A New Crisis Has Begun, & We're Running Out of Time | Arthur Brooks

21:31Arthur Brooks:And that's what we've done. And so we desperately actually have to get it back. And so what I spend all my time doing is teaching young people and not so young people, by the way, the ways to live that used to be ordinary that no longer are, because that turns out to be the solution. So how do you figure out for someone that doesn't remember the before time? Now some of those people are becoming parents. Now they're going to start having kids and they're going to go to restaurants and do what everyone does at restaurants, which is hand the kid an iPad or a phone just because they want a moment's peace.

22:04So what do you do? What do you do if you've done? Okay. So there's that version of it, right? Where they don't even remember the before time, but what do you do for the people that do remember the before time that just they've, they're living right. They take their kids out to dinner and they just want a little of that peace. And you see them do it. We haven't, we haven't gotten that far yet. Like we will sit there at the table and let them pour the salt all over the place and really piss off that waitress. But, but I, but sometimes people want more peace. And, and so that seems to be something you have to grapple with or

22:32Arthur Brooks:contend with. And so those times are actually not the punctuation to the equilibrium of life. No big deal. The real problem is what you're doing at dinner and home. That's the real problem. And the number one predictor that your kids are going to get screwed up by devices is if you're looking at your device during dinner is what it comes down to. So I talk to parents all the time. I talk to people who are like you who have young kids. And the whole point is I put together protocols on device use that people can enforce inside their home life that can fundamentally change the culture inside. So for example, just with a few little alterations, you can break the grip.

23:11Arthur Brooks:You can you can get clean effectively so that you can start living in a different way. And I use this language of addiction on purpose. You know, if you go to, if you drink it too much and you go into rehab or you get into recovery, the first thing they're going to have to do is break the grip of the physical addiction on you. And then you actually have to live differently with new friends and with an eye to the divine and, you know, have to live in a new way that's different. So when we talk about breaking the grip of the devices, there's device protocols that are in this book. There's a whole chapter on how to get clean.

23:42Arthur Brooks:And basically, it comes down to three easy things. Number one is the first hour of the day, no devices. First hour of the day. That's super hard for people because they use it as their alarm. They wake up in the middle of the night, they check it, which is unbelievably bad for your sleep, but it's also bad for your cognitive wiring for the day. You neurocognitively set your day in the first hour that you're awake. And that means you do something in the first hour of the day that's actually healthy, like praying and or exercising and not using your device. And after, it only takes three weeks before that grip is broken.

24:17Arthur Brooks:The second is mealtimes. And part of the reason is because we get a maximum amount of this neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin that links us to our loved ones. You know, when you look at your kids in the eyes and it's like the 4th of July, if you're at dinner and the phone is on the table facing down, that actually, your attention to that because you'll think, I wonder if somebody texted that will actually cut your own oxytocin flow that will make you less receptive to that love molecule for your children. And the third is the last hour before bed, partly because you want to maintain a healthy sleep architecture and a healthy functioning pineal gland for your natural melatonin.

24:55Arthur Brooks:But part of it is just because, I don't know about you, man, but the last hour of the day is when you link up with your spouse, right? I mean, you get maximum amount of oxytocin when you stare your spouse in the eyes before you go to sleep. You'll sleep better. You'll feel better. Just those three things. And life can be fundamentally different. What about how we are hit endlessly with 20 different versions of this? Meaning I see a lot of you on my Instagram, as I said. So because I'm sort of, you know, I'm sort of mostly in the politics world, but now it's sort of the wellness and spiritual world are kind of adjacent to that, obviously.

25:30And I'm interested in that. But once you click down that, you end up with 500 conflicting people saying all of these different things. And then people just end up in that rabbit hole of trying to fix themselves all day long instead of actually doing it.

25:44Arthur Brooks:Yeah, yeah. So that's a big problem that actually people have with the protocols lifestyle. You know, it's like I want to be – I want to do the 10 % as opposed to the 90%. You know, live, make the main thing. The main thing is what it comes down to. That's an ancient Stephen Covey idea. Pay attention and live the things that are actually most important and then get into the marginalia once you've mastered the 90 % is what it comes down to. A lot of people get really stuck on this. So they want to know, you know, the nine supplements that I need to take. But they're not actually eating a protein-rich diet and going to the gym for Pete's sake and trying to get seven hours of sleep.

