Why You Feel Empty Even When Life Is Good | Dr. Arthur Brooks

[00:00:02] Speaker A: It's bold to start a book with [00:00:04] Speaker B: that word, with a German word. [00:00:06] Speaker A: I know no, Germans have the coolest words. [00:00:09] Speaker B: They do. They have a word for everything. And you have big long words that come with 43 syllables or something like that. But un Heimlich is a really good one because it means, well, Heim is home. So une Heimlich means not homey, but it's sort of a metaphor. It means something's creepy where it should be familiar. Something is unfamiliar in the familiarity. You go home, you know, this is actually an interesting thing as an academic. I tell my students if they're freshmen in college and they go home at Thanksgiving, they think it's going to be like the old days with mom and with dad and with my friends. And it's going to be so nice to be back to something I'm familiar with. And it feels completely foreign. [00:00:50] Speaker A: Something is unheimlich. [00:00:52] Speaker B: Something is. And it turns out the. The mom and dad and the. The friends haven't changed. You changed. And so you. Changing is what makes things feel not homey and creepy. Almost as a matter of fact. It's a very common thing, but it's extremely disconcerting. [00:01:06] Speaker A: Wow. So something is extremely disconcerting in a sociological level. You cut past all the symptoms. Everybody's talking about the symptoms and the depression, anxiety, and you go to the disease in this book, which has everything to do with meaning. Before we dive real deep into that, how bad are things? Because we all have a general sense of disease, like something's going wrong. What are the stats showing us, especially with young people, it's really bad. [00:01:30] Speaker B: I mean, everybody knows young people who are suffering from anxiety and depression. But if you look at the data, it's actually a pandemic. What you find is that for people under 30 or 35, depending on the data you're looking at, clinical depression has tripled since about 2008. Generalized anxiety. These are disorders that are clinically diagnosed. Generalized anxiety has doubled. Loneliness has gone up. Self harm has gone up. Addiction has gone up. All of the symptoms of the symptoms even have gone up. I mean, these are big numbers. So the whole point is that the data don't lie about this, that this is a real thing and it's not just higher levels of diagnosis. There's actual no fool and suffering going on. [00:02:15] Speaker A: You know, all the statistics, what's it look like? I mean, you work with young people closely and you have for years. You see them in college. When did it first start to hit you, just from what you're seeing before you even looked at the data. [00:02:28] Speaker B: So, yeah, so, you know, so I teach happiness. So I'm at the epicenter of this kind of thing. And I've been thinking and writing. I wrote my first book on happiness in 2008, and it turns out that 2008 was a pretty interesting year for happiness because happiness statistics for young people hadn't changed for a long time until 2008. And 2008 turned out to be an inflection point. So one of the things that I look at is I measure happiness on three dimensions. These are kind of the macronutrients of happiness, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Happiness isn't a feeling. The feeling of happiness is like the smell of dinner. It's evidence of dinner, but it's not dinner itself. And this is important because feelings are liars. They exist to give you an indication of something that's going on around you. But young people who say, my feelings, this. And it's the most authentic thing about me, notice the least authentic thing about you is your. Is your. Are your feelings. I mean, old guys like me, younger but still older guys like you, who've been married for a long time. No, if you base your marriage on feelings, you're not going to stay married. [00:03:33] Speaker A: Some days. No, no, no. [00:03:34] Speaker B: It's like it's. [00:03:35] Speaker A: It's. [00:03:35] Speaker B: No. I mean, it's the dessert sometimes. But the truth is, it's about practicing your marriage, not feeling your marriage. That's the really key thing. And it's about practicing your life, not feeling your life, not trusting your feelings. So what you find is that I say, it's not feelings. If you want to be a happier person, you need to pursue enjoyment of your life, which is not pleasure. It's enjoyment, which is different. We can talk about that. I talk about that a lot in my classes. Satisfaction, which is the joy of accomplishing things with struggle. We need to struggle, which gives us a sense of the proportion of the sweetness for our accomplishments, but most importantly, the meaning of our lives, the why of our existence. And I have a little test that for decades, I've been giving my students this meaning test to see if they have. Because you don't just say, so what's the meaning of your life? What's the meaning of meaning? So you have to be more specific. And I have this diagnostic test where I say, do you have answers that you really believe to two questions. And by answers, I mean, do you have an understanding of this? Number one, why are you alive? Number two, for what would you give your life Right now, happily. And if your answers to those questions are I don't know or nothing, or those are unanswerable questions, then that means you have a meaning crisis. And this goes into a whole lot of science about the meaning of meaning and all. But I don't bother them with that. I start with that diagnostic test, and for the longest time, about 15% of people under 30 would fail that. That's according to data from a group called Monitoring the Future. It's also my own experience with my students. About 15% would fail at 85% would pass. Okay. In 2008, it started to go up, started creeping up. It was like this. And now it's about 50%. About 50% fail that test. That's the predictor of depression and anxiety. And so now we know. I mean, see, here's the thing. It's like you say, okay, everybody talks about the symptoms, what's the cause? That's super important when you're dealing with a pandemic. You can say, yeah, you know, people are having trouble breathing, or you can say there's a virus behind this that we need to find some sort of vaccine for. Yeah, I can't find a vaccine biologically or behaviorally until I know what the virus is. And so I'm looking, looking, looking, and that's it. It turns out that's it. That's the predictor of depression, anxiety, is the inability to say my life has meaning. Of course, that opens a whole can of worms. But that's now what I do my work on, that's what I write my books on, is what's the meaning of meaning and how do we get it back? [00:06:04] Speaker A: Why aren't we talking about this? [00:06:06] Speaker B: I mean, that's the predictor of all [00:06:08] Speaker A: the problems we are talking about. Is it because of scientism and materialism and that we don't want to face the fact that the problem is metaphysical? [00:06:16] Speaker B: Yeah, it's too big. It's just too big. You know, it's like, you know, you don't chalk up something that's actually leading to self harm and, you know, people not starting their lives and, you know, people being, you know, hopelessly sad and anxious to a philosophical problem. I mean, what is this, the ancient Greeks? No, I mean, it's like we want something that actually is literally a virus or something that is literally something that we can actually change. And if it looks like a philosophical problem, then we don't deal with it as such. We don't really know how to deal with it as such. But it turns out that, of course, philosophical problems, they have a whole psychological wing to them, a whole neuroscience wing to them. We can take them on. It's just hard. Which is why I actually have done my work to operationalize meaning such that we can actually, through a series of steps in our life protocols, get it [00:07:08] Speaker A: back, define meaning for us again. [00:07:10] Speaker B: All right, so meaning is actually a combination of three things as well, right? I mean, you decompose everything in life. You know, a big problem, you decompose it into a little problem, solve a little problem, put it back together. That's how computer science works. That's how science works in general. So the big problem of meaning, which is kind of like a punchline in a New Yorker cartoon, you know, what's the meaning of life? Guru or something? Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. And it really has three parts to it, which are called coherence, purpose, significance. Coherence is purpose, significance. Yeah, they're big three why questions. See, the meaning of your life is the why of your life, right? That's really what it's all about, the why of my life. Not the how to and what, the why of my life. And there are three big whys. And this is according to really good research by two social psychologists that have spent decades working on this named Mike Steger and Frank Martella, a Finn and American guy out in Colorado, near where Mike Steger teaches at, north. At northern Colorado, as a matter of fact. And they talk about the fact that it loads on these three why questions. Number one, the answer to the question, why do things happen the way they do? Stuff's happening all the time. I mean, we're talking on camera and it's sunny outside and there's traffic on the road. Why? Why are these things happening? And, you know, there's different explanations. I've got two big explanations in my life for coherence. Number one, the laws of science. Number two, the will of God. And those two things work together. Actually, the will of God is behind science. But the whole point is these are the two languages that I use to explain coherence, which is why my life has a strong sense of coherence. But if you're not hip to the science and you don't believe in the faith, you're going to struggle is the bottom line. Maybe, by the way, everybody's got a family member who's doing their own research on the Internet. These are conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theories are