Harvard Professor: “Phones Destroy Your Meaning!” This One Habit Will Rewire Your Brain | Arthur Brooks

- Today's guest is an expert on purpose, meaning in the science of happiness. Opening up your phone 205 times a day, which is what the average American is doing, that's the reason you're lonely. That's the reason you're depressed. That's the reason you're anxious. A kid from Seattle, he dropped out of college to become a professional French horn player before transitioning to politics, where you ran the most powerful conservative think tank in America. You can be very happy and rich. You can be very happy and powerful. You can only ever be happy in spite of fame. The desire for the adoration of strangers is the belief that your self-worth is something that actually has to be earned by the attention of other people. Recently, he spent the last seven years teaching Harvard's most successful students, why success will never make them happy, and shares his work with millions of followers online who seek his wisdom to find the purpose. The neurocognitive magic that actually happens with your brain in the first hour of the day, Catholics call it the holy hour, Hindus call it the Brahma Mahurtra. Don't look at your phone for the first hour of the day. In this episode, we'll explore how social media has created the least social generation. Exposed the meaning crisis, he says, is destroying our civilization. And question if the dreams you're chasing are actually yours, are the ones that you were programmed to want. Arthur, if I give you a billion dollars to make an entire generation miserable, how would you do it? You know I wouldn't have to because it's already been done. Arthur C. Brooks. Welcome to the Jack-O-Podcast. Nice to be with you, Jack. Thank you for having me. Yeah, a good place to start here. Arthur, in March of this year, you went on a podcast and said, quote, Oprah, we're living in the matrix. You said technology allows us to simulate real life, but the only thing we can't simulate is meaning. Right. How do you think life feels so fake in 2026? Did you ever see in the matrix? You ever seen that movie? I mean, not everybody has, who's your age? Because you're 25? That movie came out 27 years ago. So your mind is two when that movie came out. And that's really shocking to people in my age. Like, yeah, it's a new movie, but I was a young man, relatively, when that movie came out. And that was fantastical science fiction, man. That was like, there was this crazy idea of a vast machine intelligence, an artificial machine intelligence, nobody ever heard anything like that. And it was subjugating humanity to serve its energy needs through attention, through sucking the kinetic energy out of their bodies. And to do that, it had to pacify them and keep them still. So it would keep them in these sort of pods. By the end of the movie, the matrix, which is this artificial intelligence is destroyed because people, a few people, Kiana Reeves, the coolest dude ever, he realizes with a small group of rebels that what they wanted was real life with real suffering. They wanted real love. They wanted real fear. They wanted trouble because that was the meaning of life. And we're in the matrix shack. I mean, it came true. And again, I'm not a luddite. I mean, I've got a phone and it's not going any place. But the truth of the matter is that for a lot of people, particularly your age, I remember them before times, but people your age have grown up in the era of the small screen, which is the mediating force between you and the actual in real life experiences. If you're using it as your alarm clock and then scrolling through breakfast and talking to your friends on social media and getting your sense of accomplishment through scores and gaming and dating on the apps and working through Zoom and looking at YouTube videos as you go to sleep at night or scrolling Instagram for stuff that's going to crack you up, you've never been in real life. That's a simulation of life. That's literally the definition of a simulation of an in-person life. And that broke brains. What I do as a scientist is I actually look at the neuroscience of how that happened. I actually got my PhD and then became a behavioral scientist for a long time before I ran a think tank. And I'm super interested in how our brains process reality and how that processing of reality leads to happier or unhappier lives. I've never found a better case study of how we've broken our brains so quickly with technology by living in what amounts to a simulation of ordinary life, simulation of ordinary love. And that's what has given us the trouble that we're in today. You've been studying human happiness as a concept for 30 years now. And you've previously said that the number one predictor of depression and anxiety in people under 30 isn't trauma. It's not poverty and it's not genetics. I found this so fascinating when I saw your work. What's one sentence that tells you someone is truly unhappy? There's exhibited behavior, but I have a series of structured questionnaires that I actually have that ask people about the life that they're living. Now, understanding to begin with what is happiness and what is unhappiness, they're not opposites. Happiness and unhappiness are not on a slider. They're separate dials. You can be an unusually happy person and an unusually unhappy person. And the reason is because your brain actually processes both happiness and unhappiness for particular reasons. You have strong emotions that will give you the feelings of happiness and the feelings of unhappiness because you're responding to your milieu, you're responding to the stuff that's going on around you. There's threats and there's opportunities. The opportunities give you a sense of joy and interest. The threats give you fear, anger, disgust and sadness. So that you'll avoid the threats and approach the opportunities to say your brain works. This is the reason that the ancient Troglidite Neal family passed on their genes and Jack is alive today. Great, great is the way that this works. And so it's really important to understand that unhappiness is a biological phenomenon in response to stimuli. So what's the best predictor of people saying, I'm unhappy about my life. The number one predictor of that is saying my life feels like it has no meaning. And that's exploded since the year 2008. How many people in your research have claimed that sentiment like my life has no meaning? So around 2008, I've been giving a meaning exam to see whether or not there's a crisis or meaning it's a well validated scientific idea. It's just two questions. Here are the two questions to see if you have a meaning crisis. So everybody listening to us now they can take this exam. Number one, do you or do you not have answers to these two questions? Number one, why am I alive? You can't Google it. You'll get garbage back if you put it into clawed. And they'll first start by kissing your butt. Well, that's a very smart question. It's a very astute question you're asking. Many famous philosophers have asked that question. It's giving you nothing for you. Why am I alive? Maybe who created you or for what purpose? And the second question is for what would you give your life happily right now? And if you say, I don't know, or there are no question. No answer to these questions. I failed the exam, which is, by the way, good news, because looking for the answers to these two questions is a lot easier than just looking for the meaning of life. Search for a thing about these things very, very deeply. Traditionally, until about 2008, 15% of my students failed that exam. 85% of my students had strong answers. So those questions were a strong understanding of their answers, even then they couldn't quite articulate it. That started to creep up out for 2008. Also have data on this from a group called monitoring the future that about 15% of people always said my life feels meaningless until about 2008 and it started to come up. And now it's about half say my life feels meaningless. About half failed that exam. That's a big problem. Now question, what happened in 2008? At first, I thought like it's the financial crisis. No, we got over that. Something entered our lives. Something some force that was changing our lives. It was the smart phone. It was the smart phone, which was introduced and delivered for the first time at the end of 2007. 2008 was a big year. By 2009, most people, most adults had one. By 2010, it was utterly pervasive. And there's nothing wrong with the iPhone. The problem is that our culture was being taken over by what the iPhone promises. Our culture was saying there's an app for that. Our culture said that everything that troubles you is a complicated problem with a closed form solution. That you can Google any interesting question. A lot of people your age think that if I can't get it on Google, it doesn't exist. That's exactly wrong for all the things that really matter. Google won't tell you about the love in your life. It won't tell you how can I find the love of my life? Who is the love of my life? Why do I feel the way that I do about the love of my life? That's the meaning of meaning in there. Is this coherence and purpose and significance that we actually have in life? And none of that stuff actually comes up through the promises of technologies, through the promises of Silicon Valley that there's an app for that. There's not an app for that. There's life for that. Now this is a big neuroscientific concept. Your brain is hemispherically lateralized. That's a fancy way of saying your brain is two sides. And the left side is the Google side. Your left side is the complicated side. It's the information side. It's the analysis. How to and what side? The right side is the Y side. It's the philosophy side. It's the intuition. It's the love is the depth and mystery side of your brain. This is why you do everything. And then you'd go do it through how to and what. You're like, I want to make a living. I mean, 10 years from now, you're going to be married and have kids probably, right? You want to, most likely. And you're going to want to more. And every day you're going to be making a living, maybe doing this, maybe doing something else. Good. You're an American. It's going to change. How to and what? Make a living. Why? Because I love those people at home, right? If you cut off the Y side, if you cut off the mystery and the meeting side, because you've been told that everything has an app, everything has an answer to the question. And furthermore, you're turning off that right hemisphere of your brain by opening up your phone 205 times a day, which is what the average American is doing. You're going to be all about the cold, calculating, how to and what, and you're never going to get to the Y. And that's the reason you're lonely. That's the reason you're anxious for most Americans today. would you say a different way of stating this is that like the two sides of our brain basically are some form of like certainty and uncertainty and modernity has given us a situation where we don't have tons of uncertainty because all the answers are online and the key to meaning in a way is almost trying to find our own uncertainty like if we're feeling uncertain we should be the ones to find the answers to those problems and make our own meaning rather than like someone telling us what that is. Yeah and another way of saying that is there's there's a whole series of questions in your life right some of them have solutions of problems have actual solutions and some of them don't you have to live with them and have understanding. I'll give an example are your parents still married to each other? No they're not. When they loved each other right they had a lot of complicated problems like how to play pay the rent how to get the car fixed but they had one big complex right brain problem that they could never solve which was their marriage and they didn't survive it it didn't survive it they couldn't solve it and they couldn't live with it and they wound up getting divorced. I've been married 35 years I'm never going to get a divorce but I still haven't solved my marriage either because it's unsolvable it's dynamic it's human it's changing my wife gets mad at me every day and I've been married 35 years to her right and that's why I love my marriage all the stuff that you care about is that complexity it's all that all the why all the things you can't actually solve that you have to live with all the love in your life and if you try to reduce that to the solvable problems in the basis of what's crossing your field of vision was coming but being pushed to you through the YouTube algorithm and I realize that some people are watching us right now because the YouTube algorithm pushed this episode to them right okay make the most of it but the whole point is you got to turn it off at some point not now guys don't