Ep. 398: How Do I Find Purpose in a Distracted World? (w/ Arthur Brooks)

22:50Arthur Brooks:My younger son was living the old way and my older son was living the new way. And that is exactly what actually helped me to crack the case here was just looking at my own kids. Oh, that's fascinating. That's almost like my own sibling-dom, right? where my brother went to the Naval Academy and the Navy and was on subs. And I went to Dartmouth and MIT and did like math and computer science. Yeah, he lives life. Oh man, he lives life. He's like, this is great. He lives in California. He's always out there mountain biking and surfing and going on, you know, he's like really into it. All right, so this is fascinating.

23:22Arthur Brooks:But you, by the way, you have escaped the matrix. You actually escaped the matrix that many computer scientists are stuck in because you didn't fool yourself or you didn't let the world lie to you to tell you that your training, which is the massive increase of your left hemispheric activity, could solve your right brain needs. You love your wife in real life. You love your kids in real life. You're a man of faith in real life. And you're not mediating that. Your phone is out in the foyer. I know that because I read your stuff. Well, it helps. I think what helped that was the fact that I ended up after grad school at Georgetown, which is a Jesuit university that is a liberal arts institution that cares about those things.

24:01And you'll still walk by, a Jesuit priest will walk by, there'll be a Noviate going by. They care about humanistic values. They care about justice. They care about transcendence. And you're surrounded by it and it sort of colors even the stim work. But okay, so let me, there's a complicated thing that confused me. And I think there's an answer to this complicated scenario in your book, right? Because I agree with what you're saying. You have a change in the culture in the 21st century that leads to this problem of meaninglessness among young people. But there is also these timing hooks into some of the negative effects we see to technology, right?

24:43Like especially the spread of the smartphone led in certain circumstances, you see these large bumps in the mental health issues. Certainly, you'll see this on college campuses. is a partially like put me on what I write about was like getting the Georgetown and in like 2012 talking to the head of the mental health counseling to cap program there and her just saying we've like double or tripled anxiety anxiety related disorders like in the last couple of years and I was like what's the difference she was like it's the phones the first kids who showed up with phones it's getting worse but tell me if I have this right because I think there's an answer in your book which is the way you talk about the doom loop which is this idea of it's not that we We were fine, and then we got the phones, and then we got bad.

25:26It was, no, we were in this new perilous situation. I'm throwing this out here. You tell me if this is right. We were in this new perilous cultural situation in which we were getting disconnected from these traditional right-brained sources of meaning. In that situation, when iPhones came along, we had smartphones, that allowed us to basically amplify or supercharge the disconnection from meaning that we were already having by falling into what you call the doom loop. Is that correctly resolving this sort of tension?

25:54Arthur Brooks:Yeah, that's exactly right. And doom loops are characteristic of any addictive cycle. And the brain chemistry is very much the same across all of these different cycles. And so you'll find, for example, that if you're bored and anxious, then you drink some alcohol. And what that does is it makes you feel better for a minute. And then you're more bored and anxious. And so you drink some more alcohol. And then you escalate. And down and down and down it goes. And the same thing is more or less true with the way that we're in a society that has a lack of inherent meaning that we actually will – because we're anxious and we're bored so that we use the technology to distract ourselves.

26:29Arthur Brooks:We use the technology to pass the time, and that makes us more bored and anxious. And that's the doom loop that we can't quite get out of. The other way we can think about it is the simulation because that's what a lot of young people told me in this. It's kind of like you remember in 1999. Sorry to shock you, but that's 27 years ago now at this point. So even a young guy like you is going to feel really old. But that's when The Matrix was actually when it came out. And the plot of that movie was that in the year 2199, science fiction flick. But they think it's 1999 in the movie because they're living in pods, being fed a simulation of real life.

27:04Arthur Brooks:Because an artificial intelligence, a super engineered machine intelligence is sucking the energy out of humans in terms of their energy, in terms of their attention. And you have to pacify them by keeping them in the simulation. Cal, we're in the matrix. We're stuck in the matrix. That's the doom loop is we don't know how to get out of the matrix. And so that's a lot about – that's another way to think of the same problem. Do we – is it useful or is this crass to try to find useful analogies to the fentanyl crisis in the sense of you start with the same ground, which is a disconnection from traditional sources of meaning.

27:45So the problem is already there. In this case, it's for various economic drivers. Then you introduce into the picture a vehicle of escape that has lots of negative externalities. In this case, it leads to lots of deaths of despair and overdose deaths. Whereas in the social media world, you throw social media into a ground where we're disconnected from meeting and we tend to get great amplifications of anxiety, anxiety-related disorders. But in both cases, there's an underlying problem, and then you throw into the mix a sort of escape that becomes addictive and causes its own – amplifies problems or causes its own problems.

28:17Is that a reasonable analogy?

28:20Arthur Brooks:Well, we can, but we don't want to push it too far. Part of the reason is because for many, many millions of people, social media is not a net bad. it isn't a net bad it's not heroin i mean by the way there are a lot of analgesic painkillers that are not a net bad if you actually need them for that matter but for many people especially older people that remember them four times social media is a phenomenal way to stay abreast of your friends and to connect with your grandchildren and to get a good chuckle from time to time because they can actually use it in a moderate way the problem is people who use it to treat an underlying problem of misery and dislocation and loneliness, when they use it for that and distract themselves and solve the problem of boredom, my goodness, you know, boredom is really important.