a screaming answer to the coherence question, which is a need for meaning. And so when somebody's like, it's powerful. People that are pulling the strings. Don't say, you moron, say, okay, this person's struggling for a sense of meaning in their lives. That's a call for help is what it comes to. That. That's what that actually is. That's coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? Number two, why am I doing what I'm doing? I mean, it's like we all question that sometimes. It's like, yeah, why am I, you know, going back and forth to the university where I teach and why did [00:09:31] Speaker A: I get up today? [00:09:31] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like, why am I, you know, a lot of people say, why am I married to this person? You know, what? Why? You know, I asked my dad one time, I said, why? Why did you have kids? And he said, because everybody did. So that's kind of alarming. I said, did you want them? And he said, never crossed my mind. But the, the why am I doing what I'm doing? One of the answers to that is because I do what's expected of me. Right? But, but, but that's the purpose question. Purpose is all about why I'm doing what I'm doing. That's about goals and direction and progress. And it's funny because there's these experiments with college students when they're depressed. One of the best ways to pull them out of the depressive tailspin is to give them a random goal. Like, random. What are you getting in math? B minus. Okay, you're going to get a B plus by the end of the semester. That's the goal. Just that goal. What does it do? It gives them linearity and it gives them a sense of progress. Or you say, basically, we're going to add to your lean muscle mass 3%. 3% of your lean muscle mass by putting you on an exercise protocol. This will give dudes a huge amount of happiness vis a vis meaning. Vis a vis purpose. Because of the goals. Now, it's better if you've got good goals and you need goals that last for life, but that's what it's all about. [00:10:50] Speaker A: Hey, guys, thanks for watching the show. Listen, before the world gets you, make sure that God does. And let me help. The way that you start your day puts you on a track that will impact how your entire day pans out. The decisions you make, the kind of person you bring into the room, the kind of dad you are, the kind of mom you are, the kind of student that you are. The daily anchor takes two minutes to read in the morning. And puts you on the right track. Join the over 150,000 people that get that in their inbox every day. To start your day in the right way, click below this video Join the daily anchor family. God bless you. [00:11:26] Speaker B: The last is significance. Why does my life matter? Why does my life matter? That's the most important. And to whom, right? Why does my life matter if it doesn't? Like it doesn't matter. That usually means nobody cares about me, nobody loves me. Now half of people under 30 say no one knows me. Well, that is a significant crisis right there. And we've never seen numbers like that ever, ever, ever. UCLA actually is, it's hard rating. Yeah. Has actually collected data on that for a super long time. No one knows me well. That is the essence of saying my life is insignificant as judged by anybody else. But who loves me? My wife, my kids, my friends, my lord. I mean, these are all sources of significance is what comes about. That's the love question. So those are the three big whys. Why do things happen? Why am I doing what I'm doing? And why does my life matter? And if you have solid answers to those questions, which are all kind of wrapped up in my two question quiz, have the meaning of life and if you don't, you don't. [00:12:26] Speaker A: It really helps when cultural norms are healthy. That's why you exist. Your dad's like, I don't know the answer, but this is what people do. And then you kind of stumble into the meaning and purpose. Right. Yeah. And I mean the cultural norms seem to have just, just all gone away for us. [00:12:42] Speaker B: Or actually it's, I think it's worse. I don't think that they're absent. I think they've gone in reverse. You know, I think that it's, it's, it's, it's, it very dark what's actually happened to say, for example, I mean, who, who. Why does your life matter? Your life literally doesn't matter. Which is what a lot of people are hearing. [00:13:02] Speaker A: It's nihilism. [00:13:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it's nihilism. It's like, you know, there's a huge interest in Nietzsche. Suddenly there's a, especially among young men, a huge interest. [00:13:10] Speaker A: Don't they know, like Hitler, like Nietzsche? [00:13:11] Speaker B: Well, I mean, it's like, okay, so he's adjacent to Hitler, but even on his face though, right? I mean, Nietzsche was a beautiful writer, a great philosopher to be sure, but he went bonkers at 40 for a reason. You know, the whole idea. I mean, there's, there's kind of A. The Christian notion or the ancient Greek notion. I mean, we believe that, you know, those guys were pre Christian for a reason. Yeah, Was that existence and essence are together insofar as that essence, which is the meaning of life, precedes your existence, that God has a meaning for your life and then you're born. And that's what you have to live up to, is the meaning of your life to discover it, to live it, et cetera. But it's already there. The existentialists, the 20th century guys, Sartre, you know, the guys sitting in cafes smoking filterless cigarettes and saying profound things that you can't really understand. [00:14:01] Speaker A: The existential nausea of absolute freedom. [00:14:03] Speaker B: Exactly. I mean, it's like. But that Sartre was the one who said that, that existence precedes essence, that your life has no meaning, but you can have meaning if you invent it. Okay, Nietzsche said existence has no essence. Nietzsche said. And a lot of the nihilists, even Schopenhauer, like, there is no essence. There's no essence, nothing. It's what it comes about. And that's really come back with this deep full force that people actually have. People feel purposeless in the same way their life feels like it's just sort of random the way that they're working. They feel like there isn't any explanation for why things happen the way that they do. And I believe that our culture is undermining all three of the big whys, and that's what's. And, and, and, and by the way, the tip of the spear of the culture is the technology which has literally changed our brains. Our brains are less equipped to even answer the why question. [00:14:55] Speaker A: Yeah, what the heck happened? Okay, so it's become, it's become a cultural norm and a fad to just give in to that dark nihilism. And so we find a generation saying, well, we don't need the answers to these big questions that we've always had. So we're sitting in front of counselors looking for answers to metaphysical questions that we're afraid to ask. This is what we're swimming in. [00:15:13] Speaker B: Well, the counselors, they don't know either, because the counselors have been trained in this cultural milieu as well. They're not going to talk to you about the meaning of your life. They're going to talk to you about the symptoms that are troubling you. Well, okay, tell me about. Let's take another hour and talk about your mom. Let's rehearse your grievance. Let's talk about that. You really are a victim. Maybe you should go. No contact with your folks. That's what's going on here. Which, by the way, makes the meaning crisis worse. Right. It's going in the wrong. And now not all. I'm not. I'm not here to bash therapists, but the truth is that there's too much in the culture that's doing this, and there are a lot of people in the mental health profession that are victims of it as well. They are not making it better. [00:15:54] Speaker A: I would never want to sit with it with a therapist who just didn't share my worldview. I'm sure there's. There's some out there that are phenomenal, but it could just turn your brain to soup. [00:16:01] Speaker B: Well, if they're not getting this right, it's going to be a big problem for sure, because you're going to be dealing suboptimally with just the symptoms of, you know, of the misery that you're actually feeling as opposed to getting to the root of it. [00:16:12] Speaker A: Yeah. So. So we're living life thinking we don't need the answers to these big questions. But all the. All the studies, every statistics shows we absolutely need them. [00:16:20] Speaker B: And our brain has changed. [00:16:22] Speaker A: Yeah. We're losing the ability to even ask the questions. What have we done to our brains? [00:16:26] Speaker B: So that's the 2008 thing. Remember I said 2008? [00:16:29] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah. [00:16:29] Speaker B: I remember thinking, why am I finding this meaningless, this thing? And at the beginning, here's what I thought, because I was trained as an economist, a behavioral economist, which is why I do human behavior, but an economist nonetheless. And so I go, you know, I'm stuck a little bit with thinking economically. Yeah, it's not a flex, it's a weakness in a way. [00:16:48] Speaker A: Right. [00:16:49] Speaker B: And I thought, okay, it's a financial crisis. It's a lack of opportunity. When you lack opportunity, you lack purpose. That's gotta be it. But our economy recovered and the jobs recovered. We went to the lowest unemployment that we've seen since. We're keeping records. And this didn't come back. It got worse. It got worse and it got worse and it got worse. And the reason is because the financial crisis was coterminous with another big advance in American life, which is the introduction of the smartphone. 2008. First one delivered at the end of 2007. 