26:19Arthur Brooks:I mean, it's just they're not doing the big, big, big things. And so that's what I talk about a lot with people. I say, you know, I'm going to give you the details on this. But most of the time, I'm going to be talking to you about doing the big things. Are you doing the big things? And the people that I work with, you know, I don't have clients. I have friends. And, you know, the people who are calling me up saying, ah, what do I do? I say, let's go over the big things. Let's go over the big things again. And what are they usually missing? I mean, okay, so seven hours sleep, most people can basically get that.

26:48I, you know, most people probably should work out more, but probably do a little something. I mean, what is this? Is the whole the spiritual one? Is that usually the one that's the biggest?

26:57Arthur Brooks:Well, that's the main question for finding the meaning of life, actually, is doing this science-oriented but common sense. I mean, your grandma wouldn't say, you know, great-grandma Ruben wouldn't be like, ah, it's nonsense, you know, like so much of science, like so much of behavior. Hey, great-grandma, you know, I read an article that says that polyamory is good for your marriage. And she's going to be like, Polly, what? Right, right. But this is real stuff. And so it's basically six things. Number one is deep conversation about things you can't Google. In other words, it's the, you know, I can't remember.

27:34Arthur Brooks:Where did you go to college, Dave? I went to Binghamton University. Oh, nice. I remember you told me that, which is one of the great, the four big, the four great Sunnis, actually. That's a terrific. Do they still have any great ones? It's a little hard to tell what's going on in New York, but that's a different topic. No, I get it. I mean, New York is a problem, but those are still really good schools. They're still really good schools. And, you know, at 1130 at night before you were stuck to your device and you'd come home from a party with your friends and you'd have like these deep pretentious conversations that were activating the right hemisphere of your brain.

28:04Arthur Brooks:And that's actually a huge part. The ancient Greeks called that aporia. There was literally a technique that was promoted by Socrates to understand the meaning of your life was to sit in a state of puzzlement. That's why the Zen Buddhists have koans. They train their junior monks to become enlightened by puzzling over questions that don't have answers. So that's number one, is you got to stand in awe and puzzlement. Number two is falling in love with a real person. This is not OnlyFans. This is not, you know, this is not, you know, the AI girlfriend experience. This is the real deal is what it comes down to.

28:42Arthur Brooks:And that means putting your heart at risk and getting your heart broken and learning again, just like you and I did it the old fashioned way. Right. Number three is actually looking for your faith is spirituality and faith. And so, you know, this is one of the things that I'm actually finding. I mean, you and I come out of the world of public policy and politics. I mean, this is like I was running AEI. Right. And, but we're, we all wind up asking the big questions at the end of the day is what it comes down to. And this answer is because we want to stand in awe of something and standing in awe.

29:13Arthur Brooks:This is called transcendence. You transcend through your spiritual life or the way that you serve other people. And that takes you out of the me self. And then you can, you can actually observe the world. That's number three. Number four is looking for a calling in your work. That's meaningful because you serve other people. That's what it comes down to, which I know you do, but not everybody can actually find that so i talk in the book about all the ways to actually make your work into a calling even if you hate your job how to make your work into a calling the fifth meaning it meaning because it can provide for all of the other things correct so if your work is not that meaningful in some sense it's like well as long as it's serving some of those other goals then you're yeah and you're serving other people and so i talk about the different ways that people who hate their jobs can can actually find great satisfaction by, through their jobs, serving their colleagues, for example, which is this huge thing.

30:02Arthur Brooks:I mean, I was doing Drew Barrymore's show a couple of months ago, and this guy in the audience, because that was, you know, audience questions, which are fun and awesome. He's like, I'm a drone, man. I do data entry, and I'm in a cubicle, and I hate it. And what do I do to find meaning? And I said, well, at 2 o 'clock in the afternoon, go into the break room, make a fresh cup of coffee, bring one to the guy in the next cube and say, dude, you look like you could use a fresh cup of coffee. and look at the look on his face. And you're like, you looked at your job better that day because service is everything.

30:32Arthur Brooks:But the last two are beauty. And there's three kinds of beauty that really illuminate the right hemisphere of the brain. Artistic beauty, natural beauty, and moral beauty. Those are the three types of beauty that really matter because they just change your brain. And the machine culture is not beautiful. It's just not beautiful. I mean, it's like looking at nature through a screen. I'm sorry. You know, and being on vacation at, you know, Sequoia National Forest and just looking into your phone to take pictures of it, you've destroyed the natural beauty of it. Moral beauty is even more important where you actually witness acts of selfless people.

