Don't Be Fooled, This Isn't Normal. It's the Beginning of a New Crisis | Arthur Brooks

18:39Arthur Brooks:And now I actually see the dark place where the use of euphorics actually goes, especially if you have mental illness in your family. So the advice I give to a lot of young people, because that's the question I get after every talk. I'm on tour all the time, too. The big question is, what about hallucinogens? You know, professor, is this the short path? And the answer is, be very careful. I say, I'm not morally against that. Wait five years. Just wait five years until there's more evidence about – it's kind of like cold plunging in its way, right? I mean, the evidence is – the science is – I'm building one in the master bathroom right now.

19:12Arthur Brooks:I mean, the science is pretty settled about sauna, about heat therapy. It's great for your happiness. It's great for your health. Cold plunging, the science hasn't caught up yet. And so you don't know. I mean, how old are you? 49. Okay. I mean, if I had that hair, I could be president of the United States. And it's all I want, Gabe. I'm a simple man. PRP. You know, they spin your blood and they can jam it back in your head. It helps. Does it help? Well, I don't know that it can. You might be past the point. It doesn't do miracles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the whole, you know, with cold plunging, not to get off topic, but the whole point is that, you know, we don't really know the long-term effects of stimulating the HPA axis.

19:53Arthur Brooks:I mean, maybe extra cortisol, which makes you feel wonderful with the dopamine, et cetera, et cetera, it might age you. I just don't know. I'm not confident enough yet. And I'm even more scared of what hallucinogens would do to open up the right hemisphere of my brain. Some people have had miraculous effects, but there are non-trivial numbers of cases where it's been catastrophic.

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21:10Arthur Brooks:Don't let the IRS be the first act. What do you think of the amount of these types of conversations? Not this specifically, because we're kind of going broad with this, but that when everyone, especially young people, open up Instagram, every day it's you got to eat this way. You got to do the cold punch. You got to do the sauna. The thing you did last week is no good anymore. You got to take this. like there's some other version of the way the internet seems to be going now where the overload it's not just the overload of neurosis it's the overload of trying to get yourself right in a right way that i think is also having a strength yeah so what they want is to be right on the right but they're looking for it on the left they're looking for the protocols they're looking and look i've done right it's become a giant protocol yeah yeah and it's like i've done my six morning protocols.

21:59Arthur Brooks:I had a million and a half viewers on my six morning protocols. It's like, why does somebody want to know what a 61 year old college professor does? You know, what he eats for breakfast? Because it turns out people, they know I'm super healthy and I know the science. And so they want the edge. I get it. And that's good to have this information, but you're not going to find truth. You're not going to find beauty. You're not going to find love. You're not going to find mystery. You're not going to find meaning in what you really want by going farther and farther and farther and left. You don't get to the right by going further and further left, which actually has political connotations too, doesn't it?

22:30Yeah, there is some weird political way it makes sense. Probably not in a spiritual way. Yeah. Yeah.

22:35Arthur Brooks:Yeah, I mean, look, you and I know, I mean, you and I started out as sort of politically on the left. Yeah. And you go further and further to the left and you realize that you're not getting to where you need to go. And so you try something else. So I actually don't want to do much politics with you, but I'm curious, what do you make of how everything you've talked about here translates to our political sort of paralysis or obsession that we're all in right now? Unhappiness will be reflected in the political system. And we've been in a process of gradually declining happiness since about 1990 with periodic.

23:07Arthur Brooks:So there's a climate problem, which is gradual declines in faith and family and friendship and work as a calling. Those are the four big areas that lead to a climate crisis in happiness. Obviously, that's a metaphor, right? I got it. Then there's weather problems. You mean you don't want to do the climate crisis right now? Yeah, you know, I'm not a physicist. But then there's the weather problems and happiness, which are the down drafts, the microbursts, the things that have forced us down, we didn't come back up, which was the way the technology changed in 2007, 2008, 2009, which was the advent of the small screen in everybody's lives, which was catastrophic for the way that it was used, leading to the things we've talked about.

23:52Arthur Brooks:It was the crisis of polarization, which is we're basically in an environment where politics has been co-opted in the political parties by activists, where activism is taken over politics. And that happens very regularly, very periodically, but very regularly. It's like on a cycle, a 50-year cycle, where politics becomes an activist thing, where academia becomes an activist thing as opposed to an inquiry thing, right? And then last but not least was COVID, which was the catastrophe that was a reaction to COVID. I mean, there's some nice things. We're in Florida now instead of California. Yeah, exactly.

