Substack Exclusive: Why Swiping Kills Attraction, How Technology Is Emptying Our Lives & the Way Back to The Meaning of Your Life | Arthur Brooks

In this special episode, originally recorded live with our Breaker community on Substack, Mayim and Jonathan sit down with Arthur Brooks to talk about happiness, meaning, and his new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Brooks is one of the leading voices on human happiness, and he explains why the wealthiest, most technologically advanced countries have the highest share of people who say they don’t know their meaning or purpose. He argues it comes down to how much time we spend in our left brain versus our right brain, and how to find the balance. His top recommendations: - Step away from your devices - Pursue relationships and experiences the old-fashioned way - Grapple with the big questions in life that lead to meaning His description of dating apps as a “left-brain simulation of right-brain emotions” reframes almost every part of how we connect with each other. He also explores the difference between healthy and unhealthy suffering, and why meaning is found when we get our hands dirty in life. Visithttps://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN http://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN and for a limited time, get a free Immune Support Bundle, including a bottle of Omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of Vitamin D3K2, with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Quince. Go to https://www.quince.com/breakdown for free shipping on your Arthur Brooks' Book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-of-your-life Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik and welcome to our Breakdown. Today, we're sharing a conversation that was previously only available over on our Substack page. It's a conversation Jonathan and I had with Arthur Brooks, one of the world's leading experts on the science of human happiness and the author of 16 books, including his most recent, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Now, Arthur usually teaches people in private companies. He teaches at universities, faith communities. How can we live happier lives and also bring greater well-being to others? He happens to be a professor at Vanderbilt University. He's a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, a CBS News contributor. He's a columnist with The Free Press.

• 0:48Mayim Bialik?

  He's also the host of a weekly podcast, Office Hours, with Arthur Brooks. But the reason we wanted to bring you this conversation is he explains why the most technologically advanced, wealthy countries in the world also have the highest percentage of people who say they don't know their meaning or purpose. Guess what? It's actually related to how much time we're spending, not on our phones, although that is part of the conversation, but how much time we spend in our left brain versus our right brain. And you know, as a neuroscientist, this conversation thrills me. He gives his top tips on how to kind of shift back that balance and have an authentic experience of knowing when you're in your left brain and need to be, and knowing when you need

• 1:33Mayim Bialik?

  to bring in that right brain. So he does talk about what it means to actually avoid devices mindfully, how to pursue relationships and experiences in what he calls an old-fashioned way, and the importance of grappling with those big questions in life that really can help us find meaning. One of my favorite things that Arthur talks about with us is how things like dating apps and those kind of social interactions are creating a left-brain simulation of right-brain emotions, and that really, really blew my mind. He also talks about the difference between healthy suffering and unhealthy suffering, meaning what does it mean to kind of strive for something in a way that brings a positive tension to your life that you can work on? It's a really, really fun conversation.

• 2:17Mayim Bialik?

  Also, please make sure you're over on Substack, following us on Substack, so you can get these things right when they come out. We do lives every week. Sometimes we do them without guests, sometimes we do them with guests, but this one was such a great conversation, we're very excited to bring it to you here. So we hope you enjoyed this conversation with Arthur Brooks, and we will see you over on Substack.

• 2:35Speaker 01

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• 3:05Mayim Bialik?

  Break it down.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's great to be with both of you.

• 3:10Mayim Bialik?

