceptually is not that hard as a way that this works.

We need more love in real life. More love in real life. That's going to come down to that right side of the brain. The book is called the meaning of your life. Find me purpose in an age of emptiness.

You're going to be a group of 16 incredible books.

Tows about your podcast. The podcast office hours. This started last year. So it's a pretty new compared to yours. I mean, you have like six, six bazillion episodes of a thousand hours.

I daily show. I'm knocked out by that. Mine is once a week. So I'm kind of a piker. But what I do is I talk about a different aspect of the science of human happiness.

About every four shows. I have another expert on somebody who does this stuff and talks about whatever book that they're writing. I have this call of the Atlantic and I'm talking about the science. And most importantly, how you can use the science to live a happier life and go become a teacher and lift other people up. So again, all the parents need to listen in.

Dr. Arthur Brooks, what an honor. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks Jenny. It's almost over the story. Also this school of philosophy.

Just over the night. And then I hope that it's stupid. No, not. This story is so my safe space.

Exactly. This story is like this story.

Who just understands.

Egalobstodium, Job, or Unzo.

It's stupid.

Krass, I don't know how to do it.

Do you know how to do it? Do you know how to do it? Save. With this story.