29:09Arthur Brooks:And yet, it's really uncomfortable because it's boring, but Mother Nature, of course, doesn't care. And we've never been able to do it. But when we solve the problem of boredom, we invite all kinds of maladies. I mean, I'll tell you something that my great-grandfather, Leroy Brooks, I guarantee you he never said to mary ellen my great-grandmother he never came home and said honey i had a panic attack behind the mule today right and the reason is because it wasn't a thing because his brain wasn't malfunctioning because he was bored a lot but and here's the great irony of the doom loop that we're actually in today his life was very boring moment to moment behind that mule but i guarantee you his life wasn't boring people today are never bored moment to moment but their life is grindingly boring.

29:55Arthur Brooks:What's going on with that? To eradicate moment-to-moment boredom, we've traded away an interesting life. That's what it's come down to because our brains are working wrong and that's an encapsulation of the doom loop that we're stuck in. Interesting. Yeah. So to seek that stimulation in the moment, you prevent the bigger picture action. Well, so let's get into these equations then because you know I like equations. So I thought I'd never seen this before. Your relation of happiness to meaning is you say, okay, Okay, happiness is an equation. It's this plus this plus this. One of those factors is meaning.

30:25Those other two factors we have, it's not a problem. But the meaning, if we don't have the meaning, we don't have the happiness. And then we can zoom in and say, okay, then what is meaning? Well, meaning is this plus this plus this. So those other two factors in happiness were enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. So you think enjoyment, satisfaction, no problem. Actually, we're doing great with that. It's the meaning part. Young people are. Yeah, so it's the meaning part we're missing. That's right. Okay, and then because we're getting enjoyment satisfaction just because we have stuff to do. If you're a striver at Harvard, like you're doing lots of satisfying stuff.

30:59And we have enjoyment because we have access to like endless things that in the moment give us all sorts of pleasure.

31:05Arthur Brooks:And we have friends and people actually have friends and they do things together a lot. Not as much as they should to be sure. But enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory. That's how enjoyment actually works. So it's not just pleasure. The secret to happiness is not the pursuit of pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure leads to rehab, not happiness. But when we actually do things, and young people do, they're really good at it. It's actually kind of extraordinary. Gen Z, they tend to be better in enjoyment than boomers, as a matter of fact. And, you know, this is an achievement-based society.

31:37Arthur Brooks:There's satisfaction levels, which is the joy from an accomplishment after a struggle. They're really good at that. But meaning is in the cellar. Meaning the bottom has absolutely dropped out. All right. So there's four big things you talk about in the book. I'm going to ask you about some of these out of order, just thinking about my audience's interests. All right. I want to start with the one that overlaps my work calling. All right. This is what you're doing in your profession. All right. I'm nervous about this one because I wrote a book back – God, a long time ago. I was still a postdoc. But I wrote a book a long time ago that said we put too much emphasis in our job being a major source of passion and meaning.

32:15Actually do something really well. You can craft it into something that's meaningful in your life. But don't be searching for the perfect work. You say calling is important. All right. So help me understand what that means. I want to see if I can make it compatible with my feelings.

32:30Arthur Brooks:Calling is this feeling that you're doing something that you're meant to do, whether you enjoy it all the time or not. That's what it comes down to. Now, I teach at the Harvard Business School, so I have a lot of people that are really going to go work hard, lots and lots and lots of hours. And one of the things that I tell them is don't worry about work-life balance. Worry about work-life integration because your work should be part of your life and it should make your life better. And your life outside work should make your work better is what it comes down to. So if your only strategy for finding satisfaction in life is working all the time, you're doing it wrong.

33:05Arthur Brooks:And that's why in the chapter on calling, I have as part of your calling doing leisure right. Now, leisure is actually not chilling on a beach. If you're chilling on a beach in every vacation, it means you're so exhausted that all you're trying to do is to get ready to work more. And you're doing it wrong is what it comes down to. leisure according to joseph peeper you know the great 20th century german philosopher it really comes down to it comes down to doing something with purpose that they don't pay you for something generative that they don't pay you for where you grow as a person and he puts it into three kind of categories spiritual uh development relationship development and intellectual development in other words go read the brothers karamazov if you're going to be on the beach for Pete's sake and do it with the love of your life and then go pray or something like that.

33:54Arthur Brooks:I mean, it's basically what it comes down to is developing yourself. And that is so important that it actually is part of the calling per se, what you're meant to do as a person. But how do you find a calling? Yeah. So finding a calling really comes down to, and you know, there's a lot of stuff written on this, of course, there's a lot of philosophy written on this. It's looking for compensation that comes in two ways that you find. And this is, you know, I'm an old economist, so behavioral economist. So this is, you go back to your computer science days. I go back to the equations of the board as an economist.

34:28Arthur Brooks:And the two things that actually predict people feeling like their work is a meaningful calling have nothing to do with money or position or prestige or title. There's two things. Number one is the belief that they're earning their success, which is to say, I feel like I'm creating value with my life and value in my work. for me and for others. And the second is they feel that they're needed because they're serving other people. That's what it comes down to. And again, that doesn't mean that you're changing the world. You don't have to be Mother Teresa. Maybe you feel like your co-workers need you, that it would matter if you didn't show up.

35:01Arthur Brooks:But if you feel like you're acknowledged and rewarded for your hard work and personal responsibility, merit is everything, Cal. Merit-based systems are so important. You and I both know that tenure-based systems are not very motivating. We're both academics. Loyalty-based systems like in government are the worst actually for motivating people. But what everybody knows when they're there on the basis of merit, and that's what actually helps, but more important is that they're serving their fellow women and men. That's what it comes down to. So it's earning your success and serving other people.