  We're kind of going to jump right in. You know, your book is talking about this sort of, you know, rise in, in reports of emptiness, lack of purpose. You know, there's this incredible survey, the number of people who said that they're not too happy about their lives more than doubled from the year 2000 to 2024. Young adults were hit especially hard, and it's not the kind of people that many of us were told are unhappy. It's, it is people who are high achievers, they're educated, they have access to resources, technology. Can you explain in a nutshell what the heck is going on?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I've been studying this for, you know, nearly 30 years at this point. And what happened was actually, I left academia. So I'm an academic, I go way back. I finished my PhD in 1998, so you know, let's think in the Stone Tool era. And I was an academic for a long time. And then I left academia in 2008, and I left for 11 years, and I wasn't paying attention to it at all. I was running a big nonprofit in Washington DC, a think tank. You know, it's a research think tank. And I came back in 2019, and I took a professorship at Harvard, and I expected it to be the academia that I had found, that I had left. And academia in 2008 was happier. It was happier than the rest of the world. You were learning cool stuff, you were making friends for life, you were falling in love every week.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  I mean, it was the best. And, and when I came back in 2019, I found that depression had tripled, that anxiety had doubled, loneliness was up, self-harm was up, addiction was up, and it was less happy. College was less happy than the rest of American society today. So I said, okay, well, this is why I was put on Earth, you know, Sherlock Holmes, that little mystery. So I actually started teaching a class called Leadership and Happiness, and dedicating my, my work in, in behavioral science, neuroscience to the reason that that changed. That's what I wanted to get at. And what I found was, well, let me back up. When I'm studying happiness, I start by defining it, and, and the definition of happiness is based on three macronutrients, kind of like food is protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Happiness is a combination, it's not a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness, like the smell of your food is evidence of dinner. So happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Enjoyment, which is not the same thing as pleasure. I mean, the pursuit of pleasure doesn't lead you to happiness, it leads you, well, to rehab, basically. And, and so it's, it's pleasure plus people plus memory is, is actually how you move the experience of pleasure from the limbic system into the prefrontal cortex, where you can manage it and it doesn't manage you. There's satisfaction, which is the joy of that accomplishment with struggle. And then there's meaning, which is the big why of your existence. And so I know when I see a big unhappiness crisis, I know that it's going to be a blockage in one of those things.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  So I start off on this like down the road, looking through my magnifying glass at everything I can, which is a lot of survey data and experiments, et cetera. And enjoyment's not down. It turns out that young people today, people my kids' age, my kids are in their mid twenties, they're great at enjoyment, way better than me. I'm terrible at enjoyment. I'm the worst at enjoyment, right? They're better than my students at Harvard in particular, were better at satisfaction. They're putting points on the board all over the place. They love what they're doing, but they're horrible at meaning. It turns out that meaning is cratered, and here's how I know. There's a, there's a test that I give that's based on really the best research that's been done on, on the factors of meaning, how we define that. And it's a two-question exam.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  You pass if you have answers to these two questions, your answers, and you fail if you don't. You want me to give you the test? You want to hear the test? You ready for the test? She loves a test.

• 6:53Mayim Bialik?

  I love a test.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  All right. I know, I know, you're an academic like me, I know, I know. So we love tests. So everybody watching us here on the Substack, take this test in your head. This test comprehensively will ascertain the big whys of your life indirectly, in a very complex way. Okay. Question number one, why are you alive? If you shrug your shoulders like, oh, no, that's a sign of a meaning crisis, which is, by the way, good news. Don't go looking for meaning, go looking for the answers to these questions. Now you got something you can look for. So, and, and no, that's like who created you or for what purpose, all those big philosophical questions. You can't Google it, you can't put that into Claude. Claude will just kiss up to you, be like, well, that's a very smart question. All the smartest people have always asked that question, you know?

• 7:38Speaker 02

  It'll, it'll, it makes you think. You have to sit with that one. The second question is, for what would you give your life happily right now? And if the answer is, oh, no, that's a problem. Now, for people like me, you know, I've got, I've got like a huge pile of grandchildren and, and grown kids, so it's like, that's easy, but what else? Would I die for my country? Would I die for my values? Would I die for my religion? What else would I die for? The more that you expand your understanding of that in your own life, whatever it means to you, the more meaning finds you. Okay, so 30 years ago, I was given that exam, and 15% of people failed. Pass, fail. It's like 85% had really, really solid understanding of the answers to this, and 15% really found

• 8:23Speaker 02

  these baffling, really baffling questions. And, and here's the thing, see, these are not complicated questions, these are complex questions. Remember that the difference is the complicated questions are very hard, but you can solve them. Complex questions are really easy, but don't have solutions.