24:30Arthur Brooks:Exactly. In your case, right? Right. So how do you disconnect then that activist form of politics that we seem to be in that so many people are upset by? Right. I mean, that's one of the, you know, people, wherever I go, people want to talk politics with me. Right. And the way I do my show is kind of fun and light, and I try to make it, you know, anyone can analyze politics, so I want to do it in a light, fun way. So most of my audience responds that way. But then they'll always say to me, everything's making them crazy, or I need a break from politics or something. And yet it's dangling in front of them all the time.

25:02They can't stop.

25:02Arthur Brooks:It's the same thing where everybody hates what they're looking at on their phones, but they can't stop. And the reason is the same reason for those two things. It's like, you know, you never met somebody who's, you know, an alcoholic who says, you know, or a drug addict. He said, you know the secret of my happiest day? Meth. I mean, nobody's ever said that, right? It's like they do the thing even though they hate the thing. And the reason is because the cycle of wanting, learning, and craving, which has everything to do with dopamine, the neuromodulator dopamine, where you learn to scratch that little itch and you have a craving to scratch that little itch.

25:34Arthur Brooks:But you know your moral aspiration as a human being is to not have to scratch that itch. My animal impulse is to scratch the itch of politics, but my moral aspiration is to be above that itch. And so people are like, I hate it, but let's talk politics. Right. So it's like you basically know it, but you're sort of in the things, you're in the rat race so much that you can't even look up for it. Yeah, it's the same thing when you're trying to, were you ever a bad eater? Did you ever have bad eating habits? Not terrible, actually. I'm extremely good now, but never terrible. But for me, it was drinking.

26:06Arthur Brooks:It'd be like, I don't want to be a drinker, but today I'm going to drink. It's interesting. So I do drink. I actually have my own tequila sitting behind me over there, but I'm never an abusive drinker at all. And one of the things that I've realized over the last couple of years is I never drink when I'm unhappy. So, you know, in all the movies, when you see somebody, they're pissed off, some bad business deal, and they pour the whiskey and they sit there alone. I never do that. I never drink alone or I'm depressed. To me, it's whatever. You can say a social lubricant or whatever if I'm with people that I love.

26:38You know what I mean? Which I think is probably just has something to do with my wiring more than a conscious choice. Yeah, it means you're a healthy drinker.

26:44Arthur Brooks:I mean, so about 40 % of Americans don't drink at all. About 50 % of Americans drink 10 % of the alcohol. And about 10 % of the Americans drink 90 % of the alcohol. And so you can actually see that these are completely different phenomena. Drinking is not drinking is not drinking. Right. Right? I mean, it's like the difference between the 50, you're in the 50, not the 10. And the 10 % is actually drinking largely because of boredom and anxiety. They're self-administering something because of something they don't like. And you just told me, I don't drink when I'm unhappy, which means you're not self-medicating to actually get away from something you don't like.

27:17Arthur Brooks:On the contrary, you're augmenting an experience, you're having fun with friends, and you're perfectly fine when you don't. And that's the way it should be. If you can't do it that way, here's the test, by the way, for everybody watching us. because by the way, problem drinking is one of the biggest, one of the biggest predictors of winding up horribly as you get older. It's one of the big, big, big predictors. That's from the Harvard study of adult development, which has been tracking people over 85 years, problem drinking. And now it's really all problem use of euphoric substances, which are all in that more on the physical level or on the mental level or is it because you want to be in the quadrant of both happy and well.

27:56Arthur Brooks:And because there's a four, it's a four quadrant diagram of life. There's well and unwell physically, there's happy and unhappy. You want to be happy and well when you're 90. That's what you want in the, in the, what Peter Atiyah calls the marginal decade. In the marginal decade, you want to be happy and well. And one of the biggest predictors of not being in the happy well decade is misuse of euphorics. That's like that. People will often say when I'm unhappy and unwell, then I use euphorics. No, it's the opposite. If you want your marriage to melt down, misuse euphorics. That's the best way to do it.

28:27Arthur Brooks:And then you'll be alone, and then you'll get unhealthy, et cetera, et cetera. So the way to, one of the tests, because people are always like, I don't know. You kind of know. If you're kind of questioning, it's a big tell. If you can stop at two drinks, you don't have to. If you need to, if you can't stop at two drinks, you need to go to zero. That's what it comes down to. So you'll put it as sort of a bubble sort as a behavioral scientist to put it in order. You have three choices, zero drinks, two drinks, and six drinks. Put them in order of what you most want. Yeah. And for you, it's going to be on a fun nights too, most nights zero, never six.

29:10Yeah.

29:10Arthur Brooks:It's almost never six. Our Christmas party last year was a bit much. Once a year. Yeah. But for anybody who's going in the wrong direction, number one is six, number two is zero because number two is zero because two drinks is just enough to piss you off. That's probably right. What do you make of the age component to this? We've sort of talked about college students. You said you're 60? Is that what you said? 61. 61. Yeah. So you're 61. I'm 49. I have found that my 30s were better than my 20s. My 40s were absolutely better than my 30s. And I'm really looking forward to 50 now. I never thought 50 used to seem old to me.

