← The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 750: The Life We Forgot How to Live | Dr. Arthur Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life
00:53:09
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- [00:01]
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Jenny Erich
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Erich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and Dr. Arthur Brooks is welcome.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
I'm back. I'm back.
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Jenny Erich
I have talked about some of the things that we talked about last time and also in. I've read five of your books. I've read the happiness files, the conservative heart, from strength to strength, Build the
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
life you want, love your enemies.
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Jenny Erich
And you have a new book out called the meaning of your life. And I have talked about different topics. Dating like an entrepreneur. So much. I've talked about the whole T shirt. The T shirt.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
And you smell like you can smell
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Jenny Erich
who you're supposed to be attracted to for the DNA match the spell taps.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
The T shirt.
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Jenny Erich
Yes.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yes.
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Jenny Erich
And how like D abs are not good for that. But I do have a really important
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
piece of information that you may not remember, but I talked to my brother
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Jenny Erich
the other day, and as it turns
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
out, I can do the Van Clyburn.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
The Van Clyburn.
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Jenny Erich
I don't even know if you remember that from our last conversation. So what we talked about was the fact that you started off your adult life as a musician and then flip
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
flopped and went back to school. And I did it the opposite way.
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Jenny Erich
And I've always been in my heart like, we'll all go back to it. And then I thought I was aged out of it. And it turns out that they. That there is the main one is
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
for certain ages, but they also have
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Jenny Erich
one for amateurs that could be any age. And I thought that's a really cool thing.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
That is a cool thing. So for the, for our. For our listeners who are probably paying attention to this, the Van Clyburn competition is the premier piano competition in the world. And if you win the Van Clyburn yourself, if you win the Tchaikovsky competition, the Munich competition, or the Van Clyburn competition, you get a career as a soloist. I did not know that they had an amateur version.
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Jenny Erich
Yes, yes. So it's super. I was excited about it because I, you know, I think one of the
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
things that happens in life is you kind of get caught up in the regular path.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Right.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
That everyone else does. And then you look back and you're like, oh, maybe I missed some different opportunities.
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Jenny Erich
And to the point of the other books, you know, your intelligence does change over time, so it can be harder to get back into it. But I thought it was cool. It actually came about because our daughters
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
are doing this piano competition here in Michigan in Kalamazoo in February, and they
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Jenny Erich
have an adult division where you can do duets. So I called my brother and I was like, hey, what if we do this? You know, my brother plays piano, too. Like, what if we do this duet, you know, in our 40s at this local piano competition? I was like, since I've aged out of the Van Clyburn. And he was like, no, actually, you haven't.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
They have, like, an amateur division.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
So, anyway, your dream is still alive, Jenny persists.
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Jenny Erich
It is. And your books help me to dream. So I want to talk about the
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
meaning of your life.
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Jenny Erich
Yeah, you're talking about young people, right,
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
that are entering into their 20s, you know, and. And these are. These are the age of our kids, you know, that are heading into the adult world, and they're struggling to find meaning.
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Jenny Erich
I talked to this man recently, and
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Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
I'm curious what you'll have to say about this.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
His name's Tim Elmore, and he talks about working with younger and younger generations, so really helping people to be empathetic and to understand where they're coming from. And one of the things he said was, like, when he was entering the workforce, so he's maybe 50. When he was entering the workforce, he knew what he was working for. He wanted to have a home, he wanted to have a family, and he
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Jenny Erich
felt like the work that he did
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
would contribute to those things. What he says now is that a lot of Gen Z, they may not have that. You know, the cost of living has gone up, the cost of homeownership has gone up. And so in some cases, they feel like they don't really know.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Right.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Kind of. What am I doing?
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Now, that is a problem, to be sure, but it's really a distraction from the real problem, from the real meaning problem, which is the same problem that we all have, by the way. The difference is that people your age and then people my age. I'm older than you. We remember the before times. And the before times is before everybody was living in a simulation. The problem is basically one in how the way that we've rewired our brains, especially over the past 15 years, what's happened is that to find the meaning of your life, you need to be living in the right hemisphere of your brain. That's where all the mystery and the love and the happiness and the meaning and the faith and all of it. The right hemisphere of the brain, the left side of the brain is where you do tasks and distractions and efficiency and stuff. This is all the what and how to this. On the other side, the right side of your brain is the why, why, why, why. And guess what we've done. We've pushed everybody into fake dating and fake friends and fake work and fake gaming and fake, fake, fake. And so we're never around other people. The result of it is we're living in a simulation. We've changed our brains and there's one thing you can't simulate, and that's the meaning of life. And now people are like, I feel so empty. I feel so empty. And. And so they start looking for explanations. It's like, oh, it's because the climate is all goofed up. It's because the houses are too expensive. That's not it. You know, I'm telling you, when I was a kid, I'm going to sound like an old fart now. You know, like the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland caught on fire, man. We had to roll up the windows on the freeway in la. I mean, the climate is better than it was when I was a kid. Life is better in many ways than it was. But here's where it's worse. Life back in those days was in real life. And now it's a simulation for our kids and for a lot of us as well. And that's what we got to break out of.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Okay, so that's what the book's about.
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Jenny Erich
And that is a really big question. How do you break out of it? One of the things that you talk about is boredom. So actually that's something that we talk about a lot.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
First of all, parents are scared of boredom. But there is this wonderful book, it's called Beyond Winning. And the authors, it's a co authored book and they say when your kids are bored, you have not failed. And I thought, gosh, that's such a
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Jenny Erich
message that we all need when, when
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
they're bored, you have not failed.
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Jenny Erich
And the tricky part is that in
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
generations past, there was no choice but to be bored sometimes, right? So you were in traffic or you
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Jenny Erich
were in church, whatever, you're in school, wherever you're at, and you had periods
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
of time that nothing filled. And so naturally you were bored. There used to be no choice, right?
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Correct.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
How do you choose it?