2008, 2009, almost all of us had one. I mean, it just. That was unbelievable. And then around the world. So now what? 5 billion smartphones among 8 billion human beings in the world, the only ones that don't have them are babies, basically around the world. And that was going to change our brains because inevitably, that kind of pervasive technology, the average American today looks at her or his phone 205 times a day. Okay, so now with my Sherlock Holmes behavioral science hat on, I'm like, all right, there's a connection between this and that. What is it? And it turns out there's a big blinking light on the dashboard. When you use technology the way that people use it, which is all encompassing, all day, every day, you don't use the part of your brain you need to actually understand the meaning of your life. [00:18:08] Speaker A: Okay, so tell us about the right brain, left brain, how we're atrophying the right brain. [00:18:13] Speaker B: Exactly right. Well done. So this is the theory of hemispheric lateralization, which is a fancy way of saying this is we got to get tenure in academia, so you've got to make a fancy thing. So Ian McGlechrist, who's a great neuroscientist at Oxford and practicing psychiatrist and psychotherapist, as a matter of fact. So he deals with human problems, but he wants to know the science of how the brain is actually working when we're suffering. He has brought back an old idea. The two halves of the brain do different things. In the old days, you'd say the right side is the artsy side and the left side is the analytical side. [00:18:49] Speaker A: Right. [00:18:49] Speaker B: It's not right. That's actually not right. That went out of style in the 1980s. The way that he brought it back, using very sophisticated brain scans and tests of human neurophysiology, is to show that the right side of the brain is where you deal with life's complex questions, intuition, mystery, and meaning. Complex means mathematically complex problems are problems that are easy to understand and impossible to solve. They're all of the relationship things. They're the dynamic things in your life. They're all the why things in your life. The other side of your brain, the left side, deals with complicated problems, which mathematically means they're hard to solve, but once you solve them, they're solved forever. That's the things problem, right? That's the technology problem. That's the how to and what. So this is the why side. This is the how to and what side. You need both. I mean, you're doing this show, super popular, everybody really likes it, but it takes a lot of technological, you know, wherewithal and a great team. And you got to run a business. You have pnl. [00:19:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:19:49] Speaker B: Why? Because you want to Touch people with the truth? [00:19:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:19:52] Speaker B: And why do I want to touch people? The truth? I don't know. Because God loves me. I don't. I mean, it's like this is one of the things where it's a simple why, but it's an important. It's an understanding. It's not an analytical answer. You can't Google the stuff on the right hand side. You can't put it into ChatGPT. AI is nothing more than a great big pulsating left hemisphere of your brain. It's horrible for right hemispheric stuff, by the way, which is why when people use AI as a friend or to have the girlfriend experience or as a therapist, they get lonelier and more anxious. That's why. Because they're using it for the wrong side of their brain is what it comes down to. [00:20:30] Speaker A: And it's not a good counselor. Counselor separated from. [00:20:32] Speaker B: It's terrible. But your brain knows. And you can kind of fool your senses, but you can't fool your right hemisphere. This is why AI will never be a substitute for us. This is how we are wonderfully made. God gave us two hemispheres for a reason. He communicates with us through our right hemisphere. We instantiate his actions in the world using our left hemisphere. That's what it comes down. This is an incredible thing and completely forgotten in a secular world for sure. [00:20:58] Speaker A: Right? [00:20:59] Speaker B: So anybody who tells you that you can train an ape to ask human questions. Wrong. Anybody who says you can train in artificial general intelligence, that's incorrect. You can have an artificial general intelligence, a large language model which works on inference. In other words, I'm going to look through the entire Internet and this tends to be next to that in all these documents. So I'm going to answer the question statistically with that inference. That's the left brain works too. It doesn't work on intuition. I feel this. That's how your right hemisphere works. Your car is left hemispheric problem. Your marriage is a right hemispheric problem. Man, you'll never solve your marriage. I don't care how long you take, you'll never solve it, which is why you love it. You don't love your car, you love your wife is what it comes down to. Okay, back to technology. The screen which mediates our right brain relationships, which feeds us information, is how to and what that we didn't ask for, which separates us from human beings, which are the essence of love, which exists in our experience in the right hemisphere. All gone. All gone. We're shoving ourselves to the left hemisphere 205 times a day. [00:22:12] Speaker A: And yet we're drawn to it because of the right hemisphere, if we want it. Because you have something. [00:22:17] Speaker B: You have a hunger. You have a hunger. You have a hunger, you have hunger. By the way, this is how all addictions work. You talk to anybody who is addicted to drugs or alcohol. You can tell them, don't do that, but you better get to. I've done this stuff years in my work. Figure out the need that it's meeting first. You know, you talk to people who would get addicted to opiates, for example. Have you ever asked a heroin addict what heroin feels like? [00:22:38] Speaker A: I've heard people describe it. [00:22:40] Speaker B: Yeah. This feels like love. Yeah, it feels like love. They say it feels like love. Why? Because it touches many of the same receptors that we get when we have, you know, oxytocin, which is a neuropeptide of human connection. You know, that's why it sounds kind of like oxycontin. [00:22:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:22:55] Speaker B: I mean, it's similar in terms of, you know, binding to the opiate receptors in our brains. It feels like love, but it isn't love. It's fake love. It's a simulacrum for love. You want love, and so you'll take this counterfeit fake thing. We just do this all the time. Any of these addictions actually do this, but they leave us empty. Pornography is the same thing. It's a simulacrum for the kind of the closeness and intimacy that our brains demand, our right brains demand. And the Internet, the way that we use it, particularly in terms of social media and the small screen that's in our pocket, never present in our lives, is just making us live in the matrix. We're living a simulation, a left brain simulation, of our right brain needs. [00:23:40] Speaker A: I love what you wrote about Coco, the gorilla that literally is making us less human. As we weaken the right brain, strengthen the left left brain. Chevrolet, Coca Cola. [00:23:49] Speaker B: Coca Gorilla was a famous gorilla when I was a kid. Was trained by primatologists in California and extraordinarily learned how to. How to. How to express a thousand words. I mean, a thousand words, a bigger vocabulary than my boys had when they were teenagers. I mean, it's like they were just monosyllabic grunts as far as what I can tell. But, you know, Coco the gorilla could hand sign a thousand things. It was an amazing thing. And Coco was wonderful and gentle and had a pet kitten and, you know, had two National Geographic covers, an obituary in the New York Times, children's books, went on Mr. Rogers. I mean, incredible, right? But Coco wasn't asking questions about the meaning of her life. No, I mean, that's human. That's deeply, deeply human. And this is a big mistake that people make that artificial intelligence is human because it can answer all these questions. [00:24:39] Speaker A: No, no, no. [00:24:40] Speaker B: Answering questions is not a uniquely human thing at all. Asking fundamental questions, that's human. [00:24:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:47] Speaker B: Why? Because it's divine. [00:24:48] Speaker A: Koko never asked why. [00:24:50] Speaker B: Never asked a why question about why Koko was walking the earth. There's no evidence that would occur to a non human primate. Anybody who's not human. Look, we believe this is a non testable hypothesis. It's the essence of faith, that we're made in God's image. And God is all about the cosmic why. [00:25:12] Speaker A: That's it. [00:25:12] Speaker B: Love is about the cosmic why? Why? Why? To love and be loved, you know, God is. Love is the answer to the cosmic why. [00:25:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:21] Speaker B: And you can tell somebody, okay, explain that. [00:25:24] Speaker A: It's the best answer you could possibly imagine. [00:25:26] Speaker B: Yeah, except it's the best answer. Except that it's for so many modern people. It's, it's insufficient because you can't explain it. You just get it. You just get it, right? And it's like, okay, I mean, somebody asked me in a science podcast not long ago, okay, last question. I'm gonna go. Yeah, I'm going for hours, right? Long form podcast. Brutal. [00:25:47] Speaker A: And I'll try. Not you. That was my, that was my hint. [00:25:51] Speaker B: Brutal. So last question. What is life? Oh, my God, dude, it's been three hours. What is life? So what is life? [00:26:00] Speaker A: So [00:26:03] Speaker B: as a neuroscientific, behavioral, scientific, philosophical, theological truth, people are made to love and be loved. I can show you that in the brain. I can show you that in psychological testing and experimental conditions. I can show you that in the Bible. I can show you that in almost any serious religion, every Eastern tradition, we're all coming to the same truth, that people are made to love and be loved. So what's life? Life is love. That's the matter of life, is what it comes down to. But that's hard for people because it's like it doesn't have any substance to it. Yeah. Why not? Because you'd understand the substance in the left hemisphere of your brain, but you'd get the reality of loving