29:46And now because I've taken care of myself and all those, then I'm happy in my career and life and family. Like I'm really looking forward to my 50s. Have you seen a sort of change as the decades have gone by?

29:57Arthur Brooks:I mean, not only with you, but are you seeing that largely? Yeah, there's a huge amount of research on this. And so most people think when they're in their late 20s that in their 30s and 40s they're going to be happier. Most people aren't. Most people are less happy in their 30s than they were in their 20s and less happier in their 40s than they were in their 30s. Now, there's a reason for it. And by the way, there's millions of data points on this from every part of the world. Most of the comparisons of happiness across the world are nonsense. Like we're all supposed to live like Swedes or something like that.

30:25Arthur Brooks:All that is is propaganda so that we'll live like Nordic social democrats. Right. That's all it is. They've got their own problems. For sure. And like, God bless them. I love, you know, my ancestors are from Norway and, you know, but they came here for a reason, Dave. Yeah. Which is that, you know, they wanted to start a farm and live an entrepreneurial life. They got killer saunas, though. They got, oh, the sauna goose. Yeah. And the sauna, then you go jump in the North Sea. I've done that. Oh, have you done it? Oh, it's great. It's great. But, you know, the funniest thing is because it's always like this, like, this Danish hippie.

30:55Arthur Brooks:Yeah. You know, and he's in the sun. It's like, feel the spirit of your ancestors. And it's like, oh, man. It's like my ancestors would be like, why are you doing this? It's like, go work in the fields. You'll feel much better. I've done that in Mexico for the last couple of years, once a year, like, you know, a sweat lodge kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Temescal, they say. And I've had some interesting experiences. Sure. I mean, you'll be able to change your consciousness doing this because any really strong things like this, you're affecting your biochemistry. Psychology is just biology in every case.

31:24Arthur Brooks:Anyway, so we're on the decades, right? Don't trust any studies that compare countries with happiness. But there's a lot of research that comes from David Blanchflower at Dartmouth, where he looks at pretty much every place in the world and finds there's this U-curve of happiness. Now, the way that it works is that most people think they're going to get happier through the 30s and 40s. They get unhappier, but we know why. It's not actually an unhappiness problem. It's a trade-off between the macronutrient components of happiness. Your enjoyment of life usually falls from your 20s to 30s and 30s to 40s, but your meaning rises.

32:02Arthur Brooks:Meaning is a long-term happiness play, and enjoyment is a short-term happiness play. Does it also depend on how people define enjoyment? I mean, if your enjoyment is just that I can go out every night or I can just do whatever I want all the time, obviously that's going to dip in your 30s and 40s. That's obviously going to dip, and that's real enjoyment for people. I mean, I'm enjoying my life when I can actually, you know, I have more freedom. You know, the kids are not yelling all the time, screaming all the time. You know, I don't have a marriage that has ordinary tensions and problems. I'm not trying to write a business, run a business.

32:34Arthur Brooks:I'm not paying a mortgage. You know, I'm not trying to build my career. I mean, that stuff isn't inherently enjoyable for most people, but it's incredibly meaningful. And so what happens is in your 50s, then meaning explodes because of all the things you did right or wrong. So in other words, you're meaning craters, and those are the people who just are completely miserable. Those are the people who die. You'll see the first round of your buddies from Binghamton are going to die in their 50s. Because what happened, they made a bunch of really bad decisions. They didn't know the difference between enjoyment and pleasure.

33:07Arthur Brooks:And they sought to hit the ventral tegmental area of their brain again and again and again and again. And they've been pursuing pleasure and they're unhappy and unwell in their 50s and have no meaning. And they just fade away. And you're going to see this is like, did you hear? Bobby died. And you're like, what? And that starts to happen because of this. You, on the other hand, what it means is that your meaning is going to explode, especially in your early 50s, all the way till 70. You know, if you don't have mood disorders that are untreated, if you don't have alcohol or drug abuse that's untreated, your life's going to get so much better in your 50s and 60s.

33:43Arthur Brooks:It's phenomenal is the way that this is going to work. Plus, the fact that you're kind of an outlier because you've been conscious of your life getting better in your 30s and 40s. Fantastic. Yeah, it's pretty good. Good times lie ahead for you. But for all the people watching us who are like, yeah, I don't know, man. I thought I was going to be way happier when I got the job and the raise and the promotion and the money and the marriage and the kids and the white picket fence. And I don't know. I don't really enjoy it that much. You're normal. It's good. Make the investments in the meaning of your life and better times are really, really coming.