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Well, See, this is a problem. See, the way that the human brain works is that we have a set of structures called the default mode network that turns on when we're doing nothing. And that's so the human brain is built to be bored because when these things turn on, then we're actually thinking about things, we're considering things, we're understanding things that we otherwise wouldn't have the cycles to do because we're distracted from this. But we don't like it. People hate being bored. I mean, I have a colleague at Harvard who, he does studies on boredom and he took a bunch of people and put them in the lab. He brings in a bunch of undergraduates and pays them because you know, they'll do anything for 20 bucks. And they have to sit in a chair in a room and there's nothing to do for 15 minutes except they have a little box. And if they press the button on the box, they had self administer an electric shock. So he's looking at the difference between, it's like, what do you prefer? Boredom or pain? And a quarter of the girls shock themselves, two thirds of the guys shock themselves, of course, because boys are shocking themselves all the time. And one guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. He's a sick twisted freak. So he got thrown out of the study. But, but you know what's going on here that people hate boredom so much. And so we invented anti boredom devices. That's what's actually going on. Now your great grandfather, Jenny, I, you know, I, I guarantee you he never came home to your great grandma and said my job was super interesting today. No, but I also guarantee you he didn't come home and say I had a panic attack behind the mule today. That's not what he said. Because that didn't exist. And that didn't exist because his brain was working the way it was supposed to work. And that's what we need to get back to. And my book is all about all the ways to actually live in an extraordinary way that used to be ordinary.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yes. Historically normal. That's where a lot of the answers are.
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Jenny Erich
So with kids, you know, I think
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
you, you set time aside, right? You have time aside that's in your calendar that no one touches. And I just read a book by a woman named Heather Shoemaker and she was talking about how kids need at least an hour chunk at a time. It has to be at least an hour. 30 minutes isn't going to get them into deep play. But if it's an hour or longer, that's going to really be beneficial to them. So she's saying don't interrupt it with snack time. Make sure that they have this lengthy time.
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Jenny Erich
Okay. So for kids, you know, we have
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
got a little bit of say so in their calendar, but for young adults and for adults, what are you saying? Leave your phone in the drawer?
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Well, what you need actually, you can't. You're not going to tell them to. They're deeply addicted to their phones. We all are.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Here's the thing. And there's a reason for that. Our brains work with a neuromodulator called dopamine. And we can get addicted to all sorts of stuff. We get addicted to junk food, we can get addicted to gambling, drugs, alcohol, all sorts, sorts of behaviors. And the Internet is a highly addictive thing, especially when we're looking at it and we're participating in it using our screen based devices, which that's why they're built the way they are, is to make us addicted. So we get time in app and that leads to revenue. I got it. So what that means is that we actually have to detox and help our kids to do it. And there's a bunch of ways that we can do it. There's not one school in America at any level from kindergarten through PhD that should allow any phones in the classroom. And by the way, no phones at lunch because you actually need people, you know, at the beginning of the day they should lock down the phones. At the end of the day you take them home. And just that break from it is really important. And then we actually need families to be thinking about this. You know, not taking phones into the bedroom. You shouldn't have them at night. That's destroying kids sleep. It's ruining their ability to commune with the right hemisphere of their brains. This is the biggest problem is phones in the bedrooms. As a matter of fact, no phones an hour before you go to sleep, an hour after you wake up. No phones during meal times, no phones during school. This would solve our problems, Jenny. This is what our brains would start flickering back on, on the right side and, and we started to have these experiences and then we can actually talk about what does love mean, what does mystery mean, what does faith mean? All these conversations that actually literally have dropped out of the conversation because of
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
this because no one has time to ponder and they're not in the right hemisphere. This is kind of what we're doing with our life. I know is we're setting aside time to be outdoors and it solves quite a bit.
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Jenny Erich
So you do talk a lot about
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
beauty and you talk about this in
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Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
actually a lot of your books.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
But beauty, this is nature, this is art, this is music, this is stories. You know, there's beauty in so many things, in friendship and family, in faith, in meaningful work. And you talk about that. You have had a life dedicated to art and beauty. Long before you focused your scholarly life on happiness. You said you were dedicated to art and beauty.
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Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
You are.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
You would paint.
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Jenny Erich
I mean, this is, this is so beautiful.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
You learn to read music before written language. You are a classical musician for over a decade. This is something that is missing.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, beauty is a funny thing because beauty is, it's ineffable, it's hard. You can't quite explain it. And you know, if people want to understand what a right hemisphere of your brain experiences, you hear a beautiful piece of music or you look at a beautiful sunset and you want to cry and you don't know why. The reason is because you're having a right hemisphere experience and that's a deeply meaningful thing. When you're only looking at screens, you can't get that. And if you only look at pictures of these things or 6 second reproductions on TikTok of the music or whatever you're looking at, you're not going to be, you're not going to be consuming that in the right part of your brain. There's three kinds of beauty that we need more of. We need natural beauty, which we have to go outside to get. We need artistic beauty, which we can get from the, from the written word, we can get it from art, we can get it from music. And last, we need moral beauty, which means we need to, and these are the things that actually will exercise the, the sort of the, the numinousness, the right side of the brain. These are three different ways to do it. And we need more of all of these things. That's why you're, that's why what you're doing is so critically important. You're a right hemisphere show.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah. Isn't it interesting? I, I do feel like those are the types of things that people would act off first. So like, look, I don't have enough time.