31:10Arthur Brooks:It's one of the reasons that everybody loves the life of Mother Teresa because it's tremendously inspiring. And last but not least, and this is the hard one, is suffering. When you're suffering, your right brain is lit up like a Christmas tree. That's the reason that everybody will say, I learned the meaning of my life in the worst hour of my life. You know, so we're taping this a little bit before we're posting it. And this Iran war is happening right now. And maybe it'll be wrapped up by the time we post this or not. But I just, I'm going to text it to you right after this. I just saw a video of an American fighter pilot who had to eject out of his plane.

31:49He lands in Kuwait. Did you see this? And the Kuwaitis, these guys are running at him with the phone. Can we help you? Can we help you? Are you okay? What do you need? You know, we love America. And it's, and the guy's obviously shell shocking. And it's like the most unimaginably beautiful thing you could possibly ever see. And it's a guy standing in the desert.

32:07Arthur Brooks:I know. When you witness moral beauty, it's like you're friends with Rainn Wilson, right? Are you friends with Rainn? We've tweeted a couple of times over the years. And I like the office. We're really great friends, Rainn Wilson and I. And his uncle is a very famous psychologist named Rhett Diesner. And Rhett Diesner, who's also Baha 'i, just like Rainn Wilson is a member of that, writes about moral beauty. And so I cite his stuff all the time, and he talks about this sense of moral elevation and the physiological nature of how it works. And when you actually witness somebody doing something morally beautiful, it uplifts you for a particular reason.

32:46Arthur Brooks:And that's just like when you see a work, you know, when you hear a song, you don't know why it chokes you up. anything by the way that makes you emotional and you don't know why it's because your right hemisphere is working that's actually how you know when something actually makes you like when you think you know something anything about your kids that actually isn't tragic and you start like you're going to cry you know that feeling or or or something about religion that reminds you of something or a train whistle from when you were a little boy that's because your right brain is working and that's these are the moments that we actually need to induce in our lives you know i'll tell you one thing that is definitely, you know, my kids are three and a half.

33:23And one thing that I've definitely noticed is when I, there are certain moments that I'm doing something with them and I'm thinking it will never get better than this. Like this is as good as it gets. We, we almost nightly now we have, uh, this Frankie Valley. They love the song soul. It's a disco album he did in 1979 and we do a soul dance party and they run around like crazy people. And quite literally last week, um, I I've met Frankie a couple of times and I showed him a video of the kids dancing to Solon. I got him to say hi. And then I showed it to them saying, this is Frankie Valli, 91 year old Frankie Valli saying hi to you.

33:56And the way, you know, they're just looking at an old man standing with me saying hello, but the way their eyes just burst. And now they keep asking me to see that video. And it's like, that, how could anything be better than that?

34:08Arthur Brooks:You know? I know. I know. And you know, the truth is when you're living in the simulation, there aren't those moments. I mean, somebody could say, well, that's a video, Dave. It's a it? No, no, no. It's you in person showing them the video. Life is in the moment. It's a funny thing. The human brain, the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which gives us this incredible time travel ability to prospection, which means living in the future, thinking about the future, thinking about how people will see you, or living in the past, which is retrospection. That's fine. That's what makes our species so unbelievably successful.

34:45Arthur Brooks:But the moments right now when you're with the kids listening to that song, it really proves the point that you can only live, you can only love in the present. Love only exists in the present. Love doesn't exist in the future. Love doesn't exist in the past. It's right now. And if you're in the, in the matrix, if you're in the simulation, in the left side of your brain all day long, the thing that's really missing is love. Do you have to work to do it sometimes? So you're obviously not going to be around your kids or your wife all the time or in every situation, every meeting you're in or this or that, you're not always going to be around love.

35:21So what do you do to stay locked into that state as much as possible?

35:26Arthur Brooks:Yeah, it's hard. Or have you just trained yourself into it at this point? I wish. I wish. I mean, I've trained myself into a lot. And part of the reason is because happiness in general is really hard for me, which is why I study it. You know, I have gloomy parents. Half of your happiness is genetic. You know, I got gloomy parents who died young, and it was tough. It was very sad a lot of the time, a lot of health problems. And, you know, the truth is that it was hard for me. And so the result is I have to have really, really strong discipline. You know, I do have very high negative affect, which is just another academic way of saying, you know, strong negative emotion.

36:02Arthur Brooks:And by the way, there's nothing unusual about that. It's not like I'm depressed or, you know, something clinically wrong. but the truth is that I have to pay attention to these things. I have to take my own advice. And so I've really altered my life in a lot of ways. I start every morning by going to mass because I want to stand in awe, in transcendence. I finish every night by praying and I'm on the road about 48 weeks a year, you know, because of what I'm doing for a living. But every night before I go to sleep, my wife and I, we pray together because prayer, by the way, is the most intimate thing you can do with your partner.