34:13So, okay. So now you get to 70 and now the health, let's say, is starting to change a little bit. Yeah. And it's just the natural.

34:18Arthur Brooks:It's like a secret society at 60. You'll see. Yeah. You go to the doctor and you're like, doc. And he says, yeah, it's an engineering problem. The lumbar, the whole thing. It's like, nobody told me. He says, we all know. Yeah. Well, one of the things I'm very aware of is my audience hears me talk about this all the time, but I love basketball. I'm playing with this great group of guys that ranges basically from early 30s into mid-60s, even into late 60s. I'm 49, so I'm right in the middle. So, you know, even the guys in the 30s, they're not in the best shape of their lives anymore for the most part.

34:49But you got guys in their 60s who are still busting their ass.

34:52Arthur Brooks:Now we all have problems, this, that, you know, none of us are running like we're 20s, but, but, but it's very, I've realized it's very, very important to me. Also, my kids are three. So it's very important to me. Yeah. At 49. So it's very important to me to stay in good shape so that I'm a, because these guys bring their kids now sometimes and I'm playing against 20 year olds and I want to be able to do that with my own kids. So that part. Totally. It's super important. And you can kind of stop the clock. So going forward, just on the biology of how this works, I'm in much better shape at 61 than I was at 31.

35:24Arthur Brooks:Part of it because I was leading a different kind of lifestyle when I was 31 years old. I'm much happier and I'm in much better physical shape. My back hurts because I have a 35 degree scoliosis because I was holding a French horn for 22 years. Okay, I got it. But now I'm under 7 % body fat. I eat 200 grams of protein a day. I work out for an hour every day. I might mean, my health is on point. And the result of it is that I'm in really much better shape than I was before. And you can do that. You can fight sarcopenia. You can, you can fight weakness. You can do all kinds of stuff until you can't because sooner or later.

36:01Right. So then, so that's where I was going with the question. So now let's say you're, I mean, obviously you want to push this as far as you can, but somewhere, what would you say? somewhere by late 70s, mid 70s. Yeah, your results may differ

36:13Arthur Brooks:is kind of what it comes down to. Obviously different for everybody, but. Yeah, because of genetics and because of the things that you did early in life. It really matters how you live in your 40s and 50s to how you're going to be living in your 60s and 70s and 80s. I work a lot with Peter Tia, who's, you know, he's not my doctor, but, you know, we've done stuff on his show before and we share ideas a lot because I'm working on the, I have a physiological approach to human happiness, right? And he uses that stuff an awful lot because he wants overall medicine 3.0. What are the things that you can do, especially in your marginal decade, you're a lot better off.

36:47Arthur Brooks:And so I study a lot of this stuff, and it really matters the decisions that you're making. But it's never too late to actually start getting happier and getting healthier and doing a lot of the things right. And the great thing about the Internet is that you're not going to find meaning by all these protocols, but you're going to learn a lot. I mean, it's this information that was secret in the old days. It just isn't secret anymore. So let's say you basically are the avatar for kind of doing it right up to 61. Yeah. I hope until about 77, which is when a lot of people sort of lose a step. But that's, again, it really, really differs.

37:21I mean, most are losing a step before that. Yes.

37:23Arthur Brooks:Many are losing a step before that. Generally speaking, they weren't taking care of their brains. People who are, that's the key thing. They were not active mentally. So there's kind of seven things to be thinking about. Okay. It's diet, exercise, drinking, and smoking. Those are the four big physical things to be thinking about. Diet is making sure that your macronutrient profile is not insane. You're not eating like an 11-year-old is what it comes down to. Mostly in the United States is not getting too many highly glycemic carbohydrates and getting enough protein. And anybody who is not paying attention to the fact that you need to be eating a higher protein diet as you get older is just not paying attention.

37:59Arthur Brooks:Watch one podcast by Gabrielle Lyon or Peter Atiyah or Andrew Huberman or whatever, and you're going to actually learn this. We've got a lot of carnivore going on in this room. Something close to carnivore at least. Yeah, for sure. And there's a lot of the way you can do it. My buddy Rich Roll, I mean, he does actually as a vegan, but it takes more work. But you can do this whole thing, and as things are available that just weren't available, the resources that aren't. Exercise. You got to stay active. You don't do anything else. Walk. I mean, we're an ambulatory species. You know, get out of the house and walk around.

38:29Arthur Brooks:And you can do that even in the winter. You can do that in Fairbanks. I mean, most people actually can because they're mobile. But I really recommend, especially after 40, everybody should be lifting weights. I mean, you should actually be doing resistance because sarcopenia is no joke. It's 1 % of muscle mass on average every year after 40 unless you fight it. And you can, even into your 80s, you can fight that off by actually doing resistance. There's not a dude watching us who shouldn't be lifting weights. Plus, it's hugely important for your mental health to do that. And then smoking and drinking.