and being loved in the right side of your brain. Unless that's being turned off, then you've turned off. Meaning. Because the meaning of life is love. [00:26:58] Speaker A: You know, I've heard a lot of people reflect about how the Phone addiction has led to a sense of meaninglessness. You're the first person I've read showing how it goes the other way around as well. Yeah, it's this vicious cycle. [00:27:11] Speaker B: Completely. And that's a doom loop. Yeah, and every addiction is full of doom loops. You know, you drink because you're bored and anxious. Those are the two reasons people drink alcoholics to excess is boredom and anxiety. And if you're a bored, anxious person, all the worse. And it'll either give you a little party in your head or it'll turn off the connection. It'll cut the neurobiological connection between your amygdala and your prefrontal cortex. So you'll be really stressed out, but you won't know it consciously. And then what will happen is you'll get a rebound effect when it wears off, which means you're more bored and. Or more anxious, which means you drink more. And in. Around and around and around it goes. That's a do bloop. And we're in this massive doom loop. Virtually everybody watching us is addicted to their phones and sitting in a doom loop right now. And that doom loop has cut meaning out of the loop. Has cut the right hemispheric activity in sufficient time. Out of the. Out of the loop. In their brains. [00:28:09] Speaker A: Okay? So the foundation for how to get out of this is to accept boredom. You're the guy who's made boredom sexy. Yeah. [00:28:16] Speaker B: I'm telling you, I make boredom great again. [00:28:18] Speaker A: Yeah, right. I mean, you have a viral video on boredom. You write about boredom in this book. [00:28:22] Speaker B: I know. It's crazy. It's like, last time I looked at, like, 16 million views on my. My boredom video. But we. [00:28:28] Speaker A: We. It's repulsive to us. Like, we'd rather feel pain. Well, it's boring. [00:28:32] Speaker B: Bored. It's boring. You know, and like, we're. [00:28:34] Speaker A: We. [00:28:34] Speaker B: We. We don't. We don't like it. And mother nature doesn't care. There's the thing about mother nature. It's like, you know how the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it. [00:28:42] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, right. [00:28:42] Speaker B: And my dad's like, that's the end of America. My dad was getting right. But, you know, the. [00:28:48] Speaker A: The. [00:28:48] Speaker B: The reason that the hippies said that and a lot of people actually do is because they mistake pleasure with pleasure is basically just tapping different parts of your limbic system. And your dog has a limbic system just like you. Basically, just like yours. You know, tap the ventral tegmental area. You'll go, joy. It'll Give you a sense of real pleasure. And you can tap it in lots of ways. You can tap it when somebody says, I love you, or you can tap it with a bump of cocaine. We have thrifty brains, ventral tegmental area, the ventral striatum. Right. [00:29:22] Speaker A: For sure. [00:29:23] Speaker B: But that's not enjoyment. Enjoyment is when you can make it conscious, memorable, and social. Pleasure plus people plus memory, that's enjoyment. Then it's being managed in our prefrontal cortex and it becomes part of our. Our happiness matrix is the way that this actually comes around. Right. So. So when. When the hippie said, if it feels good, do it, what they were saying is, if it feels good, then it's good. That's wrong. That's actually wrong. You must be at war with your. With your animal impulses. Your prefrontal cortex gives you two choices all the time. Animal impulses or moral aspirations. This is how we're different. This is. To be in a divine state is actually the understanding of this. And actually choose the moral aspirations as opposed to constantly the animal impulses. If it feels good, do it. Is to give into your animal impulses all the time. And that's not the road to happiness. That's the road to rehab. [00:30:17] Speaker A: All right. Okay. [00:30:19] Speaker B: So what that means is that Mother Nature doesn't care if we're feeling good. Mother Nature wants us to be uncomfortable all the time because then we act differently. And when we understand that our moral aspirations sometimes come along with a lot of discomfort, then we can live the best life that leads to the most happiness. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning is what it comes down to. That's a deep Christian idea. It's also a deep Buddhist idea. It's a deep ancient Greek idea. I mean, it's just everywhere for people who are enlightened in some way, shape or form. It's not even unique to us as Catholics, which is good. Yeah. I want everybody to have. This is what it comes about. But then the classic case is that boredom actually is something that we need to embrace to meet our moral aspirations. But our animal impulses are to actually cut the boredom because we don't like it, because it doesn't feel good. Why is. Because when you're. And what I mean by bored is basically undistracted. [00:31:18] Speaker A: Right. [00:31:18] Speaker B: I mean, it's like. It's. It's just. It's. We're distracted by all kinds of things around us. [00:31:22] Speaker A: Like Gen X was all the time. Like you're at a coffee shop, you're just. Yeah. Or now you're doing that. [00:31:26] Speaker B: People Think I'm the last year of the baby boom. So, man, I'm. Oh, I mean, I have, I have, Yeah. I mean, I'm born 1964, so I have, I have plausible deniability. I was five. Woodstock happened. So, you know, I thought all the hippies belong to the Manson family. So, so, okay, so I, I wasn't old enough to be a true boomer. Life was pretty boring. And you go back even further. More boring. My great grandfather, Leroy Brooks. [00:31:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:50] Speaker B: He was looking at a mule's butt all day. [00:31:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:31:53] Speaker B: And there's no headphones, There was no video games, There was nothing. There's only a payphone in 1862 in Olathe, Kansas. [00:32:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:00] Speaker B: But his life wasn't boring. Why? Because when you're undistracted by all the bells and whistles and, you know, all the baubles and bread and circuses of the outside world which now are ever present through the screen. [00:32:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:13] Speaker B: When you have all of that, what you're doing is you're turning off something called the default mode network. That's a series of structures in the brain that naturally turn on when you're undistracted because your mind wanders. You have these flights of fancy. You have weird uninvited ideas and you think about the meaning of your life. Even if you don't think you're thinking about the meaning of your life, the meaning of your life is finding you when you're in the default mode network. That's, by the way, why people have their best ideas in the shower. [00:32:38] Speaker A: Wow. [00:32:39] Speaker B: Because, and, and when you work out without headphones, you always, like, if you go into your workout, if you're picking up heavy things and running around for an hour, which people should be doing every day, it's great. Do it without headphones and go in with a question. You'll come out with an answer because you're using your default mode network. But we don't like it because it's boring. And there's experiments I talk about in the book about that my colleague Dan Gilbert has done at Harvard, where he gives people the choice of either being bored for 15 minutes or giving themselves electric shocks. And the Girls shock themselves 25% of the time and the boys shock themselves two thirds of the time. Dude, you know so much. They can't, they can't. One guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes and he gets thrown out because he kind of liked it. You know, it's like, how do you get through the internal review board experiment? So, like, painful electric shock. We all know that, kid. We don't like it is the whole point, but we need it. And it was unavoidable. Yeah, but we figured out the ultimate shock machine. There's nobody who says, you know, the secret of my happiness. [00:33:45] Speaker A: My phone, Instagram. [00:33:47] Speaker B: Nobody said that. You know, young people, super cool new experiment. Experiments that show that young people would literally pay to get rid of all social media as long as nobody had it, not just them. So they're not going to get rid of it unilaterally. That's disarmament. They would literally pay money on average. If we all agree, everybody got rid of it because they know it's making them miserable, but they'd be more miserable. They think if they're the only ones that don't have it, they're not going to unilaterally disarm. Like, you know, like America getting rid of the, you know, the atom bomb, but leaving the Soviet Union nuclear armed. [00:34:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:20] Speaker B: So they want detente. That's what they want, because they know it. I mean, look, this is. There's nothing new about this. Nobody has ever said, you know, the secret of my happiness. Meth. Nobody's ever said that. Yeah, because it's not. But people keep taking it. [00:34:33] Speaker A: We know it's making us unhappy, but [00:34:35] Speaker B: we're taking it compulsively. We're taking it compulsively. [00:34:37] Speaker A: So you have to become a rebel to say, I'm going to be bored. [00:34:41] Speaker B: You got to be. Yeah. But, you know, the truth is you don't have to be really that much of a rebel. You don't have to throw your phone in the ocean and join a monastery. [00:34:49] Speaker A: Okay, how do I do it? [00:34:51] Speaker B: You need to do it by. In the same way. So if you came to me, for example, it's okay. And I'm just eating so much junk food all the time, I feel like I'm kind of. Kind of addicted. [00:35:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:35:03] Speaker B: And I'm going to find if you feel like you're addicted to eating poorly, actual