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Jenny Erich
Well, obviously everyone's spending time on their phone.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
You feel like you don't have enough time. You probably have more time than you do, but, but you feel like you don't have enough time. So what are you going to cut out? You're going to cut out time outside, you're going to cut reading novels you're going to cut out playing music. You're going to, People are just cutting out. I mean, the, the average time that a kid is outside is four to seven minutes a day, Arthur. Four to seven minutes a day. They're on screens for four to seven hours. Those are the statistics. So we've got this backwards. But I think it's hard to convince people, especially in a day and age that's rapidly changing to say, hey, you know, I know you could be spending more time on your flashcards or you could be preparing for the sat, but actually you should be listening to music or you should be taking a hike. I just think people are confused about how could that even be important in such a technological age.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah. And everybody, you know, we're making these, a bunch of very confused decisions with our kids and grandkids today. You say we want them to be more economically efficient at the cost of their happiness. That's a big mistake. Are you kidding me? They're going to be fine if they're, by the way, I got the data. If they're happy, they will be successful. That's the truth. But if they're more economically efficient going into it but depressed and anxious, they're not going to do well at all. It's a big, big, It's a, it's a trade off that isn't even making a cost benefit sense that people are doing all the time. And so John Height talks an awful lot about this. John Height has this. But, you know, the anxious generation. I know you've talked about this on the show. And he talks about two things that have really hurt us a lot. Number one is the screen based childhood. And the second is the end of the play based childhood. And this is a lot of what we're talking about right now too. My book is about, okay, what happens to your brain when you do it and what do you really want when you don't get that. And what you want is an understanding of the meaning of your life. That's why people are so sad and anxious. They don't. It's like, why am I alive for? What would I give my life? What is it worth actually living for? And nobody's answering this question. Nobody can answer it for you. You got to go find it outside. You got to go find it in your family relationships and your friendships and your love and finding your calling and suffering. You got to find it in suffering.
- [14:50]
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- [18:22]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah, there's these two men, their names are Ned Johnson and Dr. William Sticks Rud. And they talk about that young people are experiencing a massive lack of control because they're, you know, they're being told what to do almost all of their waking hours. And even screens have a lot of control.
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Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Right.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Like the YouTube is going to take you to the next video. Netflix is going to suggest the next thing that you should watch. And they talk about in addition to the screen based childhoods and the lack
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Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
of play based childhoods, they talk about
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
a performance based childhood and how that got thrown in the mix as well. And so we have a lot of people who are throwing out beauty for the sake of external almost like college resume readiness.
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Jenny Erich
And well, I think that's why it's
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
super interesting to be able to talk with you because you're working with the, the premier. I mean these college students and some of them are in their PhD programs and they're feeling lost.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
And so the performance based childhood is also not the way to go in terms of it being the most important thing. Well, degrading or deleting beauty.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, well, I mean the performance based childhood is all what to do, what to do, what to do, what to do. And you ever answer the question, why do you do it. The why side is the right side. The why side is the mystery in life. And actually discovering that and understanding that is really important. There are other things that we're not doing, by the way. Young people are less and less and less likely to actually fall in love in their 20s than they were in the past, which is, I mean, man, when I was in my 20s, that was like, that's all I cared about. That's all I cared about. Everything was secondary to that because I wanted the romance, I wanted the mystery. And part of the reason was because I was highly attuned to the hemispherically, to where I was supposed to be living. My brain was working the way it's supposed to work for a young man is the way that that happens. But no. And so what you'll do instead of romance, and this is the really striking thing that we're seeing a lot of today, especially with young people, is the advent of huge amounts of Internet pornography, for example, that's substituting for actual romantic relationships. And all it is, is a. Is a left brain simulation for the ultimate right brain need is what it comes down to. And it doesn't work, though. It doesn't work. The more people look at pornography, the more anxious they get, the more lonely they get and the more depressed they get. Always, always, always.
- [20:39]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
That's the whole problem, isn't it, Arthur? A left braid. Stimulation, stimulation and stimulation.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Either. We're living in the simulation. We're in the matrix, Jenny.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. For a right brain need. What's moral beauty?
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Moral beauty is when you actually see people serving others, when you see people sacrificing for other people. Moral beauty is an incredible thing. And when you witness it, you actually get something. There's a. There's a psychologist at Lewis and Clark University in Idaho. His name is Rhett Der, and I know him a little bit because I'm great friends with his nephew. His nephew is Rainn Wilson, the actor who played Dwight Schrute on the Office. And Rainn Wilson and I are great buds. And so he introduced me to his uncle, who's this famous psychologist who does work on moral beauty. And he talks about how you actually feel a physical sensation of warmth in your chest when you see people giving to other people, even though they don't need to. When you see an act of kindness for somebody else, when you witness it, it makes you feel like a better person. And what it's doing is it's stimulating all of these primordial sensations of altruism and goodness. And all the things that you really want in your life.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Does that relate to parenting? Because I read a statistic actually just today that said. It was a pew research study that came out in 2023, and it said that 47% of adults ages 50 and younger are not interested in having children.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Right, I know. And that. That really does. I mean, this is all part and parcel of the same thing. Because when you. When you don't understand intuitively the importance of love, then you'll start to try to analyze the importance of love and you'll do a cost benefit calculation. Kind of like the P. L Of love. Profit and loss, baby. And I'm sorry, having kids doesn't work out that way. It's not like this is 100 years ago where they're going to work on your farm. That's not the way it's going to work. You have a. You have a bunch of kids. You didn't have a bunch of kids because you wanted employees, Jenny. You wanted kids is what. Because they're wonderful and terrible and they're light. They're light.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah.
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Jenny Erich
But you don't know you're gonna go fishing with them. I told people about that. You know, like, I can.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
I can tell you every fish I caught.
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Jenny Erich
Yeah, there's. You can't put a price tag on that, though. That's the problem.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
I know. And that. And the reason is because the price tag comes on the left hemisphere of the brain, the love comes in the right hemisphere of the brain. And if that's switched off, you're going to look at the cost benefit calculation of having kids and go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's too. It's too inconvenient. It's too expensive. You know, I can't buy a house like my dad did. Although, by the way, your dad lived in a crummy house when he had his first kid. I mean, we lived in a one bathroom house in a pretty dangerous neighborhood. And it's like. And so. Right.