35:32Arthur Brooks:Then you know you're in the zone of calling. Well, okay. So there's two things there that puts you so much on my wavelength that I'm excited about it to the point where my reader's like, oh yeah, that's Cal, right? Like the two things you said there that definitely caught my attention is, okay, the way you're talking about it is this is not about the matching of the specific content of the job to some sort of narrow preexisting inclination, which is what my generation was taught. Follow your passion was 1990s into the early 2000s. We were taught what matters is the content of your job. You have to figure out through introspection that you're meant to be a beat reporter for a baseball team, and that's your passion.

36:10And if you can match that to your job, you'll be happy. Otherwise, you won't. Nothing you said was about the content of the job. It was about the properties. So you don't have to figure out in advance what is the perfect job for me. And then two, those things you're talking about, feeling like you're valued and have on a real merit basis and being able to really be serving people that develops over time. That does go along with you might not feel that way as much in the first month of a job out of college than where you're going to be 20 years after you've built up real expertise and real skills that are important.

36:44You understand the industry. So it's something that you develop and gets richer over time. Those two notes are music to my ears. So I think we're seeing this.

36:53Arthur Brooks:I've learned that through long experience. When I was in my 20s, when I thought that my passion, my everything, my all was classical music. I was a professional French horn player. I was playing in the Barcelona City Orchestra. I was going to be the world's greatest French horn player. So I thought that was the only thing I was actually made for. And if I didn't do that, I might as well die, Cal. And the reason is because I'd been taught to follow my passion. And what I found was that I wasn't going to be the world's greatest French horn player. And I married a woman who said it doesn't really matter.

37:23Arthur Brooks:And I went back to school and I found I was interested in all these different things. And I was good at things I didn't actually know I was. and I went in a completely different direction. For Pete's sake, I became a behavioral scientist. And then later on, I became a CEO of a big think tank in Washington, D.C. And now I teach happiness at a business school. And the truth is, it's the best, man, because what I'm doing is I'm cycling around. There's an old research by a social psychologist at USC named Michael Driver, who talked about the kinds of careers based on psychological profiles. And a lot of really accomplished professionals are called spirals, meaning that they reinvent themselves every 7 to 12 years, which you did.

38:06Arthur Brooks:I mean you were a very conventional computer scientist and now you write how to people to be happy for Pete's sake. Thank God you teach at Georgetown because you can actually do stuff like that because you're a spiral. Every 7 to 12 years, you reconceive of yourself thinking, what can I do now based on where I am in my life and my relative skills and my crystallized intelligence and how I'm changing and how I see the world where I can earn my success and I can serve others? Those are the two questions. I want to ask you about religion. I have a question for you about religion because I'm on board with you listing the transcendent as one of the key factors for actually regaining this meaning.

38:46But I want to ask you a question about, quote unquote, kids these days. and their relationship to religion because it's confusing to me or unknown to me. So my generation, when we came of age, we came of age in that sort of George W. Bush era where there was this sort of interesting schism that happened. The left moved away from religion. That became the rights sort of domain. We got – this was like the intelligent design debates and there became this sort of cultural split. This is when new atheism arose post 9-11. There's all of these forces that made a real sort of antagonistic relationship to religion and often associated it with, I don't know, conservative politics and simplicity on the other side of science.

39:33And so my generation grew up with like John Stewart making fun of evangelicals, right? And so we had a complicated relationship with religion that now the millennials are sort of repairing. What's going on with Gen Z? Where are they? Are they? What are you seeing? Are they pro-religion, anti-religion, indifferent to religion, dislike it, matters? Like what's going on with this new generation?

39:54Arthur Brooks:So until about three or four years ago, the answer was they continued to walk away from religion. And you saw more and more people self-identifying as nuns, not like nuns with habits, Catholic nuns that you were at Georgetown with, N-U-N-S, N-O-N-E-S. People who are identifying as having no spirituality or religious tradition. The year I was born in 1964, a nice long time ago, that was 1 % of the population. Right now, it's 32 % of the population is what we find. And so it's massively increased. And that was largely because of Gen X and millennials who are coming through exactly the bubble that we talked about here.

40:31Arthur Brooks:But something has happened in this sort of age of emptiness. It's almost as if there's a bill of goods that they've been sold. not that there's a particular religion that's that's suiting it but we found in the past three years is that there's a tick up or a tick down i should say in the nuns that there's a tick up in the people who are actually starting to identify as spiritual or religious starting with young men and that's usually how it goes by the way you know the whole idea where every time religion is is is is waning people are like yeah no man that's it that's it that's it and then it starts to wax again yeah right and it's gone through this i mean we go back to the time of the american revolution for example, people were about as irreligious as they are today.

41:11Arthur Brooks:And then we go to after the Civil War, this massive boom in religious experience where, I mean, that's when all of the, yeah, that's when all of the reformed Jewish temples in America were coming across between the Civil War and the First World War. Boom, man. That's when the Mormons were there, the Methodists and the Baptists were just doing these tent revivals, the temperance movement, the self-improvement movements, which are quasi-religious movements. And then, you know, in the fifties, it was more traditional religion. And then, you know, through the hippie revolution, it changed. And then there was a cult.