• 8:40Mayim Bialik?

  Say it again.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Complicated questions are hard to solve, but you can solve them, and once you do, they're solved. So my car is a complicated question. I have no idea how it works, but I could figure it out. And once I do, I understand it. Complex questions and problems are those that are easy to understand but impossible to solve.

• 9:01Mayim Bialik?

  Like, why am I here? Is that simple enough?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  My marriage is a complex problem. I've been married 35 years, I'm a man in love, it's the last person I'll see as I take my dying breath, because our deal is I go first. It's a complex question, but I'll, you know, she might be super mad at me this afternoon, I don't know, because we're two people, and it's dynamic, it's alive.

• 9:22Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  And so the stuff we really care about is really, really complex. And so you say, yeah, I get it, I get my marriage, I get the love, I get it. It's hard to put my words around it necessarily, but I get it. And people who are baffled by these complex questions have a big meaning crisis in their life, is how it turns out.

• 9:40Mayim Bialik?

  And they get an F on the test.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Well, no, they actually get, they get a, they get encouragement to go looking for answers in their life by living in a different way. And that's what a lot of my work was about. So I found that and said, aha, sums up this broken our brains, this change our orientation toward complexity.

• 9:57Mayim Bialik?

  You talk about the richer, more technologically advanced the country, the greater percentage of the population that answers no when asked, do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Right. That's right. So there's something going on in really advanced societies that have moved beyond the mysterious, have moved beyond the intuitive, the engineering-based cultures that says there's an app for that, that there's a complicated answer to every mystery in life. That's us. That's us. That's Silicon Valley. That's what, that's where we're living. And that's the whole OECD set of countries, by the way. There's a complicated solution to every problem that you've got are the ones who are losing their sense of meaning. And that, for you and me, sounds an awful lot like a brain problem, doesn't it? Like we're using our brains a little bit wrong, perhaps?

• 10:49Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah. If you and your wife are sitting on a beach, trying to have a vacation, it is very possible, right? That your brains are literally diverging from the same experience.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:00Mayim Bialik?

  And a lot of that is sort of what you talk about. How much time are we spending as a culture in our right brain? How much time are we spending in our left brain? That's actually some of where this conflict comes from.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  It really is. It really is true. And that gets into this great neuroscientific theory called hemispheric lateralization. Back in the seventies, everybody heard that there's right brain and left brain people. Remember those theories that are all debunked? That there's creatives? And by the way, you know, I grew up in the arts. I mean, I grew up painting. My mother was a prominent painter in the Pacific Northwest. And then I was a musician all the way through my twenties. I mean, I was in a Barcelona City Orchestra all the way through my twenties. And then I got my PhD and I was doing math and science. And I thought, oh, I guess I became a left brain person. But that's not right. Because that whole old theory was deep. No doubt by the time you were studying neuroscience, it was already by the side of the road.

• 11:53Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, and people love saying that, like, you're an actress and you're a neuroscientist. Your brain must be.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Where?

• 11:58Mayim Bialik?

  We're all this way. You know, people do ask you that. Like, how do you do both? Everybody does both all the time.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  All right. Exactly right. So the theory, however, came back in the right form with the work of Ian Nagelchrist, who's the great Oxford neuroscientist and psychiatrist with a clinical practice. And he found that it's not that you're one side or the other, everybody's everything, but that the two sides do different things. They focus fundamentally on different questions and problems. So the right side of your brain is a lot more about mystery and meaning and love and happiness and intuition. It's complexity. The left side of the brain is how to and what. It's solutions. It's information. It's linearity. And you gotta know the, you know, how to and what all day long, but you have to have a why for everything, too. You know, I make my living all the time. It's great. I love my work. But the why is

• 12:47Speaker 02

  that I want to do something good in the world and I want to support my family. And if I don't have the why, I'm gonna be going in circles and never be able to figure it out. Well, it turns out that the more that we rely culturally on technological solutions to all of our problems, the less we actually look to the complexity, to the intuition, to the mystery, to the meaning of life per se. And so we don't use our brains the way that they're basically designed to be used. And that's very alienating. My MB Alex Breakdown is supported by OneSkin.