turn it off right but at some point you got to turn it off and live at some point you actually have to because only then you have a chance of that right hemisphere flickering on that feeling that you're in the shower and you have that mind wandering that flight of fancy you need more of that because if you don't it's not that you can't find the meaning of your life you're not even looking and that's really dangerous or through your develop Catholic yeah I wanted to present the question of the cause of the lack of meaning epidemic through this lens what would you say are the seven deadly sins of modernity so we you in your show I know you've cycled through the seven deadly sins you like Dante I'm taking it you like Dante you know the inferno because it's a study of the seven deadly sins the very bottom of the pit of hell is pride the deadliest of the deadly sins which is not hot and Dante it's ice cold you know and when Dante himself was the main character he's being led by Virgil the Roman poet they go all the way down it's like I gotta go see Satan it's gonna be so bad he's gonna kill me don't worry they get down there Satan is frozen up to his waist and a lake of ice and he's writhing an agony it's cold he's immobile and he's flapping his wings fruitlessly and and all that's doing is chilling the air and making the ice harder and harder and harder and he's so locked up in curvatos and see which is what the Romans would call to be curved in on one self that that he can't see them so he can do them no harm that's pride that's pride that's the deadly center pride right above that is envy and then anger right and then sloth and greed and gluttony and lust you notice that gluttony and lust eating too much and having the wrong kind of sex that's at the very top and that's the reason it's because the least dangerous according to Dante the most dangerous is pride and envy because these are the sins of the heart these are the things that will lock you in and ruin your life and they're not even fun they're not even fun what are the sins of modern life what are the sins of humanity well the essence of living according to your animal impulses and again I'm talking as a Catholic I'm talking as a human being I'm actually talking as a scientist at this point the impulse of humanity is to be curvatos and see is to be curved in on one's self to be focused on me me me me me me it's so Jack it's so boring it's so boring and forever people have actually done that that's the essence of human consciousness by the way to be conscious to be aware is to be aware of you you have a Jack awareness you know what it's like to be Jack that's crazy compared to any other species but the trouble is that's the essence of your misery you're miserable because you notice like to be Jack and because you're thinking of a Jack all day long one of the things that Buddhism teaches and that every major religion teaches is to reduce that consciousness to other awareness Zen Buddhism is an attitude of awareness and attitude of observation when you're not looking at yourself you're just watching the world without judgment and then people actually have this feeling of peace for the very first time then you know where I'm going with this an ordinary times to be curvatos and see yeah yeah bad because we're we're naturally looking at ourselves all the time every mirror that goes by but now we created the biggest mirrors in the history of civilization the deadliest of the deadly sins which has been exacerbated by modern life is the the curvatos in C that actually comes from the internet that comes from social media that comes from the notifications that actually comes from how many followers do I have it's nutty and that's one of the reasons that misery is so pervasive it's focused us on ourselves in an intense and acute way that is that is consciousness for neuroscientists and philosophers as a source of misery and the deadliest of the deadly sins according to Dante that's where it comes together is an Instagram it's pride in a way well pride is pride is the second deadliest the pride is the deadliest of deadly sins and envy which is what we're looking to somebody else's follower count but pride actually is at the bottom of that it's pride and again we think of pride is like I'm so proud of myself I got 3.5 million YouTube that's what you've got it's like that's not what pride really is pride is an excessive attention to oneself that's what it is which is boring and miserable and we've created the perfect technological means to fill our entire day week month year in life with doing nothing with that I'd had a guest once we'd had a conversation along the lines of the religion that is the most worshiped in any culture is the one that people do not classify as a religion and on this thought something I've been thinking about is narcissism or narcissism that's an early form of ultra spiritual Christianity that shears off the physical from from the spiritual right. Nosticism is the is the opposite of agnosticism that's the reason that at a narcissism agnostic is I don't know but narcissism is secret knowledge is privileged secret knowledge spiritual mystical knowledge that you that some possess and others don't and the form that it typically has taken throughout history it was usually a kind of a Christian heresy that said that all that matters is the spirit all that matters is the soul and all of the these sort of gnostic variants would say the body's bad the body is just like the body is just a shell the body isn't real the only thing that's actually real is the essence of oneself which is the soul the reason that's a heresy for a traditional Christianity says we're body a soul that Jesus was both true man and true God and the fusion of true man and true God is the ultimate miracle of the universe and that's the reason that St. Paul says he talks about the body as one's temple and you should not desecrate the temple visualization you know get stoned all the time and you should actually get up off the couch and lift some weights occasionally etc etc so that's a really interesting thing but gnosticism will never actually go away because it's it's seductive it feels as though narcissism at least to some people who are practitioners of it I believe that God is of the self and it's like the ultimate sin of pride and I've heard some people say that oh interesting Satanism or Luciferianism ultimately isn't the worship of Satan it's the worship of the religion that Satan practices which is that you are as powerful if not more than God yeah yeah that's that's how Satan got frozen into that block of ice that's pride it goes back to pride the pride of the worship of oneself so the modern world has a formula for happiness that elucidates this really nicely if you spend all your time on the internet you know looking at people who have more stuff than you and you know the people who've got shows are like I mean I've had Jack Niels followers but I would certainly be happy at that point and I want this and I want that you have kind of three rules to live a happy life but they're not stick and they're obnoxiously wrong but they're seductive number one is love things love things and by things I mean inanimate things I mean fame and power and stuff and money love those things use people you know people are there for your desires and you're there for your emotions and worship what's at the center of everything which by the way is you so therefore your God so worship yourself right that's the formula love things use people worship yourself now it always leads to misery because it's counterfeit counterfeit money looks like real money that's the reason you can pass the bill it looks enough like real money but it isn't real money that's the secret of being a good counterfeiters to make it look like real money even though it's not. Then you can print your own money and have a bunch of, then buy a washing machine or a big screen TV or whatever you're into. We're going to end it out burger every day. So here's the real formula. So the Gnostic formula that we get from the internet culture, the modern society of the small screen, the matrix is love things use people worship yourself. The right formula, which transposes the verbs and the nouns, is to use things with gratitude, with abundance. This is a great world. Use your car. Say it's awesome car. Use energy. It's there for you. Don't feel bad about things. Don't beat yourself up for using things, but don't love them because things are not to love. People are for loving. We're made to love and be loved by people and worship the divine as you understand the divine. That's the right formula. That's the true formula. And that's the formula that is a behavioral scientist will assure you always leads to happiness because you have the right things, the right nouns corresponding to the right verbs. You're doing the right thing, the right way for happiness. Is it possible? I just scientifically to measure the effects of people who worship the self. So imagine you need relationship advice and you ask your friend who hasn't had a girlfriend since COVID and has about three matches on his dating apps despite paying for premium. Like why would you do that? There's a reason you wouldn't ask that guy to handle your love life. Just like there's a reason that Morgan and Morgan as America's largest personal injury law firm, not all law firms are the same, hire the wrong one and you might be beat before you even start. Morgan and Morgan has been fighting for the people for over 35 years. They've recovered over $30 billion for their clients and hiring them is like hiring your own army to go into battle for you. They've got over a thousand lawyers and a hundred offices nationwide. If you're ever injured by someone else's negligence, you deserve to be paid and their fee is free unless you win. So if you're ever injured, you can check out Morgan and Morgan. For more information, you can just go to forthepeople.com/jackneil or scan the QR code on screen. Again, that's forthepeople.com/jackneil. But anyway, guys, back to the podcast. Is it possible I just scientifically to measure like the effects of people who worship the self? It's easier to measure the effects on happiness and mental health of people who worship something that they consider to be the divine, something bigger than themselves. It's the concept of transcendence. You mentioned that I'm a Catholic, but my way is not the only way for lots of people. What people have in common who have the best lives is that they're transcending themselves. They're standing in awe of something bigger than themselves. Now, some people do that through the vipassana meditation and some people do that through walking the Brahma Mahorta in the morning before dawn without devices. Obviously, watching the sun come up, some people will do that by studying the fugs of Johann Sebastian Bach or studying the stoic philosophers. I do that through the practice of the Christian religion, which is, by the way, a very, very compact and efficient physics for why things happen the way that they do. It's like I'm not going to make up my own math. That really, really works for me and for a lot of other people is the faith of my youth or the faith of my old age. It doesn't really matter whatever happens to be. But the point is that the happiness part, I'm not going to say who's right, by the way. That's the metaphysical truth is a different question. But the point is that I'm making as a behavioral scientist about what brings happiness is that people who practice transcendence are happier than those who don't. What religion appears to be the most happy? Yeah, that's a good question. And I've looked at that for years and years and years. And I want to tell you Catholicism, but I can't. And the reason I can't tell you that is because that's not actually how happiness and religion load on each other. The truth is that the relationship between religion and happiness is the frequency and seriousness with which one practices the faith. And so I have data on people who say they're Catholic and haven't been to church since their first communion at age eight or something like that. And they're no happier or unhappier than people who consider themselves to have no religion, right? It really has to do with the seriousness and the frequency with which you actually practice your faith or the version of your faith, the version of transcendence. You've got to take it seriously. And a lot of people don't. I mean, they take their job seriously. They take their money seriously. And they're taking all the things that they can actually count, but they don't have the sense, this right brain sense that there's more there than they actually see. This is funny because one of the things that you'll find typically, is there, are you religious? Are you seeking? That's a spiritual question. Your spiritual question. The empirical data