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Jenny Erich
Of course there were like criminals running through the yard.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
I know. Maybe we should move. Was in my neighborhood. Ted Bundy.
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Jenny Erich
No, for real.
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Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, for real. I lived in Queen Anne Hill in Seattle on the north side. Not the fancy side, not the Tony side. The. There was a Chevy up on blocks next door that's still. Same Chevy, same blocks. And I'm 61.
- [23:46]
Jenny Erich
Yeah, yeah, you can't.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
And that. But the problem is, is that no one can really understand that until you're in it. So you make these decisions based off of Cost benefit yesterday we got a banjo.
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Jenny Erich
I'm super excited about that. We never had a banjo. And our, our middle daughter, who is 12, grabbed the banjo and I think it's pretty easy to play the chord. She's never played one before, never played guitar, picked it up, start strumming, and she's singing amazing grace with her banjo. The older sister plays guitar. So she came down, adding all these pics and little slides and I was like, this is the pinnacle of life.
- [24:18]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
That's what it's all about. J.
- [24:19]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
But you can't, like you, you can't
- [24:21]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
know that's what it's all about. And here's the thing. Well, if I, if I asked you, okay, analyze it, give me the cost benefit, why the benefits are so much higher than the cost. Anything you would say would trivialize it. And the reason, by the way, is that your language centers are on the left side. And so if you said, you know why? I said, jeannie, why do you love your husband? Anything you tell me won't make sense. You love your husband and you understand that you love your husband and he's your soulmate and you're the last person he's going to see as he takes his dying breath. And that's life. That's the life we want and that's the life we understand. Unless we switch it off. That's what we've done.
- [25:01]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Artistic beauty, natural beauty, moral beauty. The goal is just right brain, right brain. Can we start to try and balance that out? And the right brain things are the fun things. So it's such a worthy goal. It's such a life enhancing goal. We've got kids that are heading into
- [25:15]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
adulthood here very shortly.
- [25:17]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And so since there's a lot of parents that listen and I think they would love to know about work and you know, and I, I think your story really got me thinking about what should I have, you know, could I
- [25:29]
Jenny Erich
have done it differently?
- [25:30]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
But more than that, like letting our kids be maybe little less practical, right?
- [25:36]
Jenny Erich
Like you say, what, what do you love?
- [25:38]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
We got a one kid that really likes filmmaking. I'm like, well, AI is going to take that job.
- [25:42]
Jenny Erich
You know, that would be my practical, right? Like my practice was like I got a, I was a math teacher. I mean, how more practical can you be? But you, you talk about looking for your calling. Can you talk about what that looks
- [25:56]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
like for, you know, a 17 year old, a 25 year old?
- [26:00]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, absolutely. I mean the whole, the whole point is, look, there are, you're gonna make you're gonna have to make practical decisions in your life. We do that all the time. You can't eat Twinkies, you know, all day, every day you need to make practical decisions about your life and your health. And you're gonna have to. You're gonna go to study something and you're gonna study some things that you like and study other things that you don't like so very much. The whole point is you need to. There. There's a very. An important concept in Japan. You've probably heard about it. It's called ikigai. Have you ever heard about that?
- [26:29]
Jenny Erich
Yeah, I heard it from Michael Easter.
- [26:30]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, for sure. And so it's what you love and what you're good at and what you get paid for and what the world needs and all those things together.
- [26:38]
Jenny Erich
Oh, and also it's the blue zones.
- [26:40]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
The blue zones guy.
- [26:42]
Jenny Erich
I might have said the wrong.
- [26:42]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
No, Dan Buettner. Dan Buettner.
- [26:45]
Jenny Erich
But he talks about it.
- [26:46]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yes, exactly. Yeah, but you need to look across all those dimensions. What you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what they'll pay you to do. And, you know, two of those things are practical, and two of those things are left brain. And two of those things are right brain. And that's the way we're supposed to work. But if you cut off everything except what they'll pay you for, cut off everything except that, life is just drudgery, man. Life is just no fun at all, is the way. And you don't have to do it. I don't care what anybody says, you don't have to do it.
- [27:19]
Jenny Erich
Right. So then it's. It is really tricky, though. I mean, that's where we're at, which is, first of all, I guess kids
- [27:27]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
maybe seem like they need a little bit more guidance than they used to. Or maybe I'm just over mothering, but I'm not a big over mother.
- [27:34]
Jenny Erich
So I, you know, it's like, how
- [27:36]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
much guidance do you give? And then, you know, like, practically speaking,
- [27:43]
Jenny Erich
what do you do with a 17 year old?
- [27:45]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
I know. So, I mean, and some 17 year olds are a real handful and some of them not so much. Everybody's got their own. And I had all of them, you know. Yeah. I had two kids that were pretty well behaved in high school and I had one that was a complete dog's breakfast. I mean, it was a problem. And, you know, what I did with all of my kids was basically, what are you going to do when you graduate from high school to find answers to the questions, why are you alive? And for what would you give your life? What are you going to do? Where are you going to go to find the answers to those questions? And the reason for that, Jenny, is those are the two meaning questions. Those are the meaning of your life questions. If you don't know the answers to that, it means you have a meeting crisis. But that's good news because now you know what to go look at looking for. Nobody can tell you the meaning of your life. You have to find it yourself. And the way that you find it yourself is by opening your brain and letting stuff wander in by asking these huge questions. There's an interesting thing actually about that. You know, when, when I was a kid, there was this very famous gorilla named Coco the gorilla who learned a thousand words of sign language. Does that, does that ring a bell for you?
- [28:45]
Jenny Erich
I think so, yeah.
- [28:47]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
It was. She, you know, got. When Coco the gorilla died, she got an obituary in the New York Times. She had two National Geographic covers. A thousand words.
- [28:56]
Jenny Erich
That's a lot. That is a lot.