• 13:20Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:27Speaker 02

  That's 15% off onescan.co with code BREAK. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and let them know that we sent you.

• 14:40Speaker 02

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• 14:42Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:26Mayim Bialik?

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• 16:01Speaker 02

  After you purchase, they'll ask you how you heard about them. Please support our show and let them know that we sent you.

• 16:08Mayim Bialik?

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• 17:34Mayim Bialik?

  kept me on track. Starting my day with this easy, health-focused task reminds me to continue to make healthy choices the rest of the day. For a limited time, visit drinkag1.com/breakdown and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 plus K2 with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/breakdown. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that my MB Alex Breakdown sent you. The way you kind of describe it, in our increasingly complicated, technologically dominated, endlessly distracting world, we are shoved to the left side of our brains, stuck in a complicated simulation where there's a lot going on, but it's bereft of

• 18:15Mayim Bialik?

  mystery and meaning. This asymmetry explains why we're bombarded with ingenious solutions to age-old problems, but never seem to make progress towards greater happiness.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And notes the most amazing thing to me that, you know, my students at the business school, they'll come to me with some great, big, complex mystery of human life and say, I'm developing an app to solve it. And I said, sorry, you're going in the wrong direction, man. It's like, as if I could have like the meaning app or something like that. No, the meaning app is put down your phone and stare into your wife's eyes. That's the meaning app. Or failing that, get a dog. You know, something.

• 18:54Mayim Bialik?

  I was looking at sort of the suggestions. You kind of have three that stuck out to me. Make a concerted choice to avoid devices. It doesn't mean throw them away. It doesn't mean don't have them. Avoid devices. See and pursue relationships and experiences in an old fashioned way. And grapple with transcendental philosophical spiritual parts of life where happiness truly lies. Avoid devices, I think everybody likes. I'm a really old fashioned person, so I love that, you know, this phrase even made it into this. Talk about what it means to see and pursue relationships and experiences in an old fashioned way.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  The way that we're pursuing relationships today is a left brain simulation for the right brain craving. So for example, people date by swiping on the app. That's basically, that's a simulation. I mean, we're in the matrix. Remember that the plot of the matrix, there's an artificial intelligence out there. And it's subjugating humanity and running humanity by stealing its energy, by keeping people in a simulation of a pleasant life. Because it runs on human kinetic energy. Well, we're in the matrix. Effectively, what's going on is it requires our attention, our constant attention. And it keeps us pacified with left hemispheric simulations of right brain experiences.

• 20:15Mayim Bialik?

  That's an unreal explanation, and I've been on dating apps. You think that you are gonna find love, you're gonna find connection, you're gonna like find the meaning in your life through the person in the relationship. But you're doing it by literally this sort of like simulated algorithm, right?

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:33Mayim Bialik?

  Spitting out basically images that you're also forming judgments about like, you know, like he's hot enough or she's, you know, looks rich enough, whatever it is.

• 20:41Jonathan Cohen?

  It goes even one step further when we wanna stay connected to the people we actually know in real life, but we do that through texts. And we get these little hits of these paragraphs that then drive us to be like excited or sad or think that we know what the other person experiences.

• 20:56Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 20:56Jonathan Cohen?

  But we're missing all the other information coming from their voice and that looking at them and what it feels like to be in the room with someone. And people are building huge bonds across space and time, which make them feel less alone. But then it's fraction of what actually being with someone is.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. The whole point is that almost all of the way that that people, especially those who don't remember the before times like we do, that their work experiences are increasingly through Zoom, that their friendships are increasingly virtual through social media. Their accomplishment understanding is through things like gaming as opposed to real life, you know, homo faber, things that we make, which is critically important for happiness.