41:41Arthur Brooks:There's all the cults that actually came through and the moonies and all this kind of stuff. And this is just American life. And so what's happening right now is when people feel this ennui, this acute sense of emptiness, religion is going to be, is not going to be very far behind. And sure enough, that's actually the beginning of what we're starting to see today. But help me resolve this tension, right? So we're in this, this new moment that started sort of early 21st century, which is much more algorithmic and technocratic way of thinking about treating life. It seems like it's causing two counter forces, right?

42:13So force number one is that creates an ennui or meaninglessness, which will drive people back to, I need something like religion to act as like the operating system for the numinists in my life. But at the same time, the culture itself has a defense mechanism against religion. It makes you uncomfortable about religion if you're steeped in this much more technical, scientific algorithmic culture, because you say, I have lost the ability to comfortably deal with something that doesn't exist in the matrix of empiricism, that doesn't exist in terms of like, this is, we're making observations of putting them on tables and we're verifying if this is true or false.

42:46And we're thinking about fact checking. And, you know, it's the whole cultural milieu that you're talking about is one in which if you're in that world, religion doesn't make sense. So it's driving us towards religion, but it's also a culture that's going to make us uncomfortable with religion. I guess what that creates, like we saw coming out of Silicon Valley in the 2010s, a lot of people that were talking about – there was a period where every friend I had was saying they were spiritual but not religious, which to me would be an exact personification of exactly those tensions. But what's going to win here because we have counter forces?

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47:10Arthur Brooks:so i think that what's going to win is the desire to be happier that that's what's going to win because you know who's going to choose misery forever on purpose is the whole point so here it's actually a deeper problem than what you're talking about you know the work of the mcgill chris the great neuroscientist and philosopher at Oxford, now emeritus. He did the work on hemispheric lateralization that I talked about before, where the left brain does the complicated engineering stuff and the tech that you're dealing with every day. And the right brain is the why questions that don't have answers about love and mystery and meaning and happiness.

47:42Arthur Brooks:And so what happens is that when you're only on the left brain because you're on the tech all day long and you're in the hustle and grind culture, it's not that you can't deal with religion. It's just that you don't even, it doesn't even occur to you to deal with religion because you're literally in the wrong part of your brain all day long to deal with religious questions. Now, that means that when people become miserable enough, they'll say, what is actually missing? And that's when you get a whole rash of books by cats like you and me that say, uh, let's take a little look at what you've been missing.

48:14Arthur Brooks:And when they do, you get a cultural revolution. I don't mean in the Chinese sense. I mean, in the sense of when we actually get these religious waves in our society and when people start to rebel against it. And that's actually what I see for the first time. I mean, I'm in Silicon Valley all the time. Look, I'm super into tech. I actually believe that AI is going to wind up at the end of the day, mostly making us happier because a lot of people are going to figure out that, you know, all the left brain stuff that it does actually frees us up to have a lot more time. The tech, the industrial revolution initially made people work more, but then it created the weekend.

48:49Arthur Brooks:and on the weekend they actually hung out with their kids and what ai is ultimately going to do is do a lot of left brain nonsense and in the free time that we ultimately will have we will have like do crazy old-fashioned stuff like falling in love and having babies and praying and meditating and i actually figure that that's the direction that we're going to go because that's the humans what humans ultimately always do in the end that they choose happiness so uh well i i don't know if i share your optimism unfortunately on ai just because i've studied too many workplace technologies and the possibility is always there we always mess it up we always mess it up we always end up making our lives more frantic uh because we're yeah but each one of us can make that decision now by the way i agree which is why you write your books yeah right and i've been telling people yeah think about ai how can i automate something that's annoying if you're using it to avoid strain in your brain there'll be dragons like actually no no you want to keep that piece that sort of humanistic i'm trying to create new value with my brain keep that but if this means you have to not format a powerpoint slide oh fantastic there's no reason for you to be doing all right so you also like formatting powerpoint slides unless that's your actual thing is what it comes down to and by the way don't use it as a substitute for your relationships yes that's the biggest mistake that people make is making it you're getting the girlfriend experience from AI or making it your buddy or God forbid your therapist, that actually is a substitute and your brain will know the difference.

50:19Arthur Brooks:It will never pass the Turing test of the right hemisphere of your brain. And even though you say, wow, that's really good advice, that will make you feel empty, depressed and anxious because your right brain is craving a true human experience. Yeah. And it knows the difference. Well, let's talk about that because that was another one of your, the things you mentioned as sources of meaning is fall in love, have relationships. I know this is being said it's a struggle, especially for younger people. Why and what should they do to overcome that struggle? To begin with, it's been, we've made it a lot worse with the technical mediation of the relationships themselves.

50:56Arthur Brooks:You know, the truth is that the best possible way to find a mate is to go someplace where those people actually are and to deal with them over an interest that you have in common. That's actually how you meet people, which is why traditionally people would meet their mate in college or in the workplace, right? Another great way to do it is that somebody, another human being who knows you sets you up, which is why matchmakers and families are so really good at actually finding people because they're dealing with the complexity of the human person themselves. When you disintermediate that with dating apps, what you're doing is you're reducing people to a two-dimensional facsimile of themselves.

51:35Arthur Brooks:And that is inherently unsatisfying. That's one of the reasons that people who date a lot in the apps, they get way more dates than they used to. And they find less attraction than they used to. And when it turns into a long-term relationship, it's less stable and satisfying than it used to be. So marriages, by the way, 62 % of long-term relationships are starting in the apps today. They are fundamentally and notably significantly less stable and have less attraction than relationships that don't start on the apps because they're starting literally in the wrong side of the brain. Oh, interesting.