- [28:58]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
You can ask her questions, what do you want to do today? And Coco and people are like, that shows that there's not a fundamental difference between non human primates and human beings, Homo sapiens. But that's completely wrong. And here's the reason, here's the reason. There's one thing that Coco Gorilla, the gorilla was never able to do and that no non human animal can do, and that's she never asked a single question. Never once. See, here's the thing. Here's the big mistake that we make in the age of AI, in the age of tech. We think that to be truly human is answering questions. That's wrong. That's wrong. To be human is to ask questions. Answering questions is what machines do. It's what monkeys do. Asking questions. Only humans ask questions. You want to know why? Because the big questions are over here. Because the big questions are in the mystery, in the mystery in the mists of life itself. And so if you're all about like pondering these big questions, like why am I alive? What's the significance of my life? And to whom? What's the coherence? Why do things happen the way they do? For what would I give my life? For what would I die? Literally, what would I die for? These are the kinds of things. And coming to an understanding about that by living your life and going outside and having relationships and having big pretentious conversations with your friends and you're going to just discover the meaning of your Life. That's how you find it.
- [30:22]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Wow, that's a powerful answer.
- [30:24]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
It's not what I was. And I didn't have any expectations of what I thought you were going to say, but I wasn't expecting that.
- [30:30]
Jenny Erich
Well, because part of what we do is I'll be like, here's a budget. That's what we're doing. I like how, you know, how much
- [30:38]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
would you want to spend on going to the movies?
- [30:40]
Jenny Erich
How much would you think your insurance will be? You know, that's, you know, that's. That's part of it. But I certainly have not asked, why are you alive?
- [30:49]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, why do you think you're alive? And, you know, it's funny because in my son Carlos, my middle son, my problem child, he found answers to that by, you know, putting away his phone and going and doing hard things outside, you know, sitting in a bush with a tarantula on his arm, three hours behind the scope of a sniper rifle. He became a Marine sniper after high school, and he came back after four years with answers to his questions. He had answers. I mean, he couldn't even have a social media account. You know, he was doing dangerous work. You can't be, you know, hey, everybody, look at me. You know, I'm at a forward operating base in the Middle East. No, you can't do that. And, and so the result of it is he came back and he was 23 years old. He's married, had a kid at 23. Now he's 25 and two kids. And his answers, I mean, why are you alive? Because God made me to serve other people. What would you give your life? Simple. My faith and my family and, you know, my fellow Marines and for the United States of America, man. And how do we know he's not lying? Because he put his life on the line. He did those things. He did those hard things. He did those real life things that people used to do ordinarily, and now those things are extraordinary, and those are the experiences that we have to give our kids and have a confidence that we're giving them the life that they need.
- [32:11]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I love hearing about the different ways that people can do life because it just expands your mind. Like when I learned that you traveled and played French horn. I actually don't know anybody who plays French horn. It's one of those instruments that you know of. Yeah, but you're like, I. I don't know anybody who plays that instrument. And you. And you did it from age 19 to 31. And there would be a lot of people that would say that. They wouldn't say it out loud, but they might think, oh, that's kind of irresponsible or you're gallivanting around the world. But when I read it, I thought, well, there's more paths that you can take than you're really told. And then you can still be successful and you can still pivot and you can do other things, but what an incredible set of time. And so I, I, you know, an incredible 11 years. And so when you're then your parent, you think, well, should I, you know, should I be really pushing my child into this four year college experience? Like if something else pops up that seems like it might be interesting, you know, would I encourage that? And I think your story, your personal story really helps. It helps. You said this and I read it in the last one that we were doing, but I thought this was such a good quote. No matter how you find your passion early on, pursue it with a white hot flame, dedicating it to the good of the world. But hold your success lightly. Be ready to change as your abilities change. Do the most interesting thing you can. So you, you had an unconventional educational journey and it gives other people, I think, the permission to do that as well. And then love, that's this, you know, this other big piece and you talk about the pillars that contribute to happiness and being happier. One of them is love.
- [33:47]
Jenny Erich
Dating is a tricky topic. So you've got adult kids. In my world, there's a lot of judgment.
- [33:53]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
First of all, it's like, why are
- [33:54]
Jenny Erich
you letting your kids date?
- [33:55]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Is there, well, they're only, are they 15?
- [33:57]
Jenny Erich
Are they 17? We're not letting our kids date till they can afford a home. Like, okay, so start us there. You know, the, the marriage numbers are going down, everyone's getting married later. Is any of that have to do with dating?
- [34:09]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
A lot of it has to do with dating. And part of the reason is, has everything to do with the fact that we took a very, very complex, right bring thing like courting and falling in love and we turned it into a left brain technologized exercise. That's why we did it. And that's one of the reasons that when you're actually using dating apps, you have a lot more deal flow and a lot less attraction. So I talk to young people all the time. My average student is 28 years old. My graduate students are 28 years old. They're like, I go on tons of dates. I don't like any of them. I don't like them. I don't like the guys, the women will say, I don't find them attractive. And it's like, there's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. You go out with somebody and you don't know why you like them. And the reason is because you're. Your right brains are communicating with each other. And that's a really important thing, because when your left brains communicate with each other on a dating app, you're not going to make a good connection. You're not going to have the right attraction. You're going to. You're going to be too alike. You're not going to be complimentary to each other. That's why. And so you find that now 62% of couples that marry this year will have met on dating apps. And the people who made on dating apps are. They have less stable marriages, and that's because they're based less on this cosmic attraction. You know, it's like when I met my wife, we didn't literally speak the same word of the same language, not one word. And I was completely in love, and I couldn't tell you why. I just. I was in love. I was in love. I was in love. I quit my job in New York and moved to Barcelona because she lived there. And she's like, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm here because I want to spend the rest of my life with you. She's like, well, let's think about that.
- [35:49]
Jenny Erich
Can we learn the same language?