biological dependence on highly glycemic carbohydrates. Nine times out of ten, that's what I'm gonna find. You know, you want the rush that actually comes, the dopamine feeling, the small feeling of love that you get when you eat highly glycemic carbohydrates, really, you know, a combination of carbohydrate and fat, or sugar and fat. [00:35:25] Speaker A: You feel love when you have carbs and fat. [00:35:27] Speaker B: And some people are salty and some people are sweet. [00:35:30] Speaker A: Okay. [00:35:30] Speaker B: Right. I'M sweet. I got a massive sweet tooth. Unbelievable, right? I quit drinking alcohol in my 30s, and ever since then I just like, yeah, I'll take a Snickers bar. I'll eat it right now. [00:35:39] Speaker A: It's awesome. [00:35:40] Speaker B: 6:30 in the morning. Bring it on. Yeah. And like, it affects your brain is what it comes down to. So that's the, that's the thing to actually be thinking about. Is that the kind of the need that we're meeting along these lines? That's how we think about in addiction medicine. Anything that we're actually dealing with here. So with food, you know, back to the case at hand. If you have a problem with food, you have a kind of a dependence on unhealthy food. My, my suggestion is not going to be to stop eating, you know, with alcohol. I'm going to suggest that you, if, you know, if you have alcoholism in your family, you shouldn't drink any alcohol. Yeah, don't at all. But with carbohydrates, I'm not going to ask you to stop eating carbohydrates or food because you'll die. I need to have you learn to have a different relationship with food. That's the phone. We're not getting rid of the phones. You don't have to be like a Ralph Waldo Emerson type and go completely contrary to the rest of society. As much as I admire Ralph Waldo Emerson, I'm not him. [00:36:37] Speaker A: Dude. His seven steps, which could be a whole show. [00:36:39] Speaker B: He's awesome. [00:36:40] Speaker A: It's like every one of them is the antidote to the, to the Internet. [00:36:42] Speaker B: My favorite philosopher. [00:36:43] Speaker A: It's incredible. [00:36:44] Speaker B: I realized that he shouldn't be my favorite philosopher because I, you know, I'm an orthodox Catholic. [00:36:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:36:48] Speaker B: You know, and I shouldn't. Because he was the most heterotox creep. His own aunt accused him of, of, of. Of atheism. And he was a. And he was a minister. Yeah. [00:36:58] Speaker A: Wow. [00:36:59] Speaker B: Anyway, that's a rabbit hole. But the whole point is that you have to learn to eat differently and you have to learn to use your phone differently. It turns out it's not that. It's not that hard. You need basically three periods of the day when you don't use your phone, and you'll be fine. You'll completely change your relationship to it. It's the first hour of the day. I recommend getting up earlier. Most people get up a little bit too late for their maximum happiness, productivity and creativity. Many people think that they're night owls. They're not. But your circadian rhythms are only about 40% genetic. They're mostly habitual environmental. And I recommend getting up before dawn. My personal view is that if I'm up after dawn, I've lost the first owl of the day. Neurobiologically, that if I witness the dawn, it has particular properties. But also when you get up before dawn, the, the Indian thinkers who practice Vedanta and Vedic wisdom, they called it the Brahma Muhurta, which in Sanskrit means God's time. But we Catholics, we call it the holy hour. Fulton Sheen said, get up before dawn and make it a holy hour. No matter what you're doing, make it a holy hour. Holy hour doesn't include the phone. I'm sorry. And so that's also with neurocognitive programming. The most important hour of the day to not be hooked up to de hook yourself. The second is mealtime. We have. [00:38:19] Speaker A: Well, tell me about that programming. [00:38:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:21] Speaker A: How do you dehook? Why, why is that hour important? [00:38:23] Speaker B: So that first hour of the day, really, it makes you path dependent for the rest of the day. So if you have any weird habit or nervous tick or something that you want to break, it's the first hour that matters. Well, because what you do in the first hour is kind of what you're going to do for the rest of the day. Well, is what it comes down to. So if you, if you say a lot of prayer in the first hour of the day, you'll be more prayerful over the course of the day. It's both positive and neg. [00:38:47] Speaker A: So it's about getting your head into the right mode. It's not just the thing you're doing. When you're scrolling your head in scroll [00:38:53] Speaker B: mode, you are super fresh because you've just woken up. I mean, I'm usually not that fresh when I wake up because I'm a bad sleeper, but I'm fresher when I first wake up, meaning that my dopamine circuits are ready to go, ready to fire. And I want to make sure I'm rewarding it with good stuff and not rewarding these circuits with bad stuff. That's what I actually want to do. And that's how you become path dependent for the rest of the day and how you build good habits, not break. So people who want to start exercising, seriously, what I recommend that they do is don't get some trainers going to give you an exotic exercise program and don't do what I'm doing. I've been in the gym six or seven days a week for 30 years. That's not what you do. Go to the gym Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, first thing in the morning and just do 30 minutes on the elliptical and do that for six weeks and it will become a habit. You'll do. You'll neurocognitively program that so you're no longer thinking about it anymore. Same thing is true with your phone. Second is mealtime. We have. Our brains are in a special mode when we're eating with other people. I strongly recommend that people not eat alone. I mean, a lot of people eat alone on purpose and they scroll their phone while they eat. Eating with another person and not even having a phone on the table is really good for your mental health. And part of the reason is because when we make eye contact while we're eating, we get a lot of oxytocin in our brains, which is this bonding hormone, this bonding neuropeptide. And it gives us a sense of kinship and friendship, which is intensely. Yeah, it's wonderful. And that's how we're evolved from 250,000 years ago to sit around a campfire and look at yak meat in our mouths and talk about the dad. It's like, oh yeah, there's some gazelles on that watering hole over there. I saw that tribe moving a little closer, you know? Right. Oh, yeah. And the last is the last hour of the day part of it is just because of sleep architecture, how it's impacted by devices and kind of. Everybody knows that blue light in the last hour of the day is bad for you because it interrupts the functioning of the pineal gland, which interrupts the production of natural melatonin in the brain. So people kind of know that argument. But it's also highly social. I mean, when you're married, for example, that's. That's a. That's a sacred time, you know, you. It's a sad thing, a couple lying in bed, each looking, scrolling their phones. What a waste. You didn't get married in the last. So to lie in bed and scroll your individual. [00:41:15] Speaker A: It's not being dreamt of. [00:41:17] Speaker B: It's a very. Yeah. Except when they're trying to illustrate a couple, it's. That's on the outs. Right, right. And we're all doing the thing that [00:41:24] Speaker A: looks like the worst couple in the movie. [00:41:25] Speaker B: I mean, my wife and I were doing these. We're doing these, we're touring. You know, how to stay and how to stay married. [00:41:31] Speaker A: Ye. [00:41:32] Speaker B: And her background is Catholic theology and mine is science. But we talk about the practices, the protocols for couples that are not experiencing abuse or abandonment or. But just ennui, just grayness in the relationship, how to enliven it. And a lot of what we talk about is the end of the day. We talk about what we're trying to be doing at the end of the day. Most importantly, what I recommend to couples, they go to bed 15 minutes before they would ordinarily go to bed. In the first 10 of those. You're reading to each other. They're reading to each other. Not I, I. You know, the Psalms. We read the Psalms to each. Because we do that. We do. You know, we do the. The divine office. [00:42:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:42:10] Speaker B: And the nighttime prayer. Not super long. Takes 10 minutes. You're reading the Psalms. If you want to get kind of a little bit more into the weeds a little bit. The adult content of the Bible is Song of Songs. Oh, yeah. You know, that's the sexiest part of the. [00:42:22] Speaker A: Not for your kids. [00:42:23] Speaker B: Not. This is not. This is not for children. You have to be over 18 to read a song at home. [00:42:26] Speaker A: That's right. [00:42:27] Speaker B: And great. You know, and then in the last five minutes, talk to each other, looking deeply into each other's eyes. That's super important. There can be no devices involved in this. There should be no devices. And that's. And that will save marriages, by the way. Those 15 minutes will save marriages. [00:42:44] Speaker A: I love the simple solutions. [00:42:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And this is crazy. [00:42:47] Speaker A: Problems. [00:42:47] Speaker B: It's, you know, it's like. It's biblical. It's psychological. It's neuroscientific. It's common sense. [00:42:53] Speaker A: So first hour, last hour during meals. I love how you also shared in the book how you had students who were, like, literally doing reps in boredom and trying to challenge each other. [00:43:01] Speaker B: They teach at the Harvard Business School. [00:43:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:43:03] Speaker B: And last seven years, I got, like, the super strivers and, you know, it's like, how can I be better than everybody at boredom? I want to be number one at boredom. [00:43:10] Speaker