• 21:35Mayim Bialik?

  You're speaking Latin.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  We gotta make stuff. Yeah, I mean, sorry, you know, hey, I'm a Catholic, you know?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  But, but that's what, that's actually Hannah Arendt talked about this a lot about homo faber, that we're just not happy unless we're making things. Which by the way, is the reason that those of us who work with ideas need to write. If you, if you work with ideas and you don't write them, you will become unhappy because we, it's like stop, you don't make things with your hands anymore. If you're a craftsman, right? That's why if you're designing everything on the, on the, on the computer and the 3D printer, you're gonna, you're not gonna be happy. And, and part of the reason for that is because it becomes a simulation for what you really seek, which is that left brain curve fit for the right brain experiences that you really crave is the way that that works. I get it, I get it how it works and it feels like it's going to work.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  But simulations don't actually work in the end and your brain knows the score. Your brain won't let you get away with it. So people will say like, I'm getting more and more dates. I got a lot of deal flow, but a lot less attraction. There's no hotness. Why? The reason is because, that's why, right? Hotness comes from the tone of voice. The attraction actually comes a lot from the olfactory cortex. It's very interesting, you know, you've seen those major histocompatibility studies where, you know, the T-shirt sniffing, you know, the old T-shirt sniffing test? Remember that, that one?

• 23:00Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yes, that's right.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hotness is ascertained through the smell, where girls will smell a boy's sweat. And they'll be able to ascertain the immunological profile of their potential offspring. Here's the deal. If technology is a complement to your in-person relationships, it's good. If it's a substitute, it's bad. Almost everything that we've got in life that's a technological innovation can be either a complement or a substitute. And that's the rule.

• 23:29Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and also I'm just thinking about friends that I know who are, you know, on the apps, like actively dating and the messaging. Not to be judgy, it can create a false sense of connection. Because whoever you can pretend to be when you are just typing and don't actually have to be in person or say words, you can create whoever you want to be. And then become this connected person with another person who also is being who they would like to be.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:00Mayim Bialik?

  That's completely unreal. So when you get together, the only thing you can do is have sex because that's not what you do.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  But the problem is that there's very little hotness, actually, based on this. So here's the interesting thing, on the apps, what happens when you strip out the complexity of the other senses that we get when we're attracted to people? What happens is that what people will do is look for themselves. And we're very narcissistic. And so I want somebody who likes Austin, Texas and votes for Democrats and who, you know, and fill in the blank, everything else. And pretty soon you're looking in the mirror, that's not hot, right? And so what we want truly, what our senses want in this complex way that's beyond our conscious understanding is to be completed. You know, like, you know, people say, you know, what does your wife do for you? She completes me. She doesn't copy me. Thank God, I don't want this. I don't want this.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  I want her because she's different than me. The difference is actually the most beautiful thing. And that's what you don't get when you're actually trying to reason out the left brain version of your right brain needs. That's just one example. There's versions in friendship, there's versions in parenthood, there's versions in finding calling in your work and finding beauty in your environment. All of that stuff is what we need.

• 25:12Mayim Bialik?

  This piece is like really special that I hadn't really pulled out that, you know, it's a different kind of simulation that we're talking about. There's certain aspects of the old fashionedness, right? That I think makes sense, like when you talk about seeing people, smelling people, like even the unconscious sense that you pick up on, right? Like hormones is a thing. Can you talk a little bit though about what that looks like more on an intellectual and connection level, right?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:37Mayim Bialik?

  Your job, with friends. What does that look like to return to an old fashioned notion of kind of developing your intellectual capability?