- [35:51]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
But no, no. I mean, and it has everything to do with the mystery that actually goes into that. I mean, I'm not, I'm not a crazy sentimentalist and I'm not superstitious, but I know how the brain works. And the brain does not work to attract each other vis a vis the analytical left side. That's not where it happens. And that's what we've reduced it to now. Some app makers are actually getting better at this. I've been talking to some app makers who don't want to maximize time in app. They want to have people meet each other and then spend maximum time off the app in. In person courting. That's super important. And so I think we're going to get there, but we're not there now.
- [36:27]
Jenny Erich
It's opposite.
- [36:28]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
It's complete opposite that you will meet in person. And then you're going to say, I am going to move across the world
- [36:34]
Jenny Erich
and I'm gonna live in this other
- [36:35]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
place because I'm interested in this girl
- [36:37]
Jenny Erich
who hasn't even like committed or anything.
- [36:41]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Nothing.
- [36:41]
Jenny Erich
But you could see then how it will be so different from the app.
- [36:46]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And then you're expecting that.
- [36:47]
Jenny Erich
You're kind of expecting to meet in
- [36:49]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
person, and sparks are gonna fly, but they don't. So I would imagine that gets pretty discouraging.
- [36:55]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, because you're trying to solve the problem. You don't solve a romance. You. You lit. See, there's this whole range of experiences in our life that we can't solve. Problems that we can't solve, we can only live with. You can't answer certain questions. You can only understand them. You know, you can ask me, why do you love your wife? And I can say, I don't know, but I understand that. I do. I mean, I could give you answers, but they're so lame. Oh, she's so. She's a good mom. And she's so good to me. It's like I could be talking about my third grade teacher. There's no mystery in that is what it comes down to. And that's the. That's the thing that we need to comprehend and that we've gotten rid of that we've really. I mean. I mean, eradicating the mystery from our lives has been enormously costly because we've eradicated the life from life.
- [37:42]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yes.
- [37:42]
Jenny Erich
And so that the whole. The whole. That goes back to the whole T
- [37:45]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
shirt thing, because you would have to smell them.
- [37:49]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Right.
- [37:49]
Jenny Erich
And you can't do that through an app.
- [37:51]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I've even been like, boys, boys, if
- [37:53]
Jenny Erich
you wear all that cologne,
- [37:57]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I'm like,
- [37:57]
Jenny Erich
people can't smell if you're supposed to be attracted to each other or not.
- [38:01]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Well, actually, the. The nose can still. The nose still knows the nose bulb of the nose. And it really, really. It can. It can cut right through. I mean, you can. You can disguise it a little bit, but the truth is that it will. It's funny. The natural human aroma will mix with colognes and be completely obnoxious if it's a bad match. By the way, one of the reasons, Ginny, that you should never pick your own perfume, because when you pick your own perfume, you pick something that smells really attractive to you. And something that smells really attractive to you reminds you of the person you're in love with. And the person you're in love with says, that smells like my sister. Because they have a lot of the same biological markers in the major histocompatibility complex that's detected by the olfactory bulb in the brain. So that's what's happening. It's like you're, you're doing something that reminds you of him. He doesn't want to smell him. He doesn't really want to smell his sister. Don't pick your own perfume. Let him pick your perfume.
- [39:01]
Jenny Erich
Super practical. Super practical. But just another one of the things that's in person.
- [39:05]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Like, you have to be in person. You say, let humans make your matches instead of machines.
- [39:09]
Jenny Erich
And that friends were good at it
- [39:11]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
because the friend understands you and they understand the other person. And so if you're allowing some of that matchmaking, it's gonna help. I mean, I. What do you think then about young dating?
- [39:22]
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- [43:27]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
I think young dating is fine. It needs to be supervised appropriately. Of course, you know, you don't give us like give your 14 year old keys a car. And you also don't, you know, leave your 14 year old completely unsupervised on a date because that can lead to all sorts of problems, especially when you have younger girls and older boys. Younger girls and older boys. That's a, that can be a pretty dangerous situation because they're not responsible. They're. Their limbic system is not connected entirely synaptically with their prefrontal cortex. They have strong emotions and bad judgment. Strong emotions plus bad judgment equals big mistakes is what it comes down to. But just in the same way that they do all kinds of adult things but supervised until they're adults is what it comes down to. This is just prudential judgment. You know, it's just thinking or, you know, thinking in a, in a. You know, you don't protect them forever, but you get them more and more and more freedom so they can make appropriate mistakes that are not catastrophic.
- [44:20]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah. And I would imagine just more FaceTime. More FaceTime with people. More FaceTime with friends. More FaceTime, you know, in dating situations that are appropriate for their age, because that's not happening. I mean, the kids are home. They're home in their rooms, they're on their screens. And so to have all of that interaction, you need practice with it and you need to, you know, start to learn who, who smells good to you.
- [44:41]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah. And there's also, by the way, the predators are on the screen. The real predators out there are climbing through their phones into their bedrooms by themselves. That's what's really actually going on. TikTok is predator city, man. I mean, it's a real. Social media apps are a huge problem. And they're predators who are trying to exploit them. They're predators who are trying to radicalize them and propagandize them. They're predators who want to turn them against their parents. They're predators who want to confuse them about who they are as people. That's really what's going on with these things. And you know, the, the place that's a lot safer is out outside running around.
- [45:19]
Jenny Erich
It's true. And you say, okay, one of the
- [45:22]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
things you say is date like an entrepreneur.
- [45:24]
Jenny Erich
Do you think that there is a
- [45:26]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
correlation between how easy screens are? Because you also talk about suffering. Screens are pretty easy. They make them easy.
- [45:33]
Jenny Erich
Of course, video games are easy.
- [45:35]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
You respawn or, you know, all the different things people talk about. But then we don't have this practice in actual real life relationships. Or we give up too quick. We give up pretty quick because we're like, oh, that didn't work and that didn't work. And maybe by time three, we're done. So, you know, you talk about that and you also talk about suffering. Is that related to. Not that there's less suffering, but there's less, maybe challenge.