36:35Arthur Brooks:It's way more intimate than sex, is prayer, actually, because what are you doing? You're fusing the right hemispheres of your brain as an antenna of meaning to the divine. I mean, it's like no joke. I know couples that have been married 50 years, like super serious religious people. They've never prayed in front of each other because it's too embarrassing. They'll get naked, but they won't pray together. And the reason is because that's actually more intimate. So I'm taking care of that. The second thing is I've altered the way my life works. You know, I, I knew that I needed more love in my life.

37:06Arthur Brooks:And so I, you know, I, I went to my kids who are all like retro. They're, they're, they're more conservative than I am politically. Um, they live a more traditional lifestyle. I mean, two are, they got married at 22 and 23, the older ones, two of the three are military. As I mentioned before, they're all religious. And, and I said, okay, how do you want to live? And they said, we all want to live in the same place. And so we all moved to the same place and, and, and two of the families are, we're living in the same house, which is like 1940. I mean, my, I, two of my grandsons lived downstairs from me and, and that's the right thing to do if you possibly can.

37:44Arthur Brooks:I mean, that intergenerational living is a strong way to live, but that's entirely because I'm trying to eat my own cooking, Dave.

37:53What do you think that there are certain just date points, chronological points that can, can tighten some of this stuff for you. And by that, I mentioned you, I'm 49 and I know now, like when I was turning 40, I remember thinking, man, I'm going to be 40. Like I'm, I'm going to be old at 40. And now I look at 50 and I'm like, I can't wait to be 50. Something, you know, I, I take better care of myself now. I'm my career is solid. My relationship's great. My kids, like, so the stuff is there, but like, I look at 50 as like, yeah, this could be great. And maybe I could even be better at 60. Is that possible?

38:27And we'll see about 70. And then, and then I know, obviously you're going to get diminishing returns in most facets at 80, 90, whatever, but you know, science is also changing and AI and all the rest of it. But did you find that certain calendar points also can, can kind of turn things for people?

38:42Arthur Brooks:They can. And one of the biggest and most unwelcome surprises that people experience is that they think they're going to get happier through their 30s and 40s, and they don't. Most people actually get unhappier through their 30s and 40s. Not a lot. It's not catastrophic. But that's one of the things that David Blanchflower at Dartmouth, he's been doing work on this for years and years and years. And it's all over the world. It's this U-shaped thing. And then in your early 50s, for almost everybody who's not clinically depressed or addicted, almost everybody gets happier through their 50s and 60s.

39:14Arthur Brooks:Your 50s and 60s tend to be happier. Then the population breaks up into two groups. Half the population keeps going up in happiness and the other half of the population starts going back down again. And that's entirely based on seven habits. You want the seven habits? because you're 40 days. I'm guessing all of them ultimately end up being physically health related. So four of them are diet, exercise, smoking, and drinking. Okay. The obvious stuff, right? And, you know, obviously don't, and it would be like cannabis too. It'd be euphorics. It's basically use very sparingly or not at all. Don't smoke.

39:49Arthur Brooks:Don't eat like an 11 year old and get good exercise. Duh. Right. But the other three are number one, you need to have excellent technique unique at dealing with your problems. And that means you get good at something. Maybe it's journaling, you know, maybe it's religion, maybe it's therapy, maybe it's, you know, metacognition through Vipassana meditation, whatever. The next is learning. The happiest people after 70 are those who are in the habit of learning, learning, learning, learning, learning, which by the way, for you and me is what we do for a living. I mean, you're a super strength. The reason you're so good at what you do, besides the fact that you're a hard worker and highly intelligent is that you're curious.

40:25Arthur Brooks:You're like one of the most curious people I've ever met. And that's a super strength because you're a learner. Last but not least is love, is your loving relationships. And there's two kinds that really correlate with people happy after 70. Number one is a strong and stable marriage. Number two is close personal friendships. And to be happy, you don't have to have both. It's great if you have both, but you have to have one. You can't be without either is what it comes down to. And so those are the seven ways to be out And it seems to me that you're killing it, man. I'm doing all right. You know, I'm really trying.

41:00Something about 50, just seeing it in the mirror. And when we talked last time, like, I'm in better shape than I've been in probably 25 years now. I'm playing basketball a couple times a week. I work out every single day. You know, I'm out in Florida where the weather's nice. The kids are, you know, I just got a bike yesterday, so we're taking the kids out now. Like, there's just enough. And then the work stuff. and it all, it just feels very full at the moment, knock on wood. So, so that's good.