39:05Arthur Brooks:You know, most people are very responsible with euphoric substances. But if there's anything in your family or you have any doubt, just stop. Just stop. Don't use euphorics. All euphorics are neurotoxic, right? And that means very responsible use is okay. Just like not driving the safest car can be okay. but if you're worried then don't do it is what it comes down to and and then and you know and then smoking obviously i smoked until i was 26 i never smoked so that yeah no it's great but it's so dumb i mean it's like it's so dumb right but of course and most people don't you know in in my time as a musician in the 80s and 90s playing in an orchestra in barcelona well you know you were One way or another.

39:50Yeah, yeah.

39:51Arthur Brooks:And I quit because, you know, I was, you know, getting married and I burned 10 holes in my bed at four o 'clock in the morning falling asleep with a cigarette. And I'm like, it's one thing to kill myself. It's another thing to kill her. And, you know, she wakes up and she's like, what's with the holes? I mean, this sounds insane, but I knew a girl that I grew up with who thought she was being attacked by demons at night because she was waking up with burn marks. And it was because she was an alcoholic who was smoking cigarettes. I mean, literally. And she was kind of getting attacked by demons.

40:19Arthur Brooks:Right. It turns out it's true. Right. She was talking about monsters with tails. Exactly. So that's the big four. And then the protocols around that are something I talk a lot about in my work, in my columns, in my writing, et cetera. And you can get very granular on that. Those are the big things. But then there's the big three that are not the diet and exercise, smoking and drinking. Number one is constant learning. The way that you keep your brain alive is by learning, learning, learning, learning. You don't have to keep going to Harvard Extension. but you should be reading and you should be learning the way that you learn.

40:50Arthur Brooks:A lot of guys don't learn very well by reading, but you know, this is where you and I are teachers fundamentally where this is this incredible blessing of the teaching space. Don't fritter away your internet time on, on dumb nonsense. Do things where you're actually learning, which is super important and learn for the rest of your life. Every day you should be spending at least an hour learning is what it comes down to. But that's probably not just scrolling Instagram, you know, watching the videos where you're supposedly learning about something, but that's not the... You're anesthetizing. Yeah.

41:20And you all know, I mean, it's like people, it's like, am I learning or anesthetizing?

41:24Arthur Brooks:And let's just, and you know, you know, if I'm actually scrolling because I'm bored or I'm scrolling because I was stressed and I'm actually trying to feel better, that's a problem. On the other hand, it's like, I want to learn about a thing. Make a list of the nine things that you wish you knew more about, and then go looking for information on it, books and videos and podcasts. And it's a total adventure. Right. Because it's the scrolling in and of itself that's keeping the aperture closed. You know, like, it's like you used to meet a friend at a restaurant. And before cell phones, you'd have to wait outside and just stand there and people watch.

41:59And your brain could be open.

42:01Arthur Brooks:I know. And now it can't. I know. Totally. Totally. And you're wasting all kinds of opportunities to learn from each other, too. I mean, so at the next dinner party, no phones. Yeah. And here's the first question. Dave, what are you most afraid of? And watch what happens. Oh. Right? Give me my phone. It's like people are going to be like, no, but seriously, I mean, you'll have the most interesting dinner party you've ever had. And the people who can't handle it, good. Now you know. Right. Right? But that's huge. And the next one is having your technique for dealing with the trouble in life. Right?

42:37Arthur Brooks:You never want to eliminate your suffering. Don't eliminate your suffering ever. That's the worst possible technique for mental health, happiness, and wellness. Suffering is a sacred part of life. It's an incredibly important thing. It's your teacher. And there's a lot that I talk about. I talk about unhappiness as I talk about happiness. And I believe in unhappiness. I'm a big fan of unhappiness. Because you're not going to live life. And the biggest problem for young people today is they go to the campus counseling center and say, I still feel sad and anxious. They say, we got to fix that. Because of liability.

43:08Arthur Brooks:that's bad because if you try to eliminate your unhappiness you will eliminate your happiness you will be not experiencing a full range of emotion you'll feel bad about your emotions and you will not learn and grow from your negative experiences so you need to understand how to manage that and there's lots of ways to do it you know i'm you know for me it's it's prayer and fasting man it's my religious experiences it's a for many people some people's therapy i mean therapy is not my thing but for some people it's actually really valuable for some people it's Vipassana, you know, insight meditation for self-management of emotion.