52:07So the right brain appreciation of sort of humanity. This is a separate – this is a person. This is a soul. This is like another human being blessed by God to be sort of like infinitely valuable and we are like interacting in space. Your brain is literally encoding a different understanding than it's like this was option five. I swept right on or something like that. It's not like an algorithmic thing.

52:35Arthur Brooks:You're actually not encountering the people that your right brain needs. Why? Because your left brain is ascertaining who the greatest match is going to be and your left brain is going to get it wrong. Your left brain gets it wrong and your right brain knows. You remember when you met your wife, which is probably – how old were you in college when you met your wife? We were in college. Yeah. Yeah. And you met her. What were you doing? You were like having dinner or something and somebody introduced you? She was on my floor in my freshman dorm. Right. No, man. Good stuff. But I'll say this about it is we used to do things like in high school.

53:11We would do things like go to parties and it was it was social boot camp because it was weird and awkward. you had to navigate incredibly complicated real world situations, like trying to figure out, is my popularity sufficient to be in this room with these particular people? And how do I navigate this? And it was very difficult and stressful. And you would drive around with your friends and you got good at it. And I always think about by the time I got to college, then I could function competently in the new social circumstances and like fraternities and dorms and this or that, which allowed me to attract a mate who's now been, you know, my wife for 20 years.

53:46So there's like something about it.

53:48Arthur Brooks:That's a highly complex human experience. And if you're on the apps, God forbid, you'd know if she, if she look hot in a picture, does she like to eat sriracha? Does she want to live in, in, in Austin? And does she vote for Democrats or something like that? And you say, okay, I guess I'll go on a date with her. Right. And she'll be like, is he over six foot three? Does he have a good lustrous head of hair in In your case, boy, is that ever true. And the truth is that this stuff is incidental. When I first met my wife, she didn't speak a word of English. And I didn't speak a word of Spanish. And I was talking to her and I could smell her.

54:24Arthur Brooks:And I thought to myself, I don't know why, but she smells like a cantaloupe in August. I really, really like that. Now, what's happening is the right side of my brain, in concert with the olfactory bulb in my brain, was saying something about her major histocompatibility complex, which is telling me something about the dissimilarity of our immune systems. And that was telling me something like attraction, attraction, attraction, because if you have babies, they're going to have really good immune systems because you're really different than each other. Thank God for all that, man. But you're not going to get that on hinge.

54:55I can't wait to – I would love to hear what your wedding vows were like. Let me talk about the immune system mismatch. I love it. All right. So we're basically out of time here. So let's just try to bring it down to – all right. So I want to be concrete. It's impossible to be too concrete. But there's a listener of mine. They're agreeing with all of this. Like I want to add the meaning to the equation. This is what I'm missing. This brings a lot of pieces together. But I want to get concrete. Like what am I doing in the next few weeks or in the next few months just to sort of start moving in the right direction towards meaning while I'm waiting for my copy of Arthur's book.

55:30Arthur Brooks:Yeah. Book. Number one. Yeah, got it. That's great. Thank you. Number one, get clean. Number one is actually start to do some things to rebel against the machine that's actually putting you into the doom loop. Number one is people should be really angry that they're actually stuck in this thing. And I talk about the fact that in all addictive processes, the number one instigator of actually recovery is getting just pissed off. That's what it comes down to. You don't talk to anybody who's a former really bad alcoholic. They'll say, I got so mad about what I was doing to myself and what I was doing to the family.

56:05Arthur Brooks:And I was just like, no, I'm not going to do this anymore. You read Dostoevsky's The Gambler, which he wrote, by the way, because he was so out of money that he actually had to wager everything he had to get a novel written in one month so that he had enough money to pay off his gambling debts. And he wrote it about a gambler. And the whole thing is just like, he's like, basically, you know, to hell with it all is what he said. At the end of the day, the second thing is you basically have to understand how your brain is getting hooked onto these machines and actually how it works. And again, I'm not anti-tech.

56:39Arthur Brooks:I'm not anti-phone. I'm not anti-social media. I've got all of it. And so do you. You have to understand how you need to learn to manage your devices so they don't manage you. And I've got a bunch of protocols in this book to actually do that. But it starts with your methods for device-free times. And you're cited in this book. and that's like first hour of the day during meals, last hour of the day and the gold standards is your phone foyer method by the way where actually when you're home you're actually doing this then the last part is actually working to get bored on purpose and so I recommend that people actually work out without headphones that people go for walks for an hour in the morning called the Brahma Mahurta in Vedic wisdom without devices that they drive in silence, a whole bunch of actual intervention to do that.

57:26Arthur Brooks:So that's number one is getting clean. Number two, before the book shows up, because by the time the book shows up, there's a whole bunch of cool stuff to actually do, but everybody can do this. It's actually getting into what the Greeks called the state of aporia, which is the state of puzzlement by actually thinking about big questions that don't have answers and talking about it with other people. Here's two. Why am I alive? Here's another. For what would I give my life? You know, that's when you were in college. That's what you were talking about at 11 30 p.m. after the party when you met your wife now what are people doing at 11 30 p.m.

58:01Arthur Brooks:after the party zit zit zit zit sending themselves right over to the left side of the brain this is what every major religious tradition has in common if you're trying to become a zen buddhist monk you're going to learn koans what's the sound of one hand clapping the big questions the deep questions the questions that matter most in life that is pure therapy for the right hemisphere of the brain. You're not going to find the answers to the questions, and that's not the point. What you're going to find is that you put yourself into a position where meaning starts to find you. All right. Well, I'm on board with all this, Arthur.