say that after 40, you're going to need it more in a more structured sense. And that's weird, right? Because after 40, you don't believe more in the tooth fairy. You don't believe more in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. But you do believe more concretely in the master of the universe by which I don't mean some superhero. You're watching a Saturday morning as a kid. I mean, the creator, the just one. You believe in that? Why is it that people actually do that? And there are these theories, you know, these secularists or or atheistic theories to say it's just because you're getting closer to death or you need some way to discipline your kids or something like that. That's not it. There's a pull within you that says, the world is messy. I have learned by the age of 40, we'll say the middle age, Jack Neal, that nothing's neat. Nothing's tidy. And so therefore, there's a lot of things I don't see that exist. A lot of things that don't understand. I don't understand. But that exists as well. I think I have a pull, I have a belief that that exists as well. And basically what's really compelling is you get older and older and older, although many people your age as well, my kids are your age and they have a strong belief. They have a strong religious belief. I, you know, when I was 25, I was a seeker. Right. But one of the things that you find is that you start to notice something. The evidence of the existence of water is up to thirsty. I mean, evidence that the appetite for something implies the existence of its object. You know, evidence that sex exists is that there's a desire for sex and natural desire for sex. We would have a natural desire for sex and exist. So if you have a desire for something naturally and then you notice around you that all civilizations have been religious, not all people, but all civilizations have been religious. There's a, there's a God-shaped hole in people you notice as you get older. And you notice a God-shaped hole in yourself. He's like, I don't know who it is. And no one sees God, even says in the Bible, literally no one sees God in the letter of St. John. First letter of St. John is like acknowledging the obvious, I suppose. But when you're a kid, you're like, somebody knows for sure. And you're 40, you're like, no, nobody knows. But there's that God-shaped hole. And that implies the existence of God. And that's where the adventure actually lies. That's when you can actually start moving beyond. And some people are really, they're, they're, they're precocious. You're precocious. I can tell already because you're looking, looking, looking, looking, looking. You can't even say to yourself, let's talk about the seven to at least is like, dude, really? Yes. That means you're on the path earlier than most people are. You're on the path stimulated by your hunger for knowledge of the things that you can't see that you can only understand at a deep visceral level. That means you're existing in the right hemisphere of your brain. And that's the meaning of life right there. Or if I give you a billion dollars to make an entire generation miserable, how would you do it? You know, I wouldn't have to because it's already been done. I wouldn't have to. It's already been done. I would have put them in the matrix. I would have taken away the in real life experience of loving and being loved. By the way, that's not true for everybody. With my billion dollars, I would try to make that reach to every single corner of your generation. I would make sure that nobody actually looked at their phone less than 200 times a day. I would make sure that nobody is actually not getting their entertainment, their information, having their questions answered, having their attitudes and appetites met on the small screen as opposed to in real life. I would make sure that nobody was left behind. I couldn't do that with a billion dollars. I would need more than a billion dollars. But, you know, here's the ironic fact of it. You don't need to pay me a billion dollars. If I wanted to do that, I would try to do that. And I would make a billion dollars. I could be one of the richest people in the world. If I crack the nut, I'm actually making sure that Jack Neal is never off his phone. That's what I would do. Right. Who do you think that system benefits or do you think it's just inevitable with humans? So there is inevitability about the funny thing that we do. We're highly ingenious species. Holesapiens is a human primate is unbelievably good at solving problems. We have, by far, the largest brain-to-body weight ratio. We have such a big brain, which is obviously our competitive advantage as a species, that we don't even develop our brains fully in any meaningful way to be able to do something autonomously for at least two years after birth. And the reason for that is the brain is so big that we have to be born hopelessly prematurely to make it through the birth canal. Or every single mother would die in childbirth. If our brains were anything like the development and that a giraffe has, or chimpanzee has, at the age of birth. And the result of that is that we have of this incredible ability with this prefrontal cortex, which is the executive center of our brain, right behind our forehead, that clump of tissue, that's 30% of your brain by weight. It's way for thin and your golden retriever, or whatever kind of talk that you have. And the result of that supercomputer in the executive center is the problem-solving center of our brain. Our brain does all these marvelous things. Picking up signals that are below our level of awareness, delivering to the limbic system to be rendered the universal language of emotion for threats and opportunities and signals and alarms, and all that information goes to the prefrontal cortex where we say, here's what it is, here's what it means, here's what I'm gonna do. Incredible, incredible. And we are problem-solving machines, but we're especially good at solving problems that we shouldn't solve because the solution makes our life worse. There's lots of examples of this, you know? Like, damn, I got a headache. I'm gonna eat some of the bark on that tree. Hey, that felt better, that's weird, it's called aspirin. I'm gonna chemically synthesize this into a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. That's ibuprofen. You know what? I'm gonna supercharge it, actually, binding to the opiate receptors in the brain. Oh, that's fentanyl and 100,000 people died of a drug overdose this year, okay? So, I get it, pain sucks. But the resistance to the pain, the alleviation of the pain can go too far because we're such a problem-solving species. Okay, now let's back up to why we did what we did with- and I'm not jumping on the iPhone. I think my phone is great. It's made me unbelievably effective and I'm not gonna throw in the ocean. And I don't think you should either. And I know, by the way, just to get ahead of the conversation a little bit, we're gonna be okay. We're gonna be okay, we're just not now. I don't wanna lose your generation in the process of getting to okay. 'Cause we always figure it out in the end. The opiate crisis is not gonna last forever. We're gonna figure that one out and we're gonna figure out the crisis of alienation and emptiness too. But in the meantime, we used that device to solve one of the great problems in human life and thus doing creative crisis. It was the problem of boredom. We hate being bored. Being bored is a scourge on human life. But here's the thing, boredom is super necessary. By boredom, I mean not distracted by something else. You have these sort of three systems competing. You got the pre-folder cortex, which is your attention. You got the default mode network, which gives you mind wandering. And then you've got the system that actually gets your attention. The attention system that will punctuate the equal room when you've got a paid attention and something like a car's about to hit you. These are all competing all the time, right? That default mode network is what turns on when you're not distracted. And you need it for mind wandering and you need it for flights of fancy and you need it for thinking about ideas you hadn't thought about before and finding meaning for life. That's the reason that you have your best ideas in the shower. My guess is when you're in the shower, you're like, "Oh, I know what I should have on the show." That's 'cause your phone isn't in there. And the default mode network turned on. But we don't like it. We don't like to be bored. It's boring. It's unpleasant. Mother nature doesn't care. It's like sucking up buttercup. And there's nothing you can do about it until now. Now before I'm a little bit bored, I'm gonna watch TV, okay, that's bad enough. You know, back in the day, they would say, these kids these days are reading these dime store novels. What were they trying to do to drive away the boredom of not looking at anything? That's nothing. Child's play. Compared to the fentanyl that were mainlining. I mean, or how do people take fentanyl? I don't know. I was like, "Good, I'm glad you don't know." But let's not find out. We're taping this in downtown LA. So it wouldn't be that hard for us to find out. So the iPhone, not just the iPhone, sort of the smartphone, but the culture in general has driven away boredom. I got this colleague at Harvard. His name is Dan Gilbert, social psychologist. He's a genius. And he's done these boredom experiments. He brings people into the lab and he makes them sit and do nothing for 15 minutes with only one choice. I mean, alone in a room with nothing to see or hear. No phone. They get a key fob and if they touch the button, they self-administer a painful electric shock. And he wants to know shocks are boredom. Shocks are boredom. 25% of the girls shock themselves. Two-thirds of the dudes shock themselves, which shows you the difference between men and women. More than it does about boredom or pain. One guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes and got thrown out of the experiment 'cause apparently he liked it. So you get this. When was this? This was, I don't know when that paper was written. I wrote about that. That paper is about 10 years old at this point. What would you guess it'd be today? My guess is that the tolerance for boredom would be much lower. It was still in the internet age. It was in the iPhone age when this was actually done. This is one of the reasons that we're doing the experiment in the first place. But the whole point is we hate it. And so we figured out how to wipe it out. And the result of that is that we changed our brains. We changed the way that we use our brains in a highly deleterious way. What we're going to do is figure out how to use the iPhone in a healthy way, where it's a tool and not a friend. It's not our entertainment, it's a hammer. You know, it's something that we actually use to do left hand side how to and what tasks. And we're not gonna be anywhere near the mystery in the meaning and the why we're gonna face the phone. We will get there. We'll figure it out. We're ingenious. We're not gonna be addicted forever. But there's a problem between now and then. What do you think about this bifurcation of culture? I've heard a few people talk about this idea that it'll be two groups of people. One will totally reject modernity, reject technology, try to do the self-sufficient lifestyle. And then the other group will lean fully into it, get the neural link in their brain, be on their phone and embrace technology fully. Do you think that's accurate of humans or do you think people will realize that this is making them unhappy? So what's most likely to happen, and I'll be an economist, because that's my academic background. What's most likely to happen is you're gonna have three groups. You're gonna have a 5% margin of people that have the neural link in their brain. You're gonna have a 5% margin of people that are living on farms. And you're gonna have the 90% of the rest of us that are in the middle. That's what's gonna happen, where we're more or less integrated with technology, but we figured out how to not have it go beyond certain limits. You know, there are always people who are the super extremes. I'm gonna see this in politics today, right? You got the populist, woke right. You've got the populist, democratic socialists of America. I was like, I don't care what they say, that you know, 30% of people of your age think it's great. No, it's like 5% and 5%, and the 90% are like, ah, what? You know, I kind of like my neighbors even really disagree with me. So that's kind of how humanity ordinarily kind of divides up. You've got people who are doing the polar extremes and they'll get all of the media attention. You know, the sort of the trad people and then the neural link people. That's what all the stories will be about. But you know what's gonna be in the middle? You and me, Jack, you