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it requires that we actually have a proper amount of contact with other people in such a way that we have a sense of who they are. And they have a sense of who we are. And that sense, by the way, is not some sort of cosmic thing. Actually, I kind of do believe that there is something that's metaphysical about this. And certainly Aristotle talked an awful lot about the metaphysics of friendship. So Aristotle talked in the context of friendship about three levels of friendship. The lowest level of friendship is friendships of transaction. They were telic, they have a telos to them. It's like deal friends, you know? You know, you work with people in Hollywood and people in everything. These are, you know, deal friends, right? Good, we gotta have these things. But, you know, they don't know your kid's birthday.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Above that is friendships of beauty, where you really admire something about somebody. But if that beauty goes away, so does the friendship. So that will be something that you hang around with somebody because they got a great sense of humor or they're really smart. For people who wanna be your friend because you're famous, which no doubt you've actually felt because you all have a lot of friends and, you know, sports and, and Hollywood and all that. And it's weird, just like, it's hard to have friends. And by the way, when you were dating, I bet it was hard to date. Those are people who, they weren't transactional, they were actually looking for a relationship based on admiration. That's the perfect friendship, the atelic friendship, where the friends are actually useless to you in a beautiful way. You just love them and they love you.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  And these are friends that, that you walk into the future with and you have a shared, typically a shared love for a third thing. So a really successful marriage is based on a shared love for, for ideas, a shared love for children, a shared love for God, a shared love or whatever it happens to be that you share, as opposed to just admiring each other, which you should, and having a lot of transactions, which you will. It's based on this, this lack of telos, worldly telos. Now that's really important because what that shows, and in this, you've seen Yuri Hassan's work at Princeton on brain to brain coupling. Have you seen that stuff? Because what he finds is when he puts people into FMRI machines and they really link up, they understand each other, that their brainwave activity actually will mimic each other.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  So they just, a normal conversation, people are all over the place. But once they start to tell each other a human story, for example, and they understand each other, you get brain to brain coupling. And that's what you want with your soulmate is brain to brain coupling. So two hearts beating as one is actually two right hemispheres functioning as one. That's what's going on.

• 28:15Mayim Bialik?

  In terms of grappling, you know, with these, these bigger parts of life, you know, I have an 18 and an almost 20, 21 year old. And, you know, when I was their age, like, if I could have just read books all day long, and I was not a natural reader, you know, I didn't like reading really until like J.D. Salinger, you know, like when I discovered Salinger as a teenager, like, that was it, right? But all I wanted to do was to learn things and to understand the nature of our existence. Like, I know everybody's like that. We don't all have to be like that. But what I've noticed is that my kids are a lot like me. And yet, that piece has not made it to their generation. How do we force

• 28:59Mayim Bialik?

  ourselves, our kids, how do we grapple with something when the culture is not setting us up to do so?

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is a very interesting, a very important point that you're making. So when you were a kid, when you were coming of age, you were totally turned on by ideas and learning. And there's a reason for that, by the way. What, that interest is a basic positive emotion. The basic negative emotions are fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. And they're literally hardware in our brain that will moderate, will mediate these experiences. The positive basic emotions are joy, interest, and surprise, right? Which is really interesting, right? And so happiness is not an emotion. It's not a feeling. That joy, which is, you know, the feeling of ebullience that you can get from Jonathan saying, I love you, honey, or a big bump of cocaine, if that's your thing, because we have very thrifty brains, right? I'm not saying that, by the way. It's a, everybody, I didn't accuse anybody

• 29:51Speaker 02

  of anything. Anyway, so interest is also a basic positive emotion. It's a really, really important one, because we are evolved to learn stuff. And so we're evolved to actually feel intense pleasure when we learn stuff. The problem is, we don't all learn the same way. And we've, we have a culture that's basically kind of diverting us from that basic positive emotion, which is one of the other reasons that people are so much unhappier today. We've, we've distracted them from the joys of learning with the way that we presented it with a, a really, a horrible education system that just marginalizes entire swathes of the population. One of my sons was, you know, they said he had ADHD. I don't believe it. But the whole point was that they were, you know, sitting him down and

• 30:34Speaker 02

  saying, sit there and be quiet and the whole thing. And, and it turned out he has an unbelievable gift. But we have no way to surface that. And his interest only really became salient when he joined the Marine Corps and became a sniper. And then he was interested. He was into it. Boy, oh, boy, was he ever interested and into it. And, and so the result of it is that the world actually hasn't followed our biological evolutionary proclivities to satisfy our intense need to learn. On the contrary, we've just forced everybody into a tube of doing the thing the same way. And a lot of people, especially young people today, are like, I hate it. I don't like it. So I'm just gonna watch YouTube shorts.