58:35I think the right brain versus left brain, the equations, why meaning is lacking. All this stuff resonates with me. A lot of insights in this book that I hadn't had before, but helped explain things I'd noticed, which to me is usually the mark of a good theoretical framework. So to my audience, the book is called the meaning of your life. Yeah. You need to go order it. It's going to definitely help you with all the things we talk about here on the show. And Arthur, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. We'll have to have you back on again soon. But thanks for joining us.

59:03Arthur Brooks:I love it. Thank you, Cal. Thank you for your work. It's really helped my life a lot and a lot of other millions of other people, too. I appreciate it. Right on. All right. So there we go, Jesse. That was my discussion with Arthur Brooks. It's interesting how ideas seem to travel in packs. So for the years I was working on my new book about the deep life, which is coming out next year, it really felt like it was sort of out of left field and I was the only one thinking about this. And now all at once, there's lots of books about the same general idea. Arthur Brooks is one of these books. Jim Collins, they just sent me a new copy of his book that's coming out that's also about trying to find more meaning in your life.

59:43So I think it's just in the air right now that we're in a mode where people are ready to say, let's stop just talking about the problems and start also talking about the solutions. Now, all of our books do something different, so they'll all complement each other. But I'm kind of happy to see that we're entering a moment in this year of questioning how do we cultivate a life of purpose as opposed to being so unique, like focused very myopically on just individual issues that we might want to solve. I guess we call this like the meaning renaissance. I don't know.

1:00:14Arthur Brooks:Yeah. Did you end up writing your conclusion yet? No. What I'm doing, I haven't written the conclusion yet because I want to see, I'm in the first round of edits for my book, The Deep Life. And what I've been struggling on all week, honestly, is more of my personal story and the introduction, my editor wants, and I'm pretty uncomfortable writing about myself. But there are some pretty deep motivations from like my 20s where I developed a lot of the ideas like lifestyle centric planning that then play a big role in my theory of the deep life involving some stuff I went through back then. So I'm trying to write about it.

1:00:48God is going slow. I could write 3000 word, you know, New Yorker essay easier than I could write this sort of 1500 words about like my own story.

1:00:58Arthur Brooks:But it was also like completely unanticipated, right? Like you didn't expect it to do that when the editor came back with those comments. No, I mean, I know she was right. I was just hoping she wouldn't notice. okay yeah i was like do i really have to talk but she's right like when you're talking about something like cultivating a deep life it is as personal as it is technical so it is right but man it's really slowing me down but i'm almost there i'm gonna try to finish it this afternoon actually after we record and then move on to like more normal editing that i'm comfortable with which is about shortening stories adding stories clarifying things cutting things don't need to be there's my happy zone i love cutting and simplifying but man it doesn't help that i'm lying a lot so like in my story it's a lot of me in war zones i basically just like took a lot from a mix of like sebastian junger's books about being embedded in afghanistan and uh the navy seal richard marsinko's autobiography of starting seal team six so i kind of mix a lot of that into there i guess it maybe it maybe readers will notice there's a lot of a lot of me doing halo jumps high altitude low opening parachute jumps into terrorist camps but you know i want to keep it keep it real keep it real that's what i say that's what we do here all right speaking of keeping it real you've heard from me and arthur and now it's time to hear what you have to say jesse it's time to open our inbox just as a reminder if you want to ask a question or share a case story or maybe just attempt to prod me into a ranch, send a note to podcast at calnewport.com.

1:02:31I think we now have three different people who read that inbox. So it's your best chance of actually getting your information in front of me and on the show. All right, Jesse, what's the first message we're going to cover today? All right. First message, Adam recommended an article for you to read. All right. So what do we got here? This is from Adam Scott. You think this is the actor, Adam Scott, from Severance and Parks and Recreation? Yes. Let's just assume yes. look, this is his words, not mine. Emmy-nominated actor Adam Scott essentially sees me as one of his biggest inspirations. I think we can just assume that's true.

1:03:07All right, what did Adam Scott have to say? He said, here's an article that will be, quote, right up Cal's alley. All right, so let's load up this article I'll put up here on the screen that Adam Scott sent me. It's from Gizmodo. Here's the title. Tech employees are reportedly being evaluated by how fast they burn through LLM tokens. Is that terminology known, do you think, Jesse? Like if you hear me say LLM tokens, you know what that means? I'm not sure if my audience does. Can you define it? So this is what you actually, how you're actually charged for using something like a language model. So when you use a large language model, you give it text as input and the output is a single token, which is either a word or a part of a word, right?

1:03:51So what the language model thinks it's doing is it thinks the input is from a real piece of text that already exists and that it is trying to correctly guess what word or part of the word comes next. So how do you get a whole long response out of it? Well, you have a computer program like a chatbot, for example, would have a computer program that continually calls the LLM again and again. So you give it a prompt. It gives it as input to the LLM. It gets out one token. It adds that token to the end of your prompt. Now you have a slightly longer input. It feeds that into the LLM, gets another prompt.

1:04:23token, adds that to the end of your input, feeds that back in. So you're growing out a response, one word or part of a word at a time. This is called auto regression, where you keep feeding back your output back into the input to try to grow the final output. And at some point, the LLN will output a special token that says that's the end of my answer, at which point then you return that to the user if you're in like a chatbot scenario. So every time you produce a token, your input has to go through all of the layers of the LLM and all of the hundreds of billions of parameters have to be involved in multiplications.