and me and my kids and your kids and we're just gonna be getting by doing the best that we actually can. Do you think that representation of polarized figures on media actually has a large impact on the 90% in the middle? Yeah, well what it does is it makes us feel like those of us were in the 90% and it makes us feel like we're in the 5%. That's certainly true politically. You know, I don't hate anybody who disagrees with me. I mean, I have political views. I think capitalism's awesome. Wipes out poverty creates opportunity. A great system for overall happiness, although not perfect. I believe in the United States. I think America is a great country. I have two of my kids, two of my three kids are Marines. You know, I believe that getting married and having kids is probably the single happiest thing that you can do. I'm a traditionally religious person, but guess what? I have tons of friends who think capitalism is stupid. I have a lot of friends who don't trust American foreign policy, in any way, shape or form. I have people I deeply love who are atheists. I have friends who think that the typical family system is kind of a sham. And you know what? I think they're interesting. And sometimes they make very good points. So you too, I'm sure it's true. You have opinions, but you don't hate people who don't have opinions. The 5% margins in politics today, what they have in common, is they hate people who disagree with them politically. They hate them. And if you read any of the major media today, they'll be blown up into a caricature of what America is all about, the 50/50 country, where the right has the left and the left hates the right. That's just simply not characteristic of what's going on. You talked about your kids, and I'm not sure if there were any practices you did with them to ensure that they're not addicted to their phones. But from your research, what do you think is the secret to raising kids who are on their phones all their time? Look, if you or your child grew up watching social media and have noticed that you have some kind of mental health issue from it, anxiety, depression or body dysmorphia, you're going to want to hear about this. See, recently, a jury ordered meta and YouTube to pay millions for their role in designing and promoting addictive platforms. They knew for a fact that their apps could contribute to serious mental health issues, but did not disclose the risk to users, meaning that they were putting profits over people. And this recent historic verdict underscores the consequences of those decisions. Now Morgan and Morgan is stepping up to hold these platforms accountable for the harm they caused. So if you feel like this applies to you, you may be entitled to a potential recovery of over $1,000. And if you want to find out if you qualify, just take a short quiz at JackNeil.com/Morgan. Again, that's JackNeil.com/Morgan or you can scan the QR code on screen to take a short quiz to find out if you qualify for $1,000 in potential recoveries. What do you think is the secret to raising kids who are on their phone sold their time? The answer to that is what's the secret to having your kids be any way you want them to be? It's the same. People ask me all the time, "A Catholic people, Jewish people, Muslim people." They say, "What do I do to keep my kid in the faith?" Right? Were you raised? Were you raised Catholic? Were your parents practicing Catholics? They've kind of fallen away. You're probably. Are you actually more serious about faith than they are at this point? That's interesting. Isn't it? That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. It's actually. COVID actually probably did something on people, but maybe that's just my personal bias. Tell me more, because people couldn't go to church, or if they did, they would have to wear masks. They could touch each other. It actually hurt your parents and their faith and their practice. I would say so, because it was like there was high risk of going to church, or what made you more religious than them. Just. I've been obsessed with it since I was 13. It was, yeah. That's interesting. That's interesting. Good, in my view, that's a really, really good thing. But the way that people can keep their kids in the faith, people who are really religious, has nothing to do with what they tell them. All that matters is what they see. When I was a little guy, I thought my dad was the strongest man in the world. I thought he was still strong. He could pick up the corner of the house. He was a math professor, he couldn't. My dad was proud, and he would never have bent the knee to any other man, but my dad was on his knees, saying his prayers next to my bed every single night. That had a huge impact on me as a little dude. Because what that meant was to be a good, decent, strong, masculine person, meant to bow in reverence before something greater than you, truly greater than you, transcendentally, met a physically greater than you. That's what it meant to be a man, and I wanted to be that is what it came down to. I don't remember one single thing he told me about religion. Not one single thing, but I remember that. He taught me my prayers in reverence. See, that was huge, right? That was a huge thing. And the same thing is true with anything that you want. You want your kids to grow up and be drunks, of course not, never let them see you drink too much. Do you want your kids to be jerks, who scream, obscenities out the window of their car and traffic? I hope not. They better not see you do it. You want your kids to be honest and upstanding. Never let them see you take change that wasn't yours. Never see, let them see you cheat on your taxes. By the way, never cheat on your taxes, right? Because what you do in private ultimately will be found out in public, mostly by the people who love you the most, AKA your children, they know more about you than you think. You don't want your kids to look at pornography, don't look at pornography, right? It's huge. And if you don't want your kids to look at their phones at the table, never look at your phone at the table. If you don't want your kids to be scrolling Instagram six hours a day, don't scroll Instagram very much or do it within particular limits. Your future them be the adult that you want them to become, because that's what they're going to become. That's interesting. Is there any one study that sticks out to you because on behavior, modeling in general? I know there's a bunch of ones that taught in basic psychology, like undergrad stuff. But yeah, did you have an example of that? Because I don't think people realize how important this point is that it's less about the rhetoric you hear. It's less about the words that you say, but it's more just about the behavior that you present to other people. Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of stuff in psychology about this, but there's also a lot of neuroscience on modeling. But there's peer effects. I mean, kids will do what their friends do, which is why you want to make sure that your kids hang out with good people. And if you're, you know, junior brings home a kid, a super goth kid who looks like he's unbelievably self-destructive, that's a problem, not necessarily, but that's a higher likelihood of a problem. But then there's authority effects that we actually see in the literature as well. And that's especially important. Now, one of the ways that this is manifest in a kind of an destructive way is to be able to come home from college and say, dad, you're a racist. He's like, what, what, what did I do? You voted for Trump or something like that. They heard it from some professor. They heard it from some toxic campus activist. Campus activism is so bad. It's creating so much depression, so much no contact, so much alienation and loneliness. It's destroying so much love. Campus activism has done so much damage. You know, I'm a lifelong, I'm practically lifelong academic, so you know what I'm talking about here. I've actually seen this going forward. And the same thing is true with any sort of activism right or left. I'm not making a point about left wing or politics necessarily. The activism per se why because it creates authority at a very delicate time in the life of a lot of young adults, right? The goal way for the first time, their neural cognitively imprinting patterns of behavior not in the presence of their parents, they're largely being raised in the wild by, you know, other 18 year olds, which by the way, is insane. And what they're hearing as a form of authority is whatever, you know, the associate dean for campus life is telling them about what decent people think about politics and that their parents are racists because they were for Republicans or whatever happens to be. Here's the consolation. Most people snap back to the authority of their parents. Most people are trying out different identities based on those authorities, but ultimately they'll come back to those authorities if they were unconditionally loved. If your parents unconditionally loved you, then the patterns of behavior that will have the most effect on you are the parents because that's what it means to be the person that you want to be. Ultimately, not always. Your results may vary as they say in the ads, but that's one sort of consolation. I tell a lot of my, a lot of my peers, a lot of my friends who are a little younger than me and their kids are just going through college. I hate to touch on this, but do it. I know it's outside of, typically what you speak about, but as someone who worked in the conservative think tank Washington world, and then went into academia, like when you observe all the literature, all the books, are they written in a objective scientific method type way, or do you think they're help agandized in their writing? So there's a little of both and there's a great new report that actually just came out from Peter Pagosi and he was contracted by Vanderbilt University at Washington University in St. Louis. Vanderbilt is my new home. It's actually just moved from Harvard to Vanderbilt and it talked about the extent to which in the humanities and the social sciences, there's a problem of bias, not propaganda, but bias in certain fields, sociology, for example, there's been a big problem in the literature where there's a foregone conclusion of writing and wrong, and as opposed to its advocacy more than inquiry. There's a place in life for advocacy, but it's really not in the scientific method. The scientific method is all about inquiry where I have a hypothesis. I expose it honestly to empirical scrutiny, and they support the hypothesis where I fail to be able to support the hypothesis. And that requires huge intellectual humility and tons of fairness, and that report showed. So this is not my opinion. This is what this has actually shown empirically that a number of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have been deeply corrupted by this bias based on advocacy over inquiry. And it's a really sad thing to see. It's much less true in the sciences, and so most of what I see, and by the way, most social scientists as well, I know some super left-wing psychologists whom I love and trust completely in their work, because they're fair, and I've worked over the course of my entire career not to do advocacy when I'm doing, as a social scientist, when I'm trying to do science to not do that. Will it creep in? Nobody's perfect. Nobody's perfect for sure. But then I go to the hard sciences, my father was a biostatistician, and he had really, really strong views. I mean, he was a political liberal and he had strong views. But there was nothing in his work that you could have been traced back to his political bias. He was completely unrelated to that. So here's the deal. Yeah. There's a problem. Absolutely, there's a problem in academia. Most of it is still good, and most of it is still really wonderful, and most people should be really confident and relaxed about sending it to college. And it's super fun being an academic, and I never suffered any discrimination in the room where I'm either. As far as authority, though, when you think about social media, when kids are watching it, seeing people that obviously have some sort of implicit bias, theirself, would you say that people see figures on social media as authority figures in the same way they see like professors academics? Yeah. Well, I mean, in certain ways, a lot of young people today see influencers on social media as having more credibility than professors, and which is super weird and distressing. But we all want to feather our nest. It's like, man, I suffered for a long time to get my PhD. You must trust me. Well, sorry. I mean, credibility comes in all different forms. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, that I'm not just writing books and academic articles. The reason I'm talking to Jack Neal is because I got something to say, and you've got a great audience and your smart guy. And this is a good way for me to talk to a whole bunch of people about stuff that can help their lives. You know, my mission in life is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. I did nothing about the medium, right? And if we don't modernize, we don't actually do public education. I learned this from Andrew Cuberman, who's a friend and an incredible generational talent in science, get out there, explain it to everybody, explain it to actually, they can actually use it. Why? People trust you. You're a fairbroker. this interview or any? interview I've ever seen you in. And that's the reason that they trust you. And you're also an authority and an expert in this particular medium. Good. Good. So I'm actually going to be able to have more credibility by working with you as opposed to, you know, pissing in the wind for the rest of my career. Moning about the fact that, you know, whoa is me. I have a PhD and people don't trust me enough. Let's suck it up. That's a fascinating one. Yeah. I think a lot of people talk about these social media figures as being relatable and that the reason they have influences because they're relatability. But I often see it as authority. I see that people are so glued to their phones that they're emulating the behavior of the influencer that they like the most as opposed to having this parasocial relationship with them. It's more about the emulation of the behavior. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. And by the way, there's nothing new under the sun. There are people who just because of the ubiquitousness of the message of their pastor in church that they were, that person had credibility and authority, right? The, you know, the elder statesmen in the tribe, you know, the priest. And, you know, one of the ways that the, in my own church, the Catholic church that has squandered so much of the authority is that it showed that you can trust me, you can trust me, you can trust me. It turns out you couldn't trust me, right? And that's also one of the reasons that people are so eager to see the mighty fall. You know, that they, you know, the people that, the mighty that they don't quite agree with, they want to find personal, the ability, they want to find feed a clay. And so if you had a really, really strong political point of view, or somebody, you know, you already declared yourself as a follower of Christ in your way, and somebody who's a, you know, deeply set angry atheist. And this is a Jack Neal. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to take him down a couple of pegs. Then they're not going to look for a hole in your argument. They're going to look for a hole in your life, a hole in your Christianity. Yeah. And, and that's by the way, when you say that you're a follower of Jesus that holds you to a level of accountability wildly above when most people are held to, which is an incredible favor. It's an incredible blessing. That's the ultimate test to publicly make it known that, yeah, you follow Christ. And by the way, it's so good because, you know, I know a lot of religious people, so do you. I know a lot of religious people that people don't know are religious. And one of the, one of the problems that, that religious people have, religious Jews, religious Muslims, religious Christians like you, me, religious Hindus, is that they think it's weird. They themselves think it's weird. One of the best ways, if you want to bring people into divine love is through excellence in your work, friendship, and naturalness. Be friends with people, like normal friends. You don't want anything from them, right? Be natural about it. Yeah, I'm Christian, yeah. At least I also put on a shirt before I go to work, right? And be excellent at what you do, be impeccable about what you do. And get out, that's a great standard to be held for your own. Right. I want to ask about AI. Before I do that, can I ask you one question? You don't mind if I ask you a question. Sure. Do you find, with, I mean, you're super plugged in, 25 years old, you're highly influential in this world. Do you think that what you're doing in the seeking of your faith with a bias toward Orthodox Christianity? I don't mean like Eastern or Orthodox Christianity, but Christianity traditionally understood. Do you believe that's a trend for guys your age? Yes. You see it. Tell me more about what you see. Sorry for getting us off track here, but yeah, I got to, I got to know this. This is, can't be the first time you've been asked this. The first place I had ghosts to was like, what is the cause of it? But I mean, it's clearly a phenomenon. It's a meaning problem, right? I just think it's a pendulum. Yeah. I think it was so, like, atheist online, so like, wokeism, culture that people wanted to hang out with people when they found a good place to do that was church. So there's a social capital phenomenon more than a belief in the metaphysics, a deep need for transcendence and meaning. I think it's a bit of social capital, and it's a bit of signaling because if you put a Bible verse in your bio, you have a certain set of what's the word purity, a certain set of virtue associated with you? It's a virtue signal. Yeah. Not in a bad sense. Is it more men or women? I know the data, and I'll tell you what the data say in a minute, but I got to hear your experience. I would lean to say that women hold more energy toward it, but like, we've seen a rise in like the practice of nocyism and witchcraft among women on the fringes, and then we've seen a rise in philosophy type stilicism, for example. Stilicism on the other side. Yeah, I wouldn't have an answer. I would argue that women are more energized toward Christianity in this moment, but that's based on nothing. Traditionally, it's always been women more than men, and for the first time since I've been looking at data in 30 years, it's more men than women. And what you find is over the past, only the past two years. So two years and equals to a trend does not make, but men have been getting more religious, not religious for the past two years. Men in their 20s, young men are more likely to be religious and traditionally religious than young women for the first time, and men have turned the corner to becoming a little fishuck in the bottom of the secularization. Isn't that interesting? It's likely a result of influence, or it's influencing men. Yeah, yeah. Make Catholicism cool again. Anyway, I got you off track for this. Yeah, yeah. That's that's really fascinating. That for the first time it's men over women. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you can ask me about AI on the next religion, the religion of the future. There was a survey published in July last year by common sense media that found that 72% of American teenagers have used an AI companion, a chatbot they talked to like it's a friend or a girlfriend. Right. And about a third of them reported this experience was satisfying, if not more satisfying than talking to a real person. What do you think is the most concerning part about young people having personal relations with AI? The answer to that is everything to do with hemispheric lateralization has everything to do with the mistake of the left for the right hemisphere of the brain. So the classic touring test and computing all over is when you're having an interface with a machine and it passes the test of humanity. It fools you, but fooling you is a multifaceted phenomenon. One thing is for actually to fool you consciously and the other thing is for it to fool you unconsciously. There are lots and lots of things that appear in one way, but you know they're not right. Like, you know, your girlfriend can say to you, "Jack, I love you," and you look in your eyes, you're like, "She doesn't love me." Right. You know subconsciously something that consciously is registering in a different way. And there's all sorts of reasons for that. Your brain is unbelievably adroit at getting at the truth. Incredibly adroit at getting at the truth. When somebody sends you an email that has been generated by AI, you know. You know. I mean, it's like and the funny thing is about people in my age don't know that you know. We don't know that you know. And so I'm like, "Oh, dude, I got this thing. We're Gemini's going to answer my Gmail." And it's going to answer it. It sounds just like me because it went through all my emails. And then year, 25 years old is like, "Arthur's using Jeb and I to answer his email." And so you stop reading my email. Now, why is that? It's all English. It's all correct. Maybe it should be a little less correct if are we going quickly and have some typos in it, but I could program that into. That's a very easy, you know, a program, right? But the reason is because your brain understands there's something about the communication that goes beyond what your eyes are actually registering. What's actually going across the occipital lobe of your brain into your deep understanding. And that's a really important thing to keep in mind because what when people say that this is satisfying and real, what they're saying is that sort of passing the Turing test, but it will not actually satisfy the needs of the right hemisphere of the brain. That's one of the reasons that the AI is great for left hemisphere and how to and what tasks. I use it every single day, every single day. I've got all kinds of programs. I have AI agents for actually doing research for me. It's fantastic. Only how to and what stuff. When it crosses the border across the corpus classum between the two hemispheres of the brain into the right hemisphere and it's your friend or you're getting the girlfriend experience or it's your therapist, it'll seem real, but you'll be getting lonelyer and sadder and more anxious and you won't know why. That's the reason because you can't fool the right hemisphere. And why can't it fool it? Is that a yet question or is that a no, not a yet question because what it is is effectively the way that LLM's the way the large language models are designed is fundamentally much in the same way that left hemisphere works. I mean, the left hemisphere is solving how to and what questions on the basis of inference. And large language models are using incredible statistical algorithms to say what's the likelihood of this being the answer on the basis of as proximity to all these other things across the internet using vast amounts of information. That's inference. And this is the way that you're solving how to and what questions as well. Like, should I turn left here? Well, based on inference, based on all of my, you know, my past experiences, yeah. Right. And so fundamentally, the LLM is working very similarly the way that the left hemisphere of the brain works. That's not how intuition works. Intuition is like viby, you know, the right hemisphere of the brain isn't working that way. It's when you've got something that is answering in a how to and what way and you're trying to use it for why. That's when it feels wrong. That's why if you put something into you know, Chad, GPT Pro, which is phenomenal. It's unbelievably good at what it does. Why am I alive? It's going to give you nonsense. It's going to give you really coherent answer, right? But it's not going to give you that deep thing that you actually want. It can satisfy you temporarily. There's a lot of these, it's called a similacrum, by the way. You know, this like 85% of men your age use pornography, 85% which is like, and you're probably like, oh, thought it was 100. But a lot. The reason is because it's a similacrum for the experience of deep human contact and love, cutting it up into parts and giving only the very beginning of that experience. That's the reason also that the more pornography that young men in particular consume because most pornography is consumed by young men. The lonelier they get, the more anxious they get and the more depressed they get. And I've got tons of data that show that. That one of the worst things you can do, the young man can do for his mental health is consumed pornography. One of the absolute worst things he can do. Now, he wants it because it's sort of passing the two ring test, right, it's sort of passing the two ring test of meeting my sexual needs. But it doesn't actually pass the human test to giving me what I want. What it does is it leaves me empty. And the evidence of that is incontrovertible. The evidence of that is just as clear as it could possibly be. And that's the same thing that we're going to find in a non-sexual sense from people who are getting their social needs met from these AI companions. So when you say matrix, like at the beginning of our conversation, you really just mean that everything in life is being commodified, structured in such a way that we, it's so close to the real thing and it satisfies the need just enough, but not enough to actually give us meaning purpose. It's missing this thing, right, this thing, the soul of it. In the matrix, you know what I was missing? Suffering. Dostoevsky wrote a story in the late 19th century where he was able to, a man was able to come back to life with no suffering. And he was able to elect, to live a life, his real life, but with no suffering in it, and he hates it. He completely hates it. He doesn't want it because what he really wanted was, it's just, that Dostoevsky short story, it's just a matrix. And I was like, I want it all, I want it all. You know you want it all. I know you don't want to suffer a lot, but you know you want to suffer. You know, I'll tell you why, basically, it's a scientific matter. Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, right? Enjoinment is not pure pleasure. It's enjoyment plus people plus memory where you're denying yourself certain pleasures. Satisfaction is a joy from accomplishments with pain and strut all. And meaning actually requires that you have a whole range of human experiences, including tons of suffering. You know the truth is that suffering is part and parcel with every one of the macronutrients of the happiness diet. And so if you're doing something that's exempting the suffering like into matrix, or what we're actually trying to do, what we're doing is we're just missing life itself. We're missing, it's like, I wanted pure happiness. It's like, I wanted a sweet, tasty cookie. So I use nothing but pure sugar, and now it's gross. Now it doesn't have any complexity of flavor to it. It doesn't seem like a cookie anymore, right? That's kind of what we're dealing with here. This isn't super YouTube friendly, but on being an expert in the happiness field, I would guess you would study the most unhappy people. It's kind of funny to me, I've never thought about this before, that the people who take their own lives cause themselves an immense amount of suffering in the end, in the research kind of shows from what you're saying, that I don't know if it's like that on the extreme end, but it's probably from a lack of suffering a bit. Would you say that's the case at all? - And so that's a complex subject, of course, because you know the complex subject of mental illness and self-harm, it's all tied up in all sorts of pathologies. But as the general case that we're talking about, is that you've been lied to as a generation, about the nature of suffering. You've been lied to to think that when you're actually experiencing suffering, that something's wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you, and you're a human being, it means you're a man alive walking the face of the earth. You know, I tell my students, they go to the campus counseling center and they say, oh, you're sad and anxious, we need to fix that. You're kidding me, you're a student at Harvard. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy. It's hard and you're doing something hard on purpose. Good for you. You don't go to the gym going like, I don't know, man, those weights were heavy, something's wrong. No, you get under the bar because you actually want the pain. Leg day makes you want to throw up for a reason and you're there voluntarily submitting yourself to the experience. You want to be fully alive, like bring it on, bring it all on, I want all of it. But you have to have an understanding what suffering actually is. Suffering is an ancient Buddhist concept of suffering, which is that suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance to pain. You've heard this before, I'm sure. Pain is inevitable. Pain is unpleasant, physical or mental sensations and it's always a reaction to what we're sensing on the outside. So your primitive brain, your reptilian brain, the brain stem, the cerebellum, you're sensing all kinds of things that are threats and opportunities. Threats that you sense, they send a signal to your limbic system to create negative emotions. Opportunities out there, like berries on a bush or a potential mate, that sense to your limbic system, something to give you positive emotions, like joy and interest, right? These positive and negative emotions, they give you a sense of happiness and unhappiness. They give you evidence of being happier, unhappy at a particular time. That's natural and it might be physically stubbed or tow, you burned your hand, it might be mental, my girlfriend left me, I feel rejected. Both happens all the time, good. That's a really, really good and important thing. And by the way, even if it weren't good, too bad, it's gonna happen, pain is gonna happen to you. Sometimes you lower the pain, my back hurts today, it's just, I don't know what's going on, man, but I wanted to be fully present for this. So Olivia gave me four advils, 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, works great. I gotta say it works great. I'm gonna be in pain later, but I'm good now, 'cause I wanna be fully present with you. I lowered the pain. But lots of times I can't lower the pain. You know when my dad died, I was very close to my, I love my dad, I love my dad, and my dad died. He was young, he was my age. Now, not bad, obviously. And it was really, really, really sad about that. And I couldn't lower the pain, 'cause I couldn't bring him back. So I lowered my resistance to the pain. And I was in deep pain, but not deep suffering. You see my point, right? Nobody's teaching you this. We have to learn, everybody watching us needs to learn non-resistance to pain. Okay, good, lower pain sometimes, but don't say, okay, I'm feeling pain, I better go to the doctor and get rid of this. A lot of times you should say, okay, what does it mean for me to say, yep, grief, I'm sad. I'm sad right now, I'm afraid right now. To fully embrace the negative that we're actually feeling to lower the resistance, you're a Christian man. You worship a guy who practiced non-resistance submission to death by torture. What are we not learning here? What are we not teaching young people here? This is the secret that we all actually need. And when you see people who are deeply enlightened, people who are really at the vanguard of what it means to be a fully awake human, they, when they're in deep pain, are usually not in deep suffering. And you're like, wow, how do they do it? I practiced in the formula and getting good at it. But we're stealing from your future when we don't tell you that. When we tell you that pain is pathology and must be eliminated, it's a huge problem. So the reason you're suffering is because you're not choosing to suffer or submitting to your existing suffering. Well, that formula can give you all the different instantiations of suffering, how it's blessed, how it can actually be lowered in a healthy way, when it's necessary, when it's actually unavoidable under certain circumstances. But it shows you the essence of human life in its way. And when you see it that way, you have more levers for it. You know, it's funny because you know, back pain is a good case example of this. You go to the doctor and I have a great spine surgeon. And what he says is you're going to be able to lower the pain sometimes, but a lot of times you're going to have to live with the pain. And I'm like, oh, I can do that. What did he do? He told me to lower my resistance to the pain. It gave me a repertoire of things that can actually do. Right? And that makes it such that you can, for example, go through life. A lot of young men who are watching us, who are the demographics of our audience? How much do you send 35th? What percentage men? 90% 90. It's funny because 2/3 of my audience are women, actually, from my podcast and from my column, yeah. So with a lot of guys, this gives them this incredible range of options that they've got. Okay, like, yeah, pain is here what I'm going to do. What am I going to do about this pain? Am I going to try to get rid of it? Am I going to bear up under it? What am I actually going to do? Such that the suffering is my teacher and the suffering is a lever that, to a very large extent, I can actually control. And that is the essence of personal autonomy. Do you see any difference in men and women in the amount of suffering pain they need in their life? Or is it fairly similar? It's different in a lot of different ways. So what we find, and I do a lot of work on the biology of neurobiology of human emotion, which is largely mediated in the limbic system of the hippocalamus to the brand. And what you find is that. people have different levels of what's called positive and negative affect. An affect is kind of your prevailing mood. A mood changes, but affect is your prevailing mood, is one way of saying it. And some people have really high negative affect, and some people have really high positive affect. And you can have four conditions, high, high, low, low, high, low, low, low. Right? And so I'm a super high-effic person. I have really high positive affect and really high negative affect. I'm unusually happy and unusually unhappy, right? Some people are low-low. They're low-affect people that, you know, the fighter pilots and the hedge fund traders and the brain surgeons and like, you don't want somebody to open you up as a surgeon and go, oh my god. I mean, you want them to be like, okay, okay. Some people are just happy and they don't, they register negative emotions at a low amplitude. Some people are just really unhappy and the bad, the good things like, I don't know, but the bad things like, here we go again, those are sort of the poets among us. These are the affect profiles. And that's a lot of what I do. I have tests. I have a test on my website of that that people can actually take to find what their affect profile is and then see how they kind of fit with teams and see the kind of person they should marry and to have the most harmony is what we actually find. So how does it, has it differ between men and women? So boys and girls, they tend to have kind of similar affect profiles. And women are, when young women, when girls are actually going through puberty and adolescence, they tend to have a skyrocketing of negative affect. They tend to exhibit higher negative affect. And for most women, it stays higher than it is for men. So women have more amplitude, more have a greater intensity of negative emotion according to most of the studies on this. It was what a lot of researchers have actually found on this. Now that said, there are a lot of people who I work with, people who are real cheerleaders, high positive, low negative. Low or negative than me, but it certainly depends. So that's the general pattern of what we see. And that's one of the reasons that with mental health crises and with the social media, White has such a way more emotionally deleterious effect on adolescent girls than it does on adolescent boys on their mental health. The mental health crisis in the age of technology is more acute for girls than it is for boys. Really? Yeah. And on the male side, I think the who World Health Organization sites that women on average get diagnosed with depression at twice the rate of men, but men die by deleting themselves four times as often. In a 2023 Cleveland Clinic survey, 65% of men said they're hesitant to seek professional help for their mental health. So basically, there are millions of women who have no idea that the man they love is depressed. Right. What does depression actually look like in a man? Yeah. Okay. So to begin with, the data on self deletion is really important. What you find is that women are about twice as likely to make an attempt, but there are quarters likely to be successful. And the reason is because men use more violent lethal means that tend to be more effective. Pills and guns. That's what it comes down to. Pills generally don't work and guns almost always do. It's a reason you can have twice as many attempts and a quarter as many successes is what it comes down to. That's what explains a lot of those data. And that's different. That's different than what you'd heard. And so that's sort of mind blowing, isn't it? When you think about it. So there's a ton of suffering for sure. There is a ton of suffering for sure. But it's consistent with the idea of higher negative affect, especially for young women. All right. That the double the number of attempts itself harm. Okay. And however, do exhibit and experience a lot of depression, but it's exhibited in a really different way. So when you look at the way that clinicians will talk about depression, they talk about rheumatoid sadness. So that rheumatoid sadness is usually thought of as kind of a serotonin condition where there's not enough serotonin in the synapse. So you take a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor like like lexapro or prozac or something like that. And they keep more serotonin in there. So you're not ruminating as much sadly about your life. There's an hedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. That's