• 31:12Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan has an 18 year old, and we kind of experienced this as well. Child-centered psychology, which we talk about, is such an important, you know, revolution in the field of psychology. But also, for many of us, we find that we have children who feel entitled to have everything go their way, right?

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:29Mayim Bialik?

  Sometimes you don't want to read the thing, read the thing. You don't want to do your homework, you do your homework. Do you know what I mean? Like,

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:35Mayim Bialik?

  And I do feel like I've seen that difference. So much of it is, I think, device-related as well. You talk about, you know, negativity, right, versus positivity. And, and you talk about negative people and this, all these studies in this arena, right? Negative people have more activity in that left hemisphere. Where's the balance, right? Like, we don't want to be negative all the time. We also don't want to be positively positive and unaware of what's actually happening, right? Where's the balance? And how does your book, and how can you help us find it?

• 32:07Speaker 02

  One of the many great lines that we tell young people today is that if they're suffering, something's wrong with them, and it's pathological, and they're broken. And look, if you go to campus counseling, and you say, I'm feeling sad and anxious, I'd be like, that's a problem. And that's a liability problem for the university, probably. But, but it's also just the way that we've talked, that, that, that brokenness is, is corresponds to suffering. That's a huge mistake. I tell my students, it's like, you're studying at Harvard. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy. Because you're voluntarily doing a really hard thing. Good for you. I admire that. I completely admire that. That's how I tried to raise my kids, as a matter of fact. It's like, yeah, go suffer. I mean, it can be exaggerated. It can be maladapted. It can become a medical problem, for sure.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  And if it were not for proper psychiatric care, people in my, my family would not have survived. My parents, for example. So no joke. But, but still, the idea that the suffering is the enemy, that's wrong. Suffering is not the enemy. And by the way, suffering is part of life. It's your teacher and shouldn't be wasted.

• 33:08Mayim Bialik?

  I might use the word struggle over suffering, just because I think of like, you know, like, pain is mandatory. Suffering is optional. Like, in the Buddhist sense, like, yes, we're all suffering. You're not encouraging people to suffer or not get help if they don't need it. You're talking about the tension that comes from grappling with the bigger questions of life, your existence, your relationships, like getting your hands dirty in life.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, totally. As a matter of fact, that's an important distinction. I, you know, I, again, you know, there are maladaptations and exaggerations of the suffering that we can actually feel. The Buddhist conception of suffering is pain multiplied by resistance to pain, which is something that I've, I've written about an awful lot. Pain multiplied by resistance. And pain is a phenomenon. It's a, it's a neurological phenomenon. It has both a sensory and an affective component. There's the ouch that has to do with inflammation and nerve endings. And there's the, I don't like it, part of pain. It's interesting. You study that stuff. There's a part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. That's dedicated to the affective, I don't like it, part of pain. And that's a really, really, really important thing. That's what's most active when somebody rejects

• 34:16Speaker 02

  you, or your, your, your friend, you know, leaves you, or somebody dies. God forbid, that's really involved in grief is the whole thing. And, and a lot of times, those types of pain, you can lower them with acetaminophen. Acetaminophen works on the affective part. Ibuprofen works on the, on the sensory part, which is pretty interesting. Okay, so good. But a lot of times, you can't lower that pain. You know, when somebody actually dies, you can't lower that pain. And I strongly recommend not using drugs and alcohol to eradicate your grief.

• 34:46Mayim Bialik?

  It's a very Western notion that grief has a timeline, right?