1:04:59So that's the measure of how much computation is necessary for a particular response is how many tokens had to be generated. So it's the same thing as saying, how many times do we have to call the LLM? All right. So when it says tech employers are being evaluated by how fast they burn through LLM tokens, it means how much they're using language models. So let me read from this article. This article is actually, it's quoting a Kevin Roos column from the New York Times. So really we should be reading Kevin's, but this is what they sent me. So I'll read what's actually in the Gizmodo article. All right, so it says, and I'm quoting here, according to a column by the New York Times, Kevin Roos, employees at companies, including Meta and OpenAI, compete on, quote, internal leaderboards that show how many tokens each worker consumes, end quote.

1:05:44At Meta in particular and also Shopify, Roos says volume of AI used has become a metric that goes into people's evaluations with managers, quote, rewarding workers who make heavy use of AI tools and chastening those who do not. The resulting numbers in terms of both tokens and money are absolutely staggering. One open eye engineer, according to Roos, burned through 210 billion tokens, which Roos equates to 33 Wikipedias. A Swedish software engineer claims to Roost that his company spends more than his salary on Claude Code tokens alone. And then because I guess we have to Gen Z everything, he calls this token maxing.

1:06:25So there we go. What do I feel about this? Well, I think this is just pseudo-productivity laid bare. It's a big idea we talked about in last week's episode, which is why Emmy-nominated actor Adam Scott sent me this article this week. is this idea that in knowledge work in general, we tend to use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. The busier you are, the more stuff you're doing, the more productive we think you are. This is why we send tons of emails and jump in tons of meetings, even if that's not actually producing more of whatever it is that makes money for our institution. Well, this is that made even more quantitative.

1:07:00I don't care what you're doing. I don't care if it's producing better software. I don't care if it's shipping more things that matter faster. I just want to see that you're making lots of hits on the LLM because that means you're doing lots of things. So it's pseudo-productivity laid bare. But pseudo-productivity is often a trap because there's lots of stuff you can do faster or more phonetically that doesn't move the bottom line. So what was my suggestion last week? My suggestion last week is have a better scoreboard. Measure the things that directly produce value. That's what you should care about.

1:07:30How many meaningful features were shipped to our software clients, for example? Maybe that's what we care about. Now, if that requires a lot of LLM use or not, if you use a lot of tokens or maybe use few tokens because you have very, very careful, well-constrained prompts. And that actually makes you more effective than the guy that's just shooting left and right prompts, left and right, and getting clogged in all sorts of weird loops, right? Focus on the scoreboard that matters, not whatever is more proximate and whatever is easier. So I think this is a great example of the digital productivity tool traps we fall into.

1:08:06Be very wary of looking at zoomed in speed of things and be much more interested in the big picture actual production of value because what leads there is not always – doesn't always seem as busy or frenetic or fast-paced as you might assume. So I do appreciate that article. All right, Jesse, what other message do we have? All right, next message. We have a note from an anonymous student who has a question about digital books. Let's see if we can find this. All right, here we go. All right, so here's the note. It reads, I'm a 22-year-old software engineering student. I've recently been trying to apply your ideas on digital minimalism, but I have a question about reading digital books.

1:08:47Recently, I started quote-unquote reading PDFs using a combination of visual reading and text-to-speech, which I listen to while following the text. This helps me stay focused and feel like I absorb more. Here's my question. For developing deep focus, cognitive improvements, and strong critical thinking, is this combined method as effective as traditional reading, or does it reduce the long-term cognitive benefits of reading? All right, so I think in this context, yes, it is reducing the long-term cognitive benefits of reading. What I think is happening here is that you are trying to reduce the cognitive strain involved in consuming the written word.

1:09:25So by having your audio system going, you're taking the strain off of just my mind has to just purely decode these symbols and create meaningful representations in my brain, you're sort of short-circuiting that. The audio allows you to sort of take your foot off the cognitive gas pedal and just listen for a while and then read for a while, then listen for a while. It is a lot less cognitively demanding way to consume words. But if your interest is in using books to help develop your brain, your ability to contemplate, which I define to mean your ability to actually control and aim your mind's eye at particular targets towards useful outcomes, if that is your goal, then you want the strain.

1:10:03What you're doing would be the physical analogy of saying, hey, good news. My Navy SEAL training was really hard. I hate the pull-ups they make us do, but I figured out how to use a pulley system. And if I put some counterweights on the pulley system, these pull-ups are much easier for me to do. I just feel like I can do them easier. Well, it defeats the purpose of the pull-ups. You want to strain your muscles so they get stronger so that when you're in deployment, you can actually carry that rucksack for the long hike or whatever the analogy here is. So no, you want to confront the actual symbols printed on a piece of paper.

1:10:36And I want you to change your mindset, that strain you feel. Think about it like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron, loving the strain he feels in his bicep when he's lifting. He's like, yeah, that means I'm getting stronger. So I would much rather you do shorter reading sessions at full intensity than longer reading sessions where you're trying to reduce the intensity because you're not actually getting the cognitive benefits of increased contemplation ability, which it sounds like you're actually trying to get. So that would be my recommendation. There is a magic to decoding printed symbols with no other types of input that creates deep reading processes, strengthens those deep reading processes, builds cognitive patience with focus, and allows you to then reverse those circuits when the time comes when you're thinking or writing to produce much more original thoughts on your own.