A: Like, I'm in the coffee shop today. I'm just standing there in line. [00:43:13] Speaker B: That's right. That's right. I'm going to be on a flight, staring. Staring at the front of the seat. In front. [00:43:17] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. One dude you shared literally stared at the stairs. [00:43:19] Speaker B: There's a whole thing, like the whole movement. People, you know, fly back from Greece or something and stay just. Like, I'm the. I can get enough for the bathroom now. That's a thing. [00:43:28] Speaker A: I'd be weirded out by the guy sitting next to me staring at the seat in front of him. [00:43:32] Speaker B: Completely. [00:43:32] Speaker A: I just completely. But I Don't know. He just read Arthur Brooks's book. [00:43:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Or. Or there's something's wrong with him. [00:43:38] Speaker A: But the. [00:43:40] Speaker B: But you know when you're at a light. So. So ways to do this. [00:43:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:43:44] Speaker B: Work out without headphones, like I mentioned before, commute in silence. Look, there's the war at the office, and if you've got kids, there's a war at home. [00:43:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:43:53] Speaker B: Here's your zone of peace. Use that as your peace. So don't waste it listening to npr. It's just another war in your head. Don't crowd out the sacred silence. That can actually happen at the beginning. It's going to be uncomfortable. Right. But this is really, really important. And that first hour, during the holy hour, for people who don't know how to use it, at the very beginning, I ask my students to walk for that holy hour. Walk for that first hour of the day, the Brahma muhurta, because that's an ancient Indian thing, is to walk, walk, walk. Obviously, without headphones. Not even your podcast or mine is to walk. And the sun comes up and you hear the gravel under your feet, and maybe you're praying and just maybe you're letting your mind go. That's super good for you. [00:44:40] Speaker A: My. My wife, she drove from. From California to Steubenville when she was a student. I was a student here as well. We're in Steubenville right now. [00:44:47] Speaker B: And you met here? [00:44:48] Speaker A: Met here. And. But in. In Utah, she had no service. I mean, no, there was before cell phones, but there was no radio either, so it was dead silence. And it was during those hours that you started to think, maybe Chris. But if it weren't for that, like, I probably wouldn't be married. [00:45:03] Speaker B: If she had a podcast, she was distracted, you know? Look, the truth is, a lot of young people today are too distracted to fall in love. Yeah, they're too distracted to fall in love. [00:45:12] Speaker A: Tragic. [00:45:13] Speaker B: It's insane, actually. Plus, by the way, falling in love is one of the most intense Right. Hemispheric activities you can engage in. And if you've got the right hemisphere turned off, then romantic love is not something available to you. Dang, that's disturbing. That's the reason that people in their 20s today are about a third less likely to say they're in love than people were when I was in my 20s. They're half as likely to be married, half as likely to cohabitate outside of marriage, and they're even having less sex. [00:45:41] Speaker A: Wow. [00:45:42] Speaker B: So people are like, oh, yeah, everybody's hooking up? Nope. [00:45:44] Speaker A: Wow. They're not doing anything. [00:45:47] Speaker B: There's a love depression. [00:45:48] Speaker A: Okay, so boredom forms the foundation for how we could start to find meaning. Let's say someone's just. Just watching us, thinking, okay, I'll do that. Then what? How do I get the meaning in my life? Yeah, it's just lacking. [00:46:02] Speaker B: Yeah. So. [00:46:02] Speaker A: And how does faith tie into all that? [00:46:04] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So. So we've done steps one and two, which is raging against the machine and making Gorgo great again. [00:46:08] Speaker A: Right. [00:46:09] Speaker B: Okay, that's. [00:46:09] Speaker A: That's good. [00:46:10] Speaker B: But these are table stakes now. You got to live an old fashioned way. You know, Leroy Brooks, my great grandpa, he never thought about finding meaning. Meaning found him when he was in the fields. And here's the irony. His life was super boring, moment to moment, but his life wasn't boring. My students, their life is never boring, moment to moment, but their life is boring. You get to the end of the week and you're like, what did I do? I scrolled a lot of Instagram. I had the YouTube algorithm feed me a whole bunch of videos about things I did not seek, information I didn't really care very much about, but that engaged me because of the way that it's been designed. I don't remember any of it. I didn't do any big project. I talk to people, young people, again and again and again. They'll say, I want to do something big. But I get to the end of the day and I'm tired. And so I just scroll. I want to do something meaningful. [00:46:59] Speaker A: So my moments aren't boring, but my existence is. Yeah, yeah. [00:47:02] Speaker B: As opposed to your moments being boring. So your existence is not. That's the thing. Okay? So that's because he had a full life. Good old Leroy had a full life. And his full life wanted to have in it time to have the big questions front and center. A life that had family and a marriage in it. He was married for 60 years. Right. And God willing, so will me and you. [00:47:28] Speaker A: Yeah, please, God. [00:47:29] Speaker B: And what else was he doing? He was doing something that he felt he was meant to do. He was super faithful Christian. He was super, super, super faithful about his Christian faith. We know that for a fact. Both sides of my family are missionary families. As a matter of fact, we know that. And going back to various points all across the generations, because he was out in nature, this is one of the ways that you light up your brain. And by the way, because he had no way to get rid of his suffering, he had no way to eradicate and Eliminate the suffering from his life. And those are the ways to do it. Big questions, romance. Finding your calling. Looking up and having a relationship with God. Finding beauty all around you and immersing yourself in beauty and running toward it, leaning into your suffering. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Which was the ancient life that used to be ordinary and now it's extraordinary. [00:48:21] Speaker A: Say those six again because I wanted to sink into people watching. [00:48:23] Speaker B: Number one, you got to ask the questions that Koku or the gorilla couldn't Think about those questions, you know, when you've got all this time you're walking your Brahma mukurta, working out without devices. Think about big questions, the big questions. The reason that I assign that quiz for the meaning crisis, because those are also really great questions to contemplate. Yeah, why am I alive? And for what would I give my life? Yeah, why am I alive? Who created me? For what purpose? And for what would I give my life right now? What would I die for right now? That's really. We're thinking about. [00:48:54] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [00:48:55] Speaker B: And then there's other things like, does God exist? Is God good? Does God know me? You can't Google it. It's ungoogle able. [00:49:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:03] Speaker B: They'll just tell you what other people thought. [00:49:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:06] Speaker B: About that. Which is one of the reasons that, you know, I'm all about Catholic apologetics. But they'll never really satisfy you because those are left brain answers to right brain needs. [00:49:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:19] Speaker B: Apologetics are like, yeah, here's my ironclad proof for the existence of God. [00:49:25] Speaker A: I mean, if that's all we needed, then X or Twitter would have converted the world already. [00:49:29] Speaker B: Like we got, you know, it's like C.S. lewis would have, you know, open and close. [00:49:33] Speaker A: Done. Yeah. Great reading your book. Maybe you want to make like a T shirt, make faith. Right brained again. [00:49:38] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. [00:49:39] Speaker A: Right? [00:49:39] Speaker B: That's right. So big question, big question, big question. [00:49:42] Speaker A: Immerse, immerse in it. [00:49:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that's number one. Number two is falling in love. Falling in love is this funny thing. And, and, and when you're living in the left brain, what you want to do is you want to solve the problem of romantic love. You want to solve the problems of loneliness. And trying to solve it leads you to the apps. Swipe right, swipe right, swipe right. It leads you to the paradox of choice where there's too many possibilities and nobody is optimized for your needs. It leads to a lot of self centered behavior where you're trying to find somebody who's you as opposed to somebody who completes you? It leads to overuse. And by the way, any use is overuse of pornography. It leads to, you know, 85% of men under 30 regularly see pornography. [00:50:24] Speaker A: 85%? [00:50:25] Speaker B: Yeah, about, about that same percentage of 12 year old boys seen hardcore pornography, which is literally changing their brains. I mean, God bless the Internet delivering to you. Oh Lord, it's like, you know, the dark one's good at his job. You got to give him credit. [00:50:41] Speaker A: People think it's going to change the world. Look, look, poor countries have, have the Internet and smartphones. Fantastic. They look at porn and play video games like nobody else for. [00:50:50] Speaker B: Fantastic. Anyway, so, so, so, so romantic love, which is the ultimate entrepreneurial act of putting your heart at risk without knowledge and solutions. I mean, this is the thing, I mean, when you're falling in love. [00:51:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:51:04] Speaker