43:41Arthur Brooks:But you have to be, you have to get good at it. How worried are you that we've already drugged probably two generations of kids so that they can kind of never get through that because they're 20 years into being put on ADHD medication and all the other stuff? Well, I'm, you know, I'm very, I'm enthusiastic, sanguine and even enthusiastic about the advances in psychiatric medications that saved lives. You know, my mother's life was saved because of psychiatric medications. It just wouldn't have been possible for her to live a life. And she was a wonderful mom in spite of tons of mental suffering that she had had since she was a teenager.

44:17Arthur Brooks:But I think that there's a tendency to see this as a remedy for everything. You know, sadness and anxiety is evidence that you're alive. It's not evidence that you're pathological or broken. And that's the key thing. And so everything always goes too far, you know. And it's very easy when you have a boy in school. Are your kids boys? Both, yeah. Both are boys. You got boys. Yeah. It's a lot of craziness around here. Tell me, but I got four grandsons now. And yeah, two of my three kids are boys. Another reason you have to stay young. I mean, that literally. Yeah, and they live in my house. Oh, wow.

44:46Arthur Brooks:Two of them live in my house. Yeah, yeah. We're like a Catholic family in 1940. And we did it on purpose because I got the data. Yeah, that's right. And this is the way to live. It's great. Phenomenal. I love it. But the whole point is that with boys in particular, they tend to be highly kinetic and they're not learners in the same way that's really efficient with respect to kind of the industrial education system where everybody goes in all the same age, in groups of 30, quietly sitting in front of a teacher. It's like one of my boys, my son Carlos, he was not that kind of learner. Sure. He loves to know stuff, but he, you know, and so the first thing they said is, I don't know.

45:26Arthur Brooks:I don't know. It's like, I think he's, I think he's got some attention deficit. And the thing with everybody watching us was a son with attention deficit disorder. Yeah, I got it. There's insufficient dopamine in the prefrontal cortex to make them focus adequately on things that they find boring. I understand how it works. I mean, the biology of this is pretty clear at this point, but that's not necessarily a liability. Right, right. I mean, my son, he wanted to— It's only a liability, I suppose, in a system that can't condition, that can't change. That can't figure out how they learn. Right. And what they find interesting, ADHD kids, they have the super strength of the liabilities.

46:04Arthur Brooks:They can't focus as well as you and I can on stuff that's actually literally boring. What they're really good at is finding the things that they find interesting, and they have better than average attention for the things that they find interesting. So my son Carlos became a sniper. He was a scout sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps, in the Marines 3-5. at Camp Pendleton. And he would sit for three hours in 110 degree heat in the desert in a bush behind the scope of a rifle with a tarantula walking across him and be like, yeah, yeah, super interesting. I can't handle that. I wouldn't be able to handle that.

46:34Arthur Brooks:I wouldn't find that interesting. And he's like, that's super interesting. It's his thing. And the result is he's unbelievably successful after he's gotten out of the Marine Corps. Everything he touches, because he knows to go to the part of that thing that he finds interesting. I mean, ADHD kids have an incredible gift. But we have to work as parents and as educators to figure out that gift and deploy it in a certain way that's to all of our advantage. And we're not good at that. So is that just a function of a broken education system that you just, you know, if everyone's going to public school and you got 30 kids in a class and you got two kids that are like that, but you're trying to keep everybody at the desk, I mean, it's efficiency.

47:11Arthur Brooks:Again, the left brain world that we're all working ourselves into is made manifest over the past hundred years in the way that we mechanistically treat human beings. If you're turning people into machines and treating them as not individuals, as human individuals with a soul, you're a left-brained person. And you're looking at life as a series of things, not as a bunch of people. And that's a lot of what we've done. We have a Bismarckian late 19th century education system, which before that, you wouldn't say, let's take kids in groups of 30, and they're going to go all with the same age people all the way through, all studying the same thing at the same time, in the same way.

47:53Arthur Brooks:And if they can't, they're screwed up. It's kind of crazy that it worked to whatever extent it did work. It's sort of nuts, right? Because machines kind of work, but they don't work for everybody. And it turns out the extraordinary weirdos are the ones that inflect society, right? It's not the that doesn't inflect society. They keep society pacified and peaceful, but it's the Carlos's that are putting society great advances and big problems and all of it. One thing we're very good about that I also learned from Jordan Peterson is we try to exhaust them by the end of the day so that when they go to bed, they're ready to go to bed.

48:32Like it's not a fight to go to bed. Like just keep them, like right now it's a little cooler in Miami. We were out building a fire last night at like 8.30 p.m. because it's fun, but also because it was like, let's just keep them as energetic as possible. And then the second they're done, they'll look at us and be like, I'm tired. Let's read a book. And it's like, I feel like that's just got to be the best way to do it.