1:11:23So stick with the real books. Read less, but keep the reading you do at a higher level of intensity. He also asked about audiobooks. I think audiobooks are a fine way to absorb information, right? I think it's, you know, hey, I listened to this book on audio, especially like a nonfiction book where either it's just entertainment or you want to get some ideas out of it. But if what you're looking to do is increase your cognitive capacity, you really want to read physical books for that purpose, right? So audiobooks are fine. But don't think of audiobooks as your primary way of building the strongest possible cognitive results.

1:12:01It's just less strain is involved. So I'm all for audiobooks. Like half my book sales now are audiobooks, but it shouldn't be the only thing you're doing if you're trying to train your brain. Half your book sales are audiobooks. Isn't that crazy? Wow. I never knew that. When I first got in the game, it was like none. and then when like audible became a thing and amazon made it easier it was uh like a quarter i think i went back and looked this up for digital minimalism which came out in 2019 if you're looking at those first year sales it's like a quarter of the sales now if you look at like slow productivity it's 50 wow yeah incredible so partially that's a shift in book consumption habits and partially it's a reality of the fact that we have a podcast and i do a lot of podcasts and a lot of people encounter me through an audio format.

1:12:47So that also bumps it up. Like I've noticed, like if you look for sales spikes based on particular publicity-related events, if it's a podcast-related event, you get an audiobook spike. And if it's a print-related event, it's more hardcovers. It's like more evenly balanced. So like when I went on like Andrew Huberman's podcast on launch day for slow productivity that was an audiobook spike right in fact my slow productivity was on the amazon charts for multiple weeks the top 20 most read or most bought books of the week but it was the audio version because like really i was on a lot of big podcasts but if i get something like uh you know like a big article in the new york times or something then you're going to get many more hardcover so it kind of depends on the audience but a lot of our audience now finds me through this podcast so they do a lot more audiobooks the bad news is that means i have to record my own audiobooks and it's a terrible process it's terrible you explained it on a prior podcast i know i'm not looking forward to it with the new book but c 'est la vie all right uh we're getting a little shorter today since we had a very long interview but i like to end each show by briefly checking in with what i've been up to recently let's start with reading i'm working on my fifth book of march we're recording this uh on march 24th so i wrote the read the first four books my fifth book is mentioned as this brandon sanderson book misborn that my my middle son uh has insisted that i read jesse i'm about 400 pages into this book which for a brandon sanderson title means like i'm basically finishing up the prologue like i'm just getting started these are these are long books um i'm enjoying it though you know the i hadn't read him before I'd read I don't read a ton of fantasy I read some Game of Thrones I read some Patrick Rufus I hadn't read this before I had read a snarky profile in Wired there's this like famous mean profile of Brandon Sanderson from Wired magazine and I had read that and it was like really down on his writing it was like oh it's like super expositional and he is explaining redundantly how characters were feeling and I was like oh maybe this is going to be clunky writing like he just writes these things fast but I don't think so at all I think it's a very well-paced adventure-style book against the backdrop of a complicated world-building magic system.

1:15:05I was like, this is like very well executed. I mean it's not Ursula Le Guin, but it's also not like I was expecting after that Wired article. I read a lot of thrillers. I read a lot of adventure writing. Like this is like well-crafted, especially for a 600-700-page book that keeps the momentum going, great world-building. so I am impressed I was more impressed by Brandon Sanderson than that snarky article led me to believe let's check in on the HQ I got a bunch of stuff Jesse I'm about to bring over here our foyer is full we got a video game cabinet in there we got my$500 light is in there we got a new giant rug so we're going to rug the whole floor in there so it's going to be not so live and echoey or whatever I got a lot of stuff.

1:15:52I got the vintage video game maintenance manual from 1980 for the Galaxian arcade cabinet because I'm taking out some of the circuit diagrams to frame to put up in there. So like it's I need this done by May because that's when my semester ends and my sabbatical begins. And how long is your sabbatical go for? It'll be the whole next academic year. So I need because I'm going to be spending a lot of time in there working. And so I need that to all get done by May. Here's the open question I have, and I'll get the advice of the listeners, is I'm putting picture ledges staggered on the wall in front of where the computers are where I write and Jesse does video editing.

1:16:33I want to put books on them that are going to be like a source of inspiration. But I will take suggestions about what type of books to put there. My current thought has long been, but let me test this with the audience. I want to put first edition techno thrillers up on that wall because, A, I associate that with my childhood reading in the 1990s, which was like a lot of creative energy and inspiration to start of like my intellectual life. And two, I think of techno thrillers. I think of this idea that writing and thinking about technology can be – it can be interesting or fun or emotive or like really be something that catches people's attention.

1:17:14And I like that. You know, I don't want to put just like books in the mainstream of what I write about, like tech criticism up there or something like that. I want it to be a little bit more oblique. So that's my current idea, Jesse. But I'm open. I'm open to other suggestions that people have it. But I want a sort of inspiring wall of books with the spotlight for my$500 light shining right on them when I'm sitting there writing. So that's my current thought. How many books do you think? 10? 5? Yeah, I think 10 maybe. Yeah, I think 10. I'm not doing first printings, but that's too expensive. But first editions.

1:17:43that's what I'm thinking first edition hardcovers we'll get them up there they're red acrylic picture ledges all this stuff can be such a pain to hang but I'm having someone come to do it just hang everything all at once because it's all I hate doing that type of thing alright send your advice to podcast at calnewport.com or if you're the Michael Crichton estate I will lovingly put up your first editions you send me they will be well displayed they will find a good home All right, that's all the time we have for today. On Thursday, we have an AI reality check episode coming up, and then next Monday, we'll have another main episode.

1:18:21So until then, as always, stay deep.