kind of a dopamine deficit. And in really, really extreme cases, there's a condition that's characteristic of clinical depression or major clinical depression called psychomotor retardation was kind of shuffling and mumbling. And that's an anorepinephrine deficit, typically. So these different neurotransmitters, neuromodulators are involved in all these different things. It's not just a chemical thing. I mean, there's a lot that's actually going on. There's so much that we don't know. I mean, all this stuff is super contested. So, you know, there's a prescribing psychiatrist is listening to this guy, that idiot Brooks, you know, he's not up to date on the 2023 paper, you know, something. I got it. I say this is the appropriate humility. It's sort of the standard understanding of these types of things. And so therefore you look at these things, you're going to say, okay, how am I going to know? It's somebody who can't stop crying, who's just sad all the time. Right? I mean, you think about a depressed person. You think about somebody who can't get out of bed who cries a lot. Those are like, all right, that's not how most men exhibit depression. Men get angry. And so for married couples, well, I'll talk about people my age and a lot of guys my age, they get depressed for the first time in their lives. Men my age. Like your dad. How old is your dad? 53? Good Lordies. Nine years younger than me. I feel depressing. Anyway, your dad at a particular point in his career, you know, things that used to be easier, hard, things that used to be hard, feel impossible. Don't care less about what he has to say, his old skills don't interested him anymore. He doesn't know what he's supposed to do. You know, it's like on yesterday's news and he starts getting pissed. He starts snapping at, you know, snapping at his wife and kicking the dog. And he gets a ticket for speeding too fast and yelling at the cop and it's like, what happened to you? What's wrong with you? He's depressed. Irritation, chronic irritation, snappingness, grouchiness, and men, especially in middle isolation is hugely characteristic of depression. And people are just like, he's a jerk. Not nice to press. He's not crying. He doesn't cry. He's not a cryer. Hmm. Probably if you saw your dad weeping, you're like, check him into a hospital. You're probably never seen that in your life. But when your dad's going through a period of just a world is pissing him off. That's very likely of some sort of a period of depression. Would you characterize that as lack of a meeting? It could be. It could be episodic. You know, it doesn't mean that he necessarily has this malaise that on we of the lack of meeting in his life, it could be that something episodically happened like his marriage melted down or he lost his job or his business went broke or, you know, his sons that I don't love you. Don't do that. I say, on behalf of dad's every place, call your dad and tell him, you love him. And so that will, you know, put him into a funk. You know, he'll react to that in that particular way. But it might be kind of a meeting crisis. It might be, I thought in my life had all this meeting and now I kind of think it doesn't. And then he'll come out of it, most likely will come out of it with medical help or not. I mean, until relatively recently, there was no psychopharmological way to deal with these types of things. So people had to recover, you know, and the way that they would do that is like, what does the meeting in my life and go on a quest and, you know, get it, go and sit at that foot of a cave at the, you know, with a guru or start going to church again or, you know, it's one of the things that these periods of great suffering, of course, these are the things that actually can bring great epiphany in people's lives and great generativity. This is kind of connected to the episodic type depression, one might experience. For young men dealing with heartbreak, how do you actually survive a breakup? Yeah. I know. And first, it's actually worth pointing out understanding what's happening when you have a breakup, a bad breakup. I mean, people usually get all kinds of people who have had like, not bad breakups, especially if you're the breaker, it's the breaker, upper. It's usually not that sad. I mean, it can be, you know, hard, but it's not a real source of grief. But when somebody you're in love with somebody and they break up with you, that's a death. That's registered as a death because it's a death of a relationship that the relationship per se has life to it. And so what's ordinarily happening is that's registered as mental pain and social rejection. This stimulates a part of the limit system called the dorsal anterior singulate cortex. Like the size of the end of your index finger, it was evolved so that you would be deeply, deeply averse to social rejection, which is a makes sense, right? You know, if you weren't afraid of being rejected, you'd say everything across as your mind and you'd be divorced and kicked out of your tribe and fired and friendless in like a week and you'd walk the frozen tundra and die alone in ancient times. You have to be super afraid of rejection. And the reason you're super afraid of it is because you know how bad it's going to make you feel. You're going to feel really, really, really miserable, like there's a death. And so you work hard. I mean, if you, if you love your girlfriend, you work hard to make sure that she isn't sick of you and kick you out because you're afraid not of the break up. You're afraid of the feeling that you have with your breakup. You're afraid of your feelings because it's so unpleasant. Okay. It's worth pointing out that if you feel super bummed out when you've had a break up and it was not of your initiative, you got broken up with, you're completely normal. That means it's evidence that your brain works right now that you're broken, not that something's wrong with you, but that your brain is working right. If you truly loved her and you weren't heartbroken, uh oh, something's not working right. That's a problem. Okay. So number one, it's natural. It's normal. There's nothing wrong with you. You feel wrong, but there's nothing actually wrong with you. Now, second, your emotions lie constantly. Your limbic system is a great, big, lying machine. It gives you true signals about what's going on, but it lies to you so that you will behave appropriately. It tells you you'll never find love again that dorsan interior singular cortex is like, you're in loveable. Jack, nobody, that was it. She was the love of your life. Give up, give up, join a monastery. You know, just like don't even try anymore because your emotions are trying to convince you that you'll feel good forever. It also says, when you get to five million followers, then you'll be happy forever, which is also equally a lie and stupid. And yet, yeah, yeah, if I won the lottery, if I made a billion dollars, if I had that success, if I were so beautiful, if I grew hair, then I'd finally be happy. But those feelings are liars because they're not permanent. - Right, okay. - We've all hit goals that we thought would make us happy. - Yeah, and that's the arrival fallacies, you think you're gonna feel good forever, but the equivalent is thinking you're gonna feel bad forever if something bad happens or when something bad happens 'cause suffering's gonna find you. Okay, so that's the second thing to know. So number one, you're normal 'cause you're suffering. Number two, you think it's gonna last forever and it isn't, knowledge is power. This actually will fade, grief fades. The worst kind of grief that you could ever feel is the loss of a child. That's statistically the worst grief that people can actually find. And you know, I've never lost one of my children, but I came pretty close one time, pretty close. And I remember this was like, I've never felt terror like that in my life when I thought I was gonna lose my son. He was an intensive care. They said, "We're probably gonna lose him." And I'm like, terror, like the worst terror ever because I was afraid of my feelings 'cause I was like, "This is gonna be it. "This is gonna be it. "The life is gonna have no meaning. "The life is gonna have no sweetness. "Life is gonna have no love." And my brain is evolved to say, do not lose that son. Do not lose that son. It means that things are working right. But even when people lose a child, they'll always be a whole. They'll always be a hollowness there. But they will fundamentally start to function again. Their lives will have sweetness again. They will laugh again. They will love again. They will. Why? Because the brain actually recovers. And that's truth number three for the guy who's just suffered a really bad breakup. You're gonna recover. How fast it depends. But on average, you'll find that after about three months, you're suffering half as much as you are now. Usually you'll be dating again by about six weeks. You will be thinking about her. One of the best ways to make sure you don't recover by the way is surveilling her on social media. Don't, no surveillance. Surveillance is a mistake. It's just like block, delete, block, delete. Just like in the old days, there was no choice of actually doing this as the way your brain is supposed to work. And then you'll find for somebody who's not married yet and had a breakup with somebody that, the guy loved her. You loved her, but that you broke up by, you know, about six months from now, you're gonna be like, I'm gonna be all right. And two years from now, you're not really gonna be thinking about her very much at all. That's what the data say. But you gotta know the facts and knowledge about your brain is power. One of your most famous findings in this one's rough, you found that when a wife dies, the husband often falls apart his health collapses and sometimes he falls hurt at death within a few years. When a husband dies, the wife is usually fine. Their words, widows are happier than widowers. Why do men die when their wives die? And why do women who lose their husband do so well? Yeah, I've seen that finding for years and years and I didn't do the original studies on widows and widowers, but that's something that's showing up in the literature again and again, an empirical regularity that men do worse when their spouse dies than women do. Women tend to recover and the answer is because men are better friendship. Women have an insurance policy. So the essence of a happy marriage is deep friendship. Probably your parents broke up when they weren't friends anymore. They weren't friends. A lot of times that what'll happen is that a couple will break up when their kid grows up and moves out when their kids grow up because all they had in common was the kid and people bond and friendship over shared interests and shared loves. Aristotle said that the essence of a perfect friendship is a shared love for a third thing. And if all it was was raising Jack, then this white gray divorce, divorce after 25 years is so common when all the kids leave the nest 'cause they find out they're not really friends. They're not interested in the same thing. They don't have common loves. Now that said, that's the same thing with any friends. You need friends that people with whom you share a common love and women have more friends than men. Now there's a reason for that, and traditionally organized families where mom is mostly responsible for the family whether she works or not and dad is mostly responsible for working grinding hours to bring in most of the money. I mean, not every family's organized that way, but plenty are still. That what'll happen is that he has fewer opportunities for actual real friends. Got plenty of deal friends, but not the many real friends. You know, who have a shared love, a virtuous friendship for the Aristotelian friendship for the third thing, you know, he goes to work and you know, going out after work with his buddies is cheating his family. And so, you know, he knows the guys at work when the people at work and then he comes home and all of his love is dedicated to his kids who move out and start with their own lives and his wife. So there's an old statistic and it's hard to source. It's directionally correct whether it's changed or not, so I can't verify this, but I believe it's directionally correct. That's 60% of six-year-old men say their best friend is their wife and 30% of six-year-old women say their best friend is their husband. That means women more likely to have a best friend outside the marriage, which is not infidelity. It's not emotional infidelity at all. It's just smart business and it's using your time correctly and a lot of guys don't. You know, what happens a lot is that, you know, guys just work grinding hours and finally they retire and they just like follow their wife around the house and she's like, I married you for better, for worse, but