- [45:59]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, there's definitely less challenge because it's cognitively less taxing, but more stressful. When your social life is on a screen, cognitively less taxing, but a lot more stressful. So you get more stress, but you learn less is what it comes down to. Now, the suffering thing is really important to keep in mind because suffering is one of the most important ways that we do learn the meaning of our life. And the therapy industrial complex in this country has told an entire generation of parents that if your child is feeling sad and anxious, there's something wrong with your child and it's got to get fixed. That pain has to be eliminated. And that's completely wrong. That is completely wrong. That is so. I mean, it's like if I tell my students, look, your students at Harvard, if you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy. You know, the truth is it's hard. You're doing a hard thing and you're going to suffer when you're doing a hard thing. Now, it can be dysregulated, it can be exaggerated. Clinical depression and generalized anxiety are real maladies. But the truth of the matter is that if you, if you say I'm sad and they take you to a mental health professional and they say, we got to get rid of that, they're misconduct, misguided, they're, they're doing the wrong thing. Your, your child is not going to develop. Your child should cry, your child should feel a broken heart, your child should feel stressed out. It has to happen. There's no other way that we're going to develop. And if they don't, then they're going to get kind of a social peanut allergy. They're going to, they're going to not. They're Going to get to college, and then they're going to want. They're going to demand safe spaces and, you know, fall in with the microaggression crowd. And then we're going to wonder why they're in campus counseling and getting medicated in college. That's why. That's why.
- [47:33]
Jenny Erich
And then I feel like it's got
- [47:34]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
to be harder to answer the question
- [47:35]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
of why am I alive?
- [47:37]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Totally. There's no answer to it. When you're hanging out on the left side of your brain, there's literally no answer. There's nothing. There's no understanding of that at all. Why? Why are you alive? I don't know. Just to distract myself, just to go to work, just to do what I did yesterday. Just to eat this thing and drink this thing and watch this thing. That's why. Really, it's just to pass the time. That's why I'm alive. Sorry. Not good enough.
- [48:02]
Jenny Erich
It's really sad.
- [48:04]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
It's okay, though, because now we know. Now we know. And we know what to do. Look, with. We need public policies. And that's what John Heights stuff is all about. About actually prohibiting, prohibiting, prohibiting personal devices in schools.
- [48:16]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Absolutely.
- [48:17]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
But we also, as parents and young adults themselves, can do all kinds of things. I see people turn their lives around every single day. It's not that hard. I see people detox from their devices, get bored the right way, start asking big questions, start working to fall in love in real life. And their life is like, holy cow, this is life on earth. I had no idea.
- [48:41]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Yeah, you prioritize. Right.
- [48:42]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Brain activities.
- [48:43]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Totally. And that's what this book is. It's a guidebook to your own right brain where you get to look. This is what you do. This is where literally do these six things your life's going to change.
- [48:55]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
The book is called the meaning of your life. Finding purpose in an age of emptiness. Talk about transcendence. That's something that we've never talked about on this show.
- [49:02]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Transcendence is all about standing in awe of the universe, Looking at the world and universe that's bigger than you. You know, one of the worst things that actually happens in our technologized world is it makes you the star of your universe. It's all about me. It's all about my followers and, you know, my virtual friends and my Internet experiences. And that plays to a tendency that Mother Nature has imbued in us. It's called the psychodrama. And the psychodrama. It's all me, me, me, me. Because, you know, in ancient times, 250,000 years ago, thinking about yourself is how you'd pass on your genes and survive another day. But you'll be miserable because it's boring and tedious and scary and awful and sad to be thinking about yourself all day long. You need to transcend yourself by looking to the divine and serving others. That's how you do it. There's two ways to transcend yourself. Upward and outward. And so I talk an awful lot about this with young people, about starting a spiritual journey. I talk to families about how they can actually do this as a great, great blessing to their kids. I talk to kids all the time about what it means to actually serve other people and live in bonds of love with other people. And you know what actually that means. And what they do is they start to realize that, that my ordinary day on day details in my life are actually pretty boring. They're, they're, it's like, they're, it's just. I don't want it. I don't want it. There's nothing, there's nothing in my notifications that, that can get my attention. The way that, that, that looking up into the, you know, it's like, get your kid a telescope. That's going to be a lot more interesting than TikTok because they'll say, you know, after 10 minutes your son is going to be like, dude, I'm a spec on a spec on a spec. That's so interesting. That's so wonderful. Astronomy 101 is the most popular class on my campus for a reason, because it makes people small. And one of the things that I find with my students is they don't grow up in any religion at all. But they start praying for the first time. And it's like, wow, what's going on here? I don't understand what's happening to my life here. And the answer is, you're transcending yourself. You're transcending yourself.
- [51:06]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Nature feeds into it. Oh, yeah, we, and I've talked about this before on the show, but we sometimes will collect monarch caterpillars.
- [51:15]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [51:15]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And then we keep them inside and we feed them the leaves and they grow real big. You know, they start off as the little egg. You can even find them as the egg. And they eat the milkweed and you keep feeding them. And in just a couple weeks, Arthur, they've gone into the J shape on the top of your little container and they shed their last skin. And it's like this green, emerald green, like wizard of Oz green gold Dots, you know, and then in a couple of weeks, you can hang them up. You can hang around your house a couple of weeks. The. The green turns translucent, and you can see through it, and there's black and orange. And, you know, I think, you know, even if you're a creative person, even if you're like a, you know, a science fiction writer, I'm like, this is one of the most remarkable things in the entire world, that there was this caterpillar that crawled and ate this milkweed, and now it flies and it's changed colors and it has a proboscis, and it tastes with its feet. And it knows where Mexico is. I mean, we're in Michigan. I don't know how to get to Mexico, you know, And I. I think things like that.