48:51Arthur Brooks:Yeah. And for everybody who's watching us who it's not their kid, it's them. Be more tired. Yeah. At the end of the day, be more tired. How are you not going to be tired? By sitting behind a stupid screen all day long, because you're going to have too much pent up physical energy. Your body's not built for that. And your brain is part of your body. You actually need to be more kinetically active. Most people need to act more like, you know, Grandpa Rubin or great Grandpa Rubin, who was probably behind the plow. Yeah, that was the guy running from the shtetl. Exactly. Let me ask you something else.

49:21Who never had a single panic attack. I'm sure he did. You did, right, because you literally didn't have time for it. Panic attack?

49:28Arthur Brooks:Uh-uh, not right now. Panic what? Yeah. So let me ask you something that's actually quite applicable to what I've been going through in the, what I'm seeing in the internet world right now, which there's a portion of the internet right now that is just laced with conspiracy theories and just sort of an endless rabbit hole of insanity. And I think there's a lot of reasons for that. Mainstream media has failed us. The algorithms, you know, boost this type of stuff. But I think it's doing something very dangerous to people's brains. Does that sound kind of right to you? And what would you say is the best way to get someone out of when they've gone down this crazy rabbit hole and you see it sort of infecting their entire life.

50:07What's the best way to get someone out of that?

50:09Arthur Brooks:We crave meaning. That's the point of my new book. The reason for depression and anxiety exploding for people under 35 years old is that their brains are rewired to not find meaning and they want meaning. It's not just that the screen is creating the problem. The screen is actually making it impossible for them to get what they want. There's always something behind it. And that's the meaning crisis. Meaning is part of happiness. It's the most important macronutrient of happiness. Without it, you die. And they can't find meaning. Now, what's meaning? Meaning has really three parts to it. It's significance, I matter to somebody.

50:42Arthur Brooks:It's purpose, I have something to do. And it's coherence. Things happen for a reason. That coherence, when people don't have meaning in their lives, is the reason that they grab onto conspiracies. Conspiratorial thinking is a way to find coherence. Science is a way. Because it's sort of an endless story. Yeah, totally. It explains everything. You know, coherence is a way to explain things. You know, a traditionally religious person. So I'm not immune to conspiracy theories, but I'm not very open to them. You know, you give me conspiracy. Also, I've had a top secret clearance. And so I realized that it's like, wow, it's actually, you can't really hide anything.

51:14Right. It's not as exciting in a weird way. Everyone wants to think they've got the answer.

51:19Arthur Brooks:Yeah. All the sexy stuff is not classified. All the boring stuff is classified. That makes you very immune to conspiracy theories. There have been conspiracies. I get it. I mean, it turns out that there was a lot of stuff that was going on during COVID that was trying to suppress a lot of opinions about it. You've talked about this a lot, but that wasn't a huge, like, these people, Illuminati, the Bilderberg group, all this, you know, the Bohemian Grove, I don't know, whatever it is. Is it some version of we can't separate, like, what would be the grand conspiracy, the endless sort of thing that everyone's always going for, just this crazy thing out there, versus that systems just kind of don't work, people have all these selective pressures?

51:57Like, that's what COVID seems to be. It's not, I do think that there were probably some strings being pulled and there might be some, but that it might just be like a bunch of people who were over their skis in what they were doing, who had all sorts, you know, Fauci had all sorts of pressures and then it just becomes a conspiracy in a sense. Yeah,

52:14Arthur Brooks:a lot of really, really, really good people thought they had to act and they had limited knowledge. A lot of, that's how a lot of so-called conspiracies happen. And we suppose they have all the knowledge when they actually don't have any knowledge, that's your point, is what it comes down to. to. But that's what people crave is coherence, because what they want is meaning, because what they want is happiness. And if you don't have something that provides coherence in a healthy way, like God, or science, or in my case, God and science, you're going to grasp onto something that some person on the internet is telling you actually explains everything.

52:49Arthur Brooks:Because your brain doesn't work right unless you have a sense of coherence. A clock spring is going to come bursting forth from your forehead if you don't have a sense of coherence. And so that's what people are looking for. Do you ever find that the, I mean, this is sort of the age old question, but that the God and science portion of these things, do they come into conflict in your mind anymore or have you reconciled all of that? I've reconciled that, but they do come in conflict for a lot of people. I'm a behavioral scientist by background. My father was a PhD biostatistician, so he comes from a harder science background.

53:21Arthur Brooks:So I grew up with a lot of, my mother was an artist, My father was a biostatistician. So I had the two sides, right and left, man. A lot, yeah, yeah. But my father was a very, very religious guy. And I remember this. So I sat at the knee of a great man, you know, a great man who really loved the Lord and who really loved science. And so our dinnertime conversations were math problems. You know, that's what we'd be talking about. But we were, but every night before I went to sleep, he was on his knees next to my bed, bowing for the Lord. This had a huge impact on a little dude. There was something bigger than my dad.