not for the lunch. Go get a hobby. Can you please go get a hobby? There's this weird program in Australia and UK right now. It's called the Men's Shed's Movement where they built the public sector, where the government has to do all this stuff. It's so depressing where the government does these things. But the government builds these like these craft sheds and women with retired husbands will drop their husbands off there for play dates with other guys while they build like bird houses and stuff. So grim, right? But the reason is because they don't have any friends and they don't know how to make friends because friendship is a skill. Okay, now back to your question. He dies. She has friends. She has a social network. People that she can count on. People with whom she has common loves. She people with whom she talks about her feelings. She dies. He's like alone, deeply alone. And loneliness will kill you. Loneliness will kill you. Loneliness is deadly. So the advice is for a lot of young guys, biggest party or audience, it's men in their 20s. You have friends right now, I hope. Don't lose them. Your friends, you need friends for life. And I know you're moving around, stay in touch. Make friends, you need a friendship network. This is the essence of what it is to have a good life. And not doing that is a big mistake. It's a deadly mistake. You said loneliness will kill you. And you've kind of hinted that constant consumer consumption behavior of these algorithms of content online kind of leads to lack of meaning. But the remedy to that is kind of being alone with your own thoughts. Like how do you segment those two in a productive way? - Yeah, so you don't have to choose between the internet and being alone with your own thoughts. You should be alone with your own thoughts plenty. Because you need the default mode network to be on as you're bored. You need to make boredom great again in your life. So that is really, really important. But the choice socially should actually be between what you're doing online and what you're doing IRL. That's what we need. Men need to be in real life with other people. With the people they're in love with and the people they're related to and the people that they like to hang out with. And that's really what it comes down to. You want to be happier. You need more relationships. Now how many friends it depends? I mean, are you an introvert or an extrovert? That's the top one we talked about that the other day. I would lean toward introvert at this series of my life. Here's the test. I'm doing a big event tonight and has a big party afterward. If you came to that event and you went to that party and you were there for three hours at the party, would you be exhausted after we're talking to all these people you don't know? Depends on the event, but for that event, probably not. You'd probably be more energized by it, but you would be more energized by it or less than it. Would you be tired or energetic? Okay, introverts can be really, really good. You're super good socially. So it's not like you're retiring flower. You can't carry on a conversation. You've been carrying on this conversation. We just met. Excellent. If you're tired after a social event that generally is an indication of introversion, as opposed to if you're wired after a social event, which is an indication of extrovertion. So that's kind of what it comes down to. So when it comes to friendships, introverts, they tend to have one to three really close friends and extroverts have a whole bunch of medium friends. One of the things that's really important for extroverts is to learn from introverts about how to go deeper with somebody and how to maintain those relationships for life. That's what a lot of extroverts are really bad at. It's why a lot of extroverts wind up being lonely late in life, ironically. That's fascinating. And for me, no joke. I'm like at the 96th percentile in extroversion, which you may have noticed. I can never tell on that one, actually, but like I mean, the obvious introverts are very, very obvious, but the extroverts to me, I always struggle with it because I would have done it. assume that people's social mask is different than their one at home? Well, it can be. You can be expressing and experiencing your personality in different ways. There's extroversion/interversion is one of the five, the big five personality characteristics. And with all of them, you can actually mask them and experience them differently than your exhibiting. Expression and experience are different. Arthur, you told a story a couple times about a famous friend of yours, a wealthy guy who told you something heartbreaking. He said, "I thought when I got rich, my wife would love me. Really love me." You asked what happened, and he said, "She did it." Was there ever a moment in your life where you thought, "If I just achieve this, then someone will finally love me?" Yeah, for sure. And this is the curse of the striver, right? This is the curse of people who want to do big things in their lives. This country, this world, is largely propelled by excellent people who work hard and do great things. Excellent people. I mean, it's like the Elon's, the Zuckerberg's, the Henry Ford's. But one of the things you find about the super strivers, not to say anything about them, I didn't know Henry Ford personally, but it's not to say anything about them because I don't know anything about their upbringing. So, people who are big strivers who want to do great things, one of the things that they commonly have in their background is that they were really good at something when they were kids. Sports, music, academics, and they learned that their parents appeared to love them more when they did important things, when they did unusual things, when they did good things. That records in the child's brain as that love is earned. Love is earned. Love is earned by doing things. Now, that can metastasize as you grow up into a personality pathology in which you surround your constantly, chronically, obsessively, compulsively do things as opposed to being. You become a human doing as opposed to a human being. And you surround yourself with people who insist that you earn their love to find the guys, for example, in particular, who are like super strivers, right? They'll often marry women who make them earn their love with money or with achievements over and over and over again. This flash, you can't earn love because love can't be earned. It love can't be earned because love is a free gift, free of the given. Love is a grace. Your wife loves you on the day your company goes bankrupt. She probably loves you more because that's when you need more love. Your wife, the true love of your wife is proportionate to your need for love. And you know, anybody who's like, hmm, I admire you a little bit less. So sure about this relationship. Problematic, right? I mean, I get it. I get biology. I get human nature. You know, the truth is that when a man loses his job, his likelihood of divorce goes up by 35%. When the wife loses her job, the likelihood of divorce goes up by 0%. Interesting statistic, isn't it? And that has everything to do with kind of a lot of these. Now, this is not a hit on the choices that we make as men or the behavior that women exhibit on a contrary, but it's really important to recognize that you need to find somebody who's not going to make you earn their love. You shouldn't have friends that you surround yourself with who are sick of antics suck ups and who actually want favors from you all the time. You want friends who actually love you even when you're down and out. That's what you want. Do you think men can be loved unconditionally? Yeah. I think men can be loved unconditionally, but it's a different form for different people. You know, I have friends who love me unconditionally. I mean, look, I could do something that could spoil a friendship. I could do something that could really spoil a friendship. I could probably do something that was spoil my marriage is what it comes down to. But within the realm of normal, non-pathological possibility, I'm pretty unconditionally loved by my kids. I don't know. I mean, the relationship between parents and children is different. My kids love me, but you know, it's, it tends to be asymmetric, right? In the way that you love your parents and your parents love you. I love my kids super unconditionally. My kids could rob a bank. I always love them equally. I would not be pleased. It's the way that that works. But the whole point of that is that if you're in the pathology of believing that love has earned, even if you don't quite know it, you'll become success addicted. You'll become workaholic. You'll become quite compulsive in the things that you do and that you'll look for the achievement that you see because finally getting the love that you need and you would just know that you that now in the world of public life, which you're in now, whether you like it or not, you ever walk down the street and people like Jack Neil, people recognize you in the airport. No, they're right. Young guys, they recognize you in the airport. If you get to the point where you feel like I want that, I want that. That's a problem because the desire for the adoration of strangers is the belief that your self worth is something that actually has to be earned by the attention of other people. That's a very natural thing. That could be cultivated just by virtue of the fact that you get a little rush of dopamine with somebody walks up to you on the street and say, I love your show, right? Huh? He loves my show. We all fall prey to that. Now, the more that we're in public life and the more that we seek success, the more that success is seductive to us, the more that we're going to be prone to that. And I have that too. It's like anybody else. I've marginalized relationships in my life and pursued that. I'm not proud of it. I tried to fix it. One of the reasons I study happiness is because I want more of it personally. Arthur, you're a well-connected guy. You speak regularly on guessing with a lot of the people that the average guy would consider to be like the people making policy, the people that are celebrities, the people that are ultra wealthy. What are the things they ask you about? So a lot of the things that they ask me about are the same things that anybody would ask me about. How do I have a better marriage? But many of the things that the most successful people ask me about is how to understand why not far a field from your last question. Why do I feel so empty? My dreams come true, but I don't feel it. Why am I so afraid of the future? How do I stop? How do I stop doing this thing that I don't love? And I can't do forever. But I don't know anything else to do. They're on the treadmill. They're stuck. You heard of the hedonic treadmill. That's that metaphor where to get the feeling you got to keep running and running and running because your emotions are transient. And so the problem with the hedonic treadmill for the super successful is that it's speeding up. And if you're on a speeding treadmill, it's not just that you're not going to feel good when it stops. If it stops, you're going to wipe out. You're going to face plant. You're afraid of the injury that's going to happen to you when it stops. That's that's the real problem. That's the hedonic treadmill twist that you get for people. And so I've had to coach people on how to stop being successful. A lot on how to stop being famous. I had a stop trying to get richer. I had a stop having power over the people. It is very much like what if I were a drug and alcohol rehabilitation counselor, how to tell people to stop looking for the pleasure from the drugs and the sex. Is it harder to be happy when you're famous, wealthy or have a lot of power and influence? So the worst of the three is fame. Now this is paradoxical. Where we want fame and fame takes different forms. You know, in my world of academia is like the prestige of walking into a room of scholars and saying, that's Professor Neil, he wrote that famous paper in 1998, right? And you're like, who cares? But he does. Right. It's to have the right people. Thank you. A lot of people now in the world of Internet influencers and YouTubers is the adoration of strangers. You know, I have a lot of followers and have a follower count. I was just talking to somebody yesterday about this research that shows that that addicts tend to quantify everything. And one of the signs that you're addicted to something is that you're counting it compulsively. The limbic brain, the hypothalamic and limbic brain counts. So if you're addicted to barbituits, you'll know how many pills are in the bottle all the time. If you're anorexic, you'll be able to look at a plate and know exactly how many calories are there. If you're addicted to the fame that you actually have from the internet, you'll know all the