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:50Mayim Bialik?

  In, in my tradition, you know, we grieve a whole year. Like, you have literally a year of every single day being in the presence of 10 people, so that your grief is shared communally. That's considered normal in my community to be for a year. And then the grieving then continues to shift. But it's this Western notion that, I mean, people, I remember when my father died, people were like, so you're gonna go on medication? And I was like, what? He, he died. Like, that's, I'm gonna try and metabolize it to the best of my ability. You know, that, that is different, right? But there's a, a real, you know, kind of fetishization, right?

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. Totally, totally. I mean, that, that taking the drugs, by the way, is trying to lower the pain as opposed to sitting in grief and in mourning is lowering the resistance to it. It's super important. And, and a lot of times, that's the right answer. Look, I mean, my students will often say, it's like, professor, do you think I should, do I have to go looking for suffering? I say, don't worry, it will find you. The question is, what do you do when it finds you? And how do you make it more into your teacher? What old people know that young people don't is that lowering your resistance to pain can be one of the best things that actually teaches you things. I've got a guy coming on my show who's a very famous spine surgeon. He's actually a mental health professional.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Because one of the things he tells people, his patients all the time, is, I'm gonna lower your pain as much as I can. But what I'm really gonna teach you to do is lower your resistance to the pain. Because we have an engineering problem. I'm not gonna be able to, to be able to change in your life. And that's what rocks their world. That's what makes them say, wait, you mean, I could actually still be happy, even though my back hurts? Oh, my God.

• 36:26Jonathan Cohen?

  Obviously, there's a lot that we should be concerned about, which you're amazing at pointing out the context and bringing forward. But with our current situation, reliant on devices, trying to come back to real world interactions, what do you see going right, if at all, that we should be doubling down on?

• 36:44Speaker 02

  I see a lot of things actually going right in our society right now, because we're learning. Now, the great thing about Homo sapiens is that they're a learning species. Part of it is because we love to learn. But part of it is that necessity is always the mother of invention. And all of these changes, these technological revolutions have come through humanity again, and again, and again, most notably over the past 100 years, when the expansion has, has increased. And we've figured it out. And I see people actually figuring it out, which is really thrilling, I have to say. Look, there's a kind of a, a weird new spiritualist movement among the optimization bro crowd. Have you noticed this thing?

• 37:23Mayim Bialik?

  Don't even know what you're talking about. Couldn't even imagine it.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  It's so cool. It's so cool. I mean, I'm talking to young men and, and women, but especially young men every day, who, you know, five years ago would be like, I don't know, I'm living in my mom's basement. I'm gaming all the time and smoking weed. And now they're, they're actually looking for the, to the metaphysical dimensions of their life. They're actually looking to transcend themselves. They're studying the Stoic philosophers. They're doing all this stuff that's, and I can tell them all day long, what you're doing is you're expanding activity in the right hemisphere of your brain. It doesn't matter. The point is that we're adapting. And I think that we find there's a new day that's forming. I think that there's a, a new enlightenment that's actually coming. At the end of the day, I mean, I'm a super techno-optimist. I think that AI is gonna be so good for us. It's just gonna hurt while we're getting to the great, is what,

• 38:11Speaker 02

  and I want to figure out a way to help people to, just to clear that path more than what we currently see.

• 38:17Mayim Bialik?

  Please tell people where they can find your book, where they can find out more about you. You write for the Free Press. Tell people all things are there.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. I write for the Free Press every week. Every Monday, that comes out at vfp.com. I also have a website where, you know, my books and talks and where I'm gonna be, I'm, I'm on the road 48 weeks a year on tour. So I'm always speaking someplace. And that's at arthurbrooks.com. That's my name. And I love being with you. It's so fun.

• 38:43Mayim Bialik?

  Amazing. This was really great. We really appreciate you. We appreciate the book and all of the work that you're doing.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Thanks. I'll talk to you soon, I hope.

• 39:07Speaker 01

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