41:25Arthur Brooks:And then the thing is also, as you get into your fifties, it's a really, really good opportunity to develop your spiritual practices. I mean, really, really developing your spiritual practices. And I can't remember where you are on that particular journey, but that's - I'm a believer. I mean, we're, we're, we're doing Shabbat now and, you know, we're, we're trying to incorporate a little more of that. And, you know, it's, for me, it's, it's more tradition than, than necessarily reciting certain things or that sort of thing. But, you know, we can pick this up in a couple months and discuss it again.

41:53Arthur Brooks:That's great. You know, so you're, maybe your fifties are Torah, Torah, Torah, Torah. I'm reading enough already, but it's a lot of reading. Let me ask you something for somebody that, okay, you're, you're going along, you've tried to do some of these things. You seemingly are just sort of stuck. You know, the other part that we haven't talked about is that we have a very over-medicated society. Where do you put some of these antidepressants and whatever when somebody is just, they've tried the stuff, it's not working. Is your answer short of like that they really have deep, you know, imbalances, chemical imbalances, that it's just a shortcut pretty much all the time?

42:32Arthur Brooks:Well, so I'm not against psychiatric drugs. I mean, that would be foolish. And psychiatric drugs literally saved my mother's life. And for a lot of people who have really grave, not just chemical imbalances, but just, you know, mood disorders that are beyond the pale, they can be truly life-saving. And, you know, Jordan Peterson has talked about this, how important it is too. And he's a completely credible witness on this because there's one thing that Jordan Peterson is incapable of doing is lying. He can't say something he doesn't believe to be true, which is, you know, he's suffered a great deal because of that.

43:05And preternatural

43:08Arthur Brooks:ability to, you know, tell the truth. So, so it's great for a lot of people. The trouble, a trouble with it is that we live in a culture that has an eliminationist philosophy toward pain. And this is an important thing. And, you know, I think I've told you before, I work a lot with the Dalai Lama over the past 12 years. And the Dalai Lama has this, and the Buddhists in general have this math where they say that suffering equals pain times resistance, resistance to pain, Pain and suffering are not the same thing. We talk about it in the same sentence. But you find people with great equanimity of real enlightenment who have incredible amounts of pain but low amounts of suffering.

43:44Arthur Brooks:And the reason is because of resistance. Now, the reason that we're getting this wrong for young people today who I believe – I'm not against medication, but it's not the first line of actually how we're going to understand our pain is because we have an eliminationist thing. If you go to campus counseling at most campuses, including mine, and you say, look, I'm feeling really sad and anxious. They're going to say, well, we got to fix that. Well, dude, if you're at Harvard and you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy. It's normal. I mean, it's like Newsflash, Arthur and Dave are also sad and anxious.

44:20Arthur Brooks:That's just life is what it comes down to. Now, again, it can be exaggerated. It can be dysregulated. I completely get that. But the truth is that they're an incredible opportunity to learn and grow if you understand they're not to be eliminated. The pain literature on physical pain, for example, it's very clear that if you have back pain, I got a lot of back pain because, you know, it's like I'm 61. Engineering, it's all messed up. And so the result is that I know perfectly that if I baby my back, I'm going to wind up with a lot more back pain. You know, do your life is what it comes down to.

44:52Arthur Brooks:And the same thing is true with most kinds of emotional pain, that they're there to teach you something you're supposed to learn. And understanding and practicing techniques of non-resistance, that's a better path. I think people can see clearly why I wanted to have you on so soon. We usually don't do two sit-downs within a couple months, but it was fairly obvious, well beyond the book. We're going to link to the book right down below. Any final thoughts on your day of happiness over here? Yeah, you know, thank you for doing this. It's really meaningful to me to talk to you. And part of the reason is because, you know, you've had this really, really interesting journey and evolution in your own career and life.

45:30Arthur Brooks:It's clear that you're living with a lot of meaning. And the meaning is actually coming from all of the things that we're talking about here. Happiness and meaning are a function of love and loving in real life. You're a testament to that. And I'm really grateful for your friendship. it wow well that that is a two-way street my friend will i see you at arc in london this year that's where we the where we met originally yeah that's right i'm gonna be there oh good all right wait i would say a drink on me but i feel like you don't drink at all now or maybe there's a steak on me how about steak how about steak drink but you know let's go have a steak together steak done thanks arthur

46:13Thank you.