53:55Arthur Brooks:Something bigger than my dad. There's something, there's a lot of stuff he didn't know because of the science part, which he always said, this is a mystery. And there were things that were bigger metaphysically than my dad. And so that really wired into me an important concept, which is that there's the creator in the creation. And you can't find the creator in the creation. If you're looking to science to find God as an exercise in futility, and if you can't find God in science, it's not evidence of absence. It's not, it doesn't mean that God is absent. On the contrary, if you're an art historian and you specialize in Picasso, you need to know two things, you know, exhaustively.

54:31Arthur Brooks:You need to know about Picasso's paintings and you need to know about Picasso. I don't care how long you stare at Picasso's paintings, Guernica, you're not going to find evidence of Picasso the man in there. You know, when German Titov, the second man to orbit the earth, the Russian cosmonaut, was asked, what did, you know, being in space, what did it do to your atheism? He's a Soviet. He was an atheist. That was his official position, right? He said, I stared all day into space and I saw neither angels nor God. That was the dumbest thing ever. That was absurd. It means something, man. Our mutual friend Bishop Barron talks about this, right?

55:08Arthur Brooks:I mean, of course, I mean, you can be an atheist for sure, but the evidence supporting your atheism is not the absence of God in God's creation. You can't look at it that way. They're inherently not in conflict. As a behavioral scientist, probably 17%, at least last time I saw the data, believed in a greater power. 17%. Natural scientists, 51%. Natural scientists under 45, 61%. There's a reason for that. We think everything is socially constructed. I disagree. So when you explain that and you give me some of those stats. I mean, is that the odd part that people seem to think these things are so at odds with each other?

55:48I've never felt that. And I think actually, I think because growing up Jewish, it wasn't really at odds in a weird way because the Jewish mind tends to be scientific in some sense. And then there's this long history there also. So it never was at odds. So I find it a little strange that so many people have this weird.

56:06Arthur Brooks:Yeah, no, it is. And that's a kind of a a torquing of the, of the enlightenment mindset. You know, the whole idea that we would go, science would deliver us beyond that. And it's interesting because some of the greatest minds who've actually talked about this, you look at Tolstoy, for example, in his autobiography. Tolstoy, he was actually a modern guy. It, in, I mean, people think of him as like, I don't know, sometime in the ancient past, but he wasn't, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature three times. He's that new. But he was in Russia, which was pre-revolution, and it was a lot of really, really simple people.

56:42Arthur Brooks:But he was this big intellectual. He was rich. He was famous. He had 13 kids. So his life was pretty much on point, but he wanted at 51 to kill himself because he said his life had no meaning. And he couldn't find it in working harder. He couldn't find it in his ambition. He couldn't find it in his wealth. And so he went to science, and he couldn't find it in his science. And so finally, at wits end, Tolstoy, as he tells it, goes out to this little village, it's like someplace in Siberia, someplace. He goes to some little village. And it was just these simple people who were illiterate. And what they did was they pushed the plow, and they had dinner, and they had these little parties and dances, and they went to church.

57:23Arthur Brooks:They went to Eastern Orthodox liturgy, and they loved the Lord, and they prayed their prayer ropes. And he said, that was it. He said, that was it. It was in the simple things of life. And he wrote, it's interesting, in Anna Karenina, you know, he writes, he writes about the secondary, there's two stories going on. There's Anna Karenina and her, you know, her travails. And there's Levin, Constantine Levin, who's the secondary story that's going on. And Levin ends the novel and Levin can't find meaning and Levin can't find meaning. Finally, Levin gives up and goes back to his farm. And he just loves his wife and he loves his kids and he loves his employees and he raises the wheat and he dies happy.

58:04Arthur Brooks:And so the whole point is, and he worships God. And so the whole point is even Tolstoy found that when he stopped trying to find what he was looking for, the metaphysical truth in the left brain realities, what he was saying is only when he opened up the right Could he appreciate the left and does his life have meaning? That's true for all of us. And so if you're looking for it on the left and you're not going to find it, the meaning will elude you and you'll chase your tail for the rest of your life. I think we opened up the aperture a little bit because this was literally, I think, the quickest hour I've ever done.

58:39I could do this for the rest of the day. We're done? It was 63 minutes? It was such a pleasure. It was, yeah.

58:43Arthur Brooks:Thank you, Dan. Thank you for what you're doing. Yeah, thanks. This was great. You've opened the aperture for me for a long, long time, but now I get to be part of it. What an honor. What a nice way to start the day. I love it.