- [52:15]
Jenny Erich
Yeah, right. I'm like, I could get to Indiana, but that.
- [52:19]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
That type of thing, which is one
- [52:21]
Jenny Erich
of the most simplest things.
- [52:22]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
You're going to see that all over the place, right? There's butterflies everywhere. It's not something that's like a mountain pass or, you know, some river rapids or something that you might not see, but you're going to see butterflies. And then that makes you think, how is this here?
- [52:38]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
You know? Yeah, yeah. No, and it's. It's so extraordinary. It's so amazing. The problem is that online, the universe is little. The universe is unextraordinary. The universe is a little boring. As a matter of fact, it's just sort of in your phone. That's where the universe is. You go outside and you experience this, and the universe is out there and never stops. So where do you want it to. Do you want it to be little and stops in your phone or going on forever? Where you could keep going and keep going and you'd never find the end of it. And that's an exciting adventure. That's your life. The truth of your life is that the experiences that you can have and the things that you can marvel at, the miracles that you can witness, never stops. But you better get out. You better get out what it comes down to. And you have a whole hemisphere of your brain dedicated to the appreciation of what it means. And you're going to be shutting it off otherwise. And, you know, that's the problem. We got to crack, and we're cracking right now.
- [53:34]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Oh, it's like we're tricked. Because the phone does feel infinite. There's infinite amount of content that you can consume. There's always a new YouTube video. These are all interesting things that we've dropped. We've Dropped over the course of decades.
- [53:48]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
There's wisdom here with teenagers. I have a study that shows. I didn't do the study. I just saw the data that most teenagers would pay to get rid of all social media if nobody had it. And you want to know why? Because they know it's terrible. They know it's terrible. They have it because they have to have it. It's an arms race. It's like the nuclear bombs between America and the Soviet Union, and everybody in the Soviet Union, in America, in the United States, when I was a kid during the Cold War would be like, I wish nobody had a nuclear bomb. But if the Russians have it, I'm glad we do. And that's how kids are kind of in this. In this. This arms race of communication and missing out and fomo, et cetera, et cetera. But they would. They're smart, and they know that it's taking the meaning out of their lives.
- [54:34]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah. Yeah.
- [54:35]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
So it's like we've just dropped it all.
- [54:37]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
We've dropped nature, we've dropped play, we've dropped faith, we've dropped dating, but we got reals.
- [54:45]
Jenny Erich
Yeah. And so this is why. This is why we're having a hard time, and our young people, especially, are having a hard time because they may know nothing different.
- [54:56]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
I know.
- [54:56]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And that is a tragedy.
- [54:58]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
They don't. They don't remember the before times.
- [55:00]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah.
- [55:00]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Remember the before times.
- [55:01]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Yeah.
- [55:01]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
They didn't age. And even your age, remember the before times. Remember the goodness of it. I mean, this is why, in an age of technology, you do a podcast called A Thousand Hours. Right. Because you're countercultural. This is a countercultural show is what it comes down to. And we all need to be more countercultural. We're not going to get rid of technology. What we're doing is we're learning how to use technology prudently, which human beings are very good at. And we've always done, you know, I mean, there were people in 1895. I read an article in the New York Times from 1895 that said that this newfangled device, the telephone, is going to ruin all of social life. People are never going to leave the house. They're going to be holding their. They're going to be listening to their phone. They'll be going to church on the phone. They were saying things like that. And. And. And it's hilarious now, because the phone is nothing more than a tool. And the truth is that the Internet will be used as a tool as opposed to a simulation of real life. But it's going to take, you know, another part of a generation actually get us there. And I just want to get us there faster.
- [56:00]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah. Neil Postman said something similar, and he was this futurist, and I don't know if I'm going to be able to find it, but he said something about. He thought he was like computers. He was talking about it in terms of computers. He wrote a book in the 80s called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And he said something about, you know, computers, who knows? But he said, no medium is excessively dangerous if its users know what the dangers are. Yeah, yeah. He said to ask is to break the spell. Are you asking. I mean, that's what you talked about at the very beginning.
- [56:30]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Are you asking.
- [56:31]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Are you asking the questions? And are you using a tool as a tool?
- [56:35]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah.
- [56:36]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Or are you using the tool as an end in itself? And that's about human life itself. If you use money as the end in your life, you're going to become miserable. If you use money as a tool, it can create great happiness. If you think about the influence that you have over your kid is what is the ultimate, final end of your parenting. You're going to be a crummy mom. That's just what it is. But if the control you have over your kids is as a vehicle to actually look, lift them up into bonds of happiness and love, you're going to be a great mom. All of these things are tools. And if you mistake the tool for the goal, that's a big. That's a problem. You're going to be creating these problems. And that's all it is. That's all it is. Now I'm talking about the. The neuroscience of how this whole thing works, but conceptually, it's not that hard, is the way that this works. We need more love in real life. More love in real life. That's what it comes down to, that
- [57:24]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
right side of the brain. The book is called the Meaning of your life, Finding Purpose and in an Age of emptiness, one of 16 incredible books.
- [57:29]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Tell us about your podcast, the podcast Office Hours. This, you know, started last year, so it's pretty new compared to yours. I mean, you have like 6.6Bazillion episodes of a thousand hours a daily show. I'm knocked out by that. Mine is once a week, so I'm kind of a piker. But what I do is I talk about a different aspect of the science of human happiness about every four shows. I have another example expert on, you know, somebody who does this stuff and talks about whatever book that they're writing. But most of the time I'm saying I have this column in the Atlantic and I'm talking about the science and most importantly, how you can use the science to live a happier life and go become a teacher and lift other people up.
- [58:05]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
So good all the parents need to listen in. Dr. Arthur Brooks, what an honor. Thank you so much for being here.
- [58:10]
Dr. Arthur Brooks
Thanks, Jenny.
- [58:12]
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- [58:41]
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