B: You're like, I don't know, I don't know. That's part of the adventure when you're doing a startup company, by the way. You don't know. [00:51:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:51:10] Speaker B: Which is, I mean, you have, you're a startup guy. I mean, effectively, you're an entrepreneur. And what you're trying to intellectually, spiritually and in terms of business, you're an entrepreneur. You don't know. You don't know if in five years this thing is going to be working right. You don't know the workings of the market and the will of God. And so that requires this leap of faith. And a leap of faith per se means an unsolvable problem. And that means you're in the right hemisphere. That's what it is. Okay, so the next one is having a sense of what you're meant to do is having a sense of what your calling is. We've never lived in a better time to find our calling. Vocation, vocatsio. I mean, that's this incredible concept of what God wants you to do. But even secular people have a sense of finding meaning through their work. Because you have this feeling like, I'm just supposed to do this. Even, even secular career counselors say there's a sacred feeling in my work. I find that vocation and a sense of meaning and work comes from two things. Number one is feeling like you're earning your success, and number two, feeling you're serving others. I don't care if you're putting roofs on houses or doing a Catholic podcast or teaching at Vanderbilt University, which I'm doing these days, it's am I earning my success and am I serving other people? Is what it comes down to. So that's critically Important to do that. And this book has, you know, what do people have in common who have this? How do people find it who don't have it? It's a really practical book. It's not theoretical at all. [00:52:37] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's right. [00:52:37] Speaker B: Yeah. The next is actually, is, of course, is pursuing faith, because faith is a right hemispheric experience. God communicates with us on a right hemisphere. I mean, I suppose he can in the left hemisphere too. I suppose he could actually. I mean, if he wanted to, for his holy will, he could start an unbelievable website, you know, and, you know, and it's like. And people would be, you know, flocking to it. It's like, you know, all this time I've been kind of communicating in pretty abstract ways with you guys, but I'm going to lay it on the line so you really get it in black and white right now. [00:53:10] Speaker A: But, you know, then you'll accept it. But. Yeah, yeah. [00:53:12] Speaker B: Except that as you know, as the gospels say, you know, in the case of the rich man of Lazarus, dude, that's what that was all about. And, you know, the rich man who's in is in hell. And you know, he's like, just let Lazarus come and put a little drop of cold water on my tongue. Lazarus was the poor man who was sitting outside his rich man's gate. You know, one is in hell and the other is at Abraham's bosom. And the rich man says, you know, father Abraham, you know, send Lazarus over to Cool light Tongue. You know, it's like, no. He says, well, okay, well, just do me a favor then. I've got all these brothers and they're not believers either. Send them back to warn them. Send them back to tell them. And he said, you had the law and the prophets. You had the law and the prophets and you didn't believe it. You think that, you know, Moses going back, coming back to real life and telling them, no, what is he saying? I gave you a right hemisphere. I'm not going to put a billboard on the i95 for you guys. That's not how I communicate with you guys. You want to know why? The number of people who say they're none. That isn't the good old fashioned N U N the N O N E S. No affiliation. No affiliation. Why is that going up? Because there were left hemispheres in charge. That's the reason. There are lots of people who are lazy about their faith in ancient times or even in relatively modern times who are not serious about it, who could be better, but they're not none. And the reason they're not none is because they still have this flicker in the right hemisphere of their brain. They're still communicating with the divine in some way, shape or form. That's done. I'm done. [00:54:47] Speaker A: Dang. What do you say to the atheist, the materialist, who's like, well, I want meaning too, but I don't want that stuff. [00:54:53] Speaker B: You know when I say to a lot of atheists is, you're closer to me than you think because they have belief. They have a belief in some truth that. See, they can't prove that there is no God, but they have belief that there is no God. I'll take it. You know, like I'm. Yeah, I'm not choosy. So many people who are, you know, very fervent in their faith and are converts, they were atheists early on because they had a sense, but that sense actually left them empty. [00:55:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:55:21] Speaker B: And you know, God will, he'll, you know, make that, you know, the beeping smoke alarm that wakes you up at night, that chirp. Yeah, look at that chirp. Look at that chirp. And I like, this is, this is what I. Yeah, no, there is no God because there's no evidence for God. There's no evidence for God. So I believe, believe right hemisphere, there is no God. And then the chirp wakes you up at night. And some of them are like, I gotta go change that battery. [00:55:50] Speaker A: And due respect to apologetics, don't write right in and complain about they're anti intellectual. [00:55:55] Speaker B: No, on the contrary. But this is not the center of bringing down to it. All this is, is an adjunct, just like all of the great left hemispheric stuff. Look, I'm a professional intellectual, I teach science. That's left hemispheric stuff. What to complement the right hemisphere truths. That's what apologetics are for. So that you have a language to put around your faith. That's what this stuff is actually for. What is the five proofs of the existence of God from Thomas Aquinas and the Summa Theologia. It's not because he didn't have faith and had to prove it. He wanted to give us words using the language centers in the left cortex so that we could actually say, okay, this is why I actually feel this thing. [00:56:37] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, good and real event. I love how you. It's soft, but very real. Evangelization happened here. Right. Not to blow your cover. [00:56:47] Speaker B: Sure. [00:56:48] Speaker A: No, no. [00:56:48] Speaker B: And it's not even a cover because I'm in plain sight. [00:56:50] Speaker A: Yeah, that's Right. [00:56:51] Speaker B: And everybody's in a different point in their path. And I work with all kinds of people. My beloved atheist friends. And I work a lot with people of other faiths. No faith, the whole thing. But I'm right up front. [00:57:03] Speaker A: How does your living this. How does your immersion in Catholicism keep you connected to meaning? Because you were at a place in your life where it's like, well, I'm not religious. Which way do I go? [00:57:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I was actually always religious. I was raised in a Christian family, but I came fully into the Catholic faith when I was a teenager. I had a mystical experience at the Shrine of Guadalupe when I was 15 or I had an episode of adolescent rebellion because I was raised in an evangelical family. You choose. Right. And it's like, who knows? Through the sands of time, it's better [00:57:36] Speaker A: than sex and drugs and rock and roll. Yeah. [00:57:38] Speaker B: Well, you know, and that's the life of my parents finally came to, you know, like, I guess it's better than drugs and. And then, you know, through my 20s, I was dating and falling in love with and marrying a woman who had. Had no faith. Had no faith at all, didn't go to Mass. And so I wasn't going to Mass, but I was praying and I wanted it in the whole. And it was always a weird thing. I remember at one point in my life, this is the mind of a, you know, an adolescent or young adult, in my mind at least. And I was a professional musician in those days. I had no money. I'm like, I have these. I have some. I have a set of goals. Number one is I am going to make sure I'm going to stop drinking because I don't think it's good for me. Number two is I'm going to start exercising because that would be good for me. Number three is I'm going to go to the dentist. And I haven't gone to the dentist in five or six years. At this point, I didn't have any money to do that. And number four is I'm going to start going back to church again. This is my goals, like stop eating carbs and save your soul. But it's weird how that works. So I was never against it. I was never gone. What I was was lazy. And what brought me fully more back into it was that I started praying very, very constantly that God would save my wife. [00:58:53] Speaker A: Wow. [00:58:53] Speaker B: The woman I was in love with. And I realized that I was going to alienate her. So I stopped talking to her about God. I started talking to God about her. [00:59:02] Speaker A: Wow. [00:59:03] Speaker B: Which is for everybody watching us was somebody in their life that they're trying to get into mass. That's what you do. Don't bug them about God, bug God about them. Because God loves to be bugged. [00:59:15] Speaker A: Right. [00:59:15] Speaker B: And in his will and in his time, that will happen. And. And she did. I mean, she did. And it took until she was about 40 years old for the longest time. You know, I was back in church by, you know, in my early 30s, and I was going every week with my kids. [00:59:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:59:31] Speaker B: And I was teaching them their prayers. She's like, occasionally she'd go, she's a long homily. I said, I know, I know, I know. But just the praying. And the praying. And the praying was actually. So praying for her was actually what I prayed myself back in by praying for her. And that's one of the mysteries, the right hand side mysteries, that you can't actually explain with the left cortex. [00:59:54] Speaker A: At least part of the ritual. People look at Catholicism and say, oh, it's just empty, hollow religiosity. But there's part of that rhythm of life that Catholics have that's just. Well, how do I immerse in this? Just do these things. [01:00:05] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. And, you know, that's a really important point that you're making, a right hemispheric point, but a common sense point as well. A lot of people think probably I thought this for a while, I'm not quite sure. And again, I was never against it. I was never a nun, I was never an atheist. I was just lazy, Just lazy. Just torpor, distracted. Which is so dumb, thank God, that the phones didn't exist in those days. But what a lot of people, the misconception they actually have about the whole process of faith, especially the Catholic faith, is you got to feel it. And then when you feel it, you might believe it. And then when you believe it, then you can practice it. That's the mistake that people make about marriage, too. Feel it, believe it, practice it. This exactly opposite from the truth. You need to practice it all the time so you can believe it a lot of the time, so you can feel it some of the time. That's my marriage. I practice my marriage all the time. You know, Bishop Barron always says, can you imagine going to your wife and saying, honey, I'm such a good husband, I'm faithful to you. 99%. That's like complete faith. [01:01:11] Speaker A: 1% doesn't mean a thing. [01:01:13] Speaker B: That 1% feels like, no, it's like 99% of the time, I'm true to you. What do you want from. So practice it all the time. Practice your faith all the time. Practice your marriage all the time. Practice the things that you know that are the essence of love, which is the essence of your life. A lot of the time you're going to believe it, and your belief is going to grow. You get 90 years, years for that belief to grow. And some of the time, your limbic system is going to not be rebelling, and you're going to feel it, too. And that's just like a little reward, and that's okay. [01:01:42] Speaker A: Something happens when we give ourselves to the right brain that you really illuminate with your Camino, that you were here. You're walking on the Camino. This is a full Catholic immersion experience. A pilgrimage. Massive pilgrimage walk. [01:01:54] Speaker B: Totally. [01:01:55] Speaker A: I'm going to be doing Lena Camino next summer. Like, my first time ever. [01:01:58] Speaker B: Like, really? Are you doing it all the way from the. [01:02:00] Speaker A: Not the hoarder? [01:02:01] Speaker B: How many days? [01:02:02] Speaker A: I think it's like 10 days, but we're doing. We're doing, like, segments of it. I just. I just wanted to find the prettiest parts. [01:02:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:02:08] Speaker A: So it's kind of cheating. But you had this experience where, like, you're not looking for specific answers. And I. I've never read someone give, you know, laying out their personal mission statement more accurately. On the Camino, you realized, I will lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. [01:02:26] Speaker B: I was 55 years old, by the way. [01:02:27] Speaker A: 55, yeah. [01:02:28] Speaker B: I was the tender age. Well, you know, I've changed careers a whole bunch of times. A whole bunch of times. And I knew I was in another career turning, but I was, you know, too young to retire, but too old to. I don't know. Yeah, it's like that old. Do you ever watch that show Succession? [01:02:42] Speaker A: No. No. [01:02:43] Speaker B: It's a great show. It's a phenomenal show about this family that's infighting of, you know, billionaires and all that. And one of the minor characters is. He finds out his grandfather's gonna give him 5 million bucks. And he says, well, no, one way or the other, I'm gonna be okay because I'm gonna get five million. Bu. The character is like, oh, no, sorry. Five million is just enough to. Is not enough to retire, but too much to work. You're in trouble, my five feathered friend. And so at 55, I was in trouble. Too young to retire, too old to start. I didn't know. And so I did what Catholics have Done for a thousand years when they have a question they don't have an answer to. I went on a long walk. That's the Catholic way to find it. Because we're an ambulatory species. We're a walking species. This is. This is our weird comparative advantage. You know, if you know how to track an animal, you can walk it down. [01:03:34] Speaker A: Be cool. [01:03:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:03:35] Speaker A: You can walk with a nightmare for those animals. [01:03:37] Speaker B: I know. [01:03:37] Speaker A: And then. I know Savannah just, like, won't stop coming. [01:03:39] Speaker B: Just like, you got to be able to track it. [01:03:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:03:42] Speaker B: I mean, it's counting on you not being able to see where it went. [01:03:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:03:45] Speaker B: But if you can just walk and walk and walk and walk, you can walk 15 miles. You're going to get that gazelle, it's yours. You're going to spirit be lying on the ground going, no mountains. [01:03:54] Speaker A: Keep going. [01:03:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So we're an ambulatory species. This is one of our great advantages as a species is being able to walk. And while we walk over long periods of time, this is where truth finds us. This is where meaning finds us. So if you don't know what to do, take out your headphones and go for a long walk. That's what I'm talking about in that Brahma muhurta, in that first hour of the day, in the holy hour. A little pilgrimage each day. [01:04:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Even the left brain stuff starts to figure itself out when you stop engaging it. We think left brain activity will find answers to the left brain problems weighing on us. [01:04:29] Speaker B: Right. [01:04:29] Speaker A: But then you walk in a Camino, it's like, oh, I have clarity about the rest of my life. [01:04:32] Speaker B: Well, part of the reason. Because you were trying to do how to and what without the why, which is always an exercise in futility. If you're always like, ah, okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna go to work. I'm gonna, you know, take. I'm gonna. Here's how I get to work. Here's what I do when I'm at work. Here's how I try to raise my salary. But you never ask why. You're gonna be going to surfboards. You're gonna be ineffective when you're on the Camino. [01:04:53] Speaker A: The. [01:04:53] Speaker B: The reason that the, you know, you get your life in order is because you actually figure out the why. The why finds you. That's. That's the advantage. That's what we're actually looking for. [01:05:03] Speaker A: You know, I've heard this is the hardest book you've ever written. And you took this on the meaning of life. Yeah, Yeah. I Mean, can't imagine. Can't see why. [01:05:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. [01:05:11] Speaker A: I'm just grateful you wrote it. Thanks for doing it. [01:05:13] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you for bringing it to more people. And thank you for your work, which I love. [01:05:17] Speaker A: Thanks. Thanks, brother. It means a lot. [01:05:18] Speaker B: I'm one of the. One of the many admirers. [01:05:20] Speaker A: Oh, thanks, man. [01:05:21] Speaker B: Yeah, of course. [01:05:22] Speaker A: But seriously, you invite people. The way that you share the faith is just. It's the. Come and see. It's what the apostle said. It's like, I'm walking this path, Come do this with me. So I hope more and more people don't only hear what you have to say, but also follow that path of spreading the faith, which is, you know, more closely mimics how people associate with Eastern religions right now. But it's also how the early church did it, first and foremost. The earliest apologetics were actually, hey, look at these people and how they live. [01:05:54] Speaker B: Right? That's tertullian. [01:05:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:05:56] Speaker B: Talking about the early Christians. Look how they love one another. [01:05:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:06:01] Speaker B: The apostolate is largely done by Catholics, not by knocking on doors. The two great tools of Catholic apostolate are friendship and excellence. Friendship, be a good friend and be great at what you do. And then have people say, huh? And Chris is a huge Catholic. Huh? And. And I'm gonna. [01:06:21] Speaker A: I'm. [01:06:21] Speaker B: I mean, I'm. I'm a total spy. Because, you know, I'm not. I'm teaching at a secular institutions, and almost all of my books are apparently secular. But I say at the very beginning of each one of them, my Catholic faith is at the center of my life. I go to mass every single day. You need to know that about me. Now, let's talk about science. Why? Because I want people. If they like it, you go, huh, that crazy dude. Mass every morning. What's up with that? Yeah, that's apostolate. [01:06:46] Speaker A: That's why the mugs made the best beer. [01:06:48] Speaker B: It's right. They want to be like, I like the beer. Maybe I like the faith behind the beer. [01:06:52] Speaker A: And I, I'm thinking this too, as I'm. As I, you know, I'm listening to answers to the questions I'm asking. It's like, there's such excellence you bring to an interview. It's like, do you lay everything. You're probably gonna say, nap after this, actually, or maybe go work out again. But the excellence and everything. [01:07:07] Speaker B: I'm going to speak at University of Pittsburgh. Great afternoon. So talk to the incoming students. [01:07:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Thanks for letting us, bro. [01:07:11] Speaker B: Thank you. [01:07:12] Speaker A: Thank you. [01:07:12] Speaker B: Thank you so much. [01:07:13] Speaker A: Really grateful to you, too. [01:07:14] Speaker B: God bless you. [01:07:14] Speaker A: You too. Thanks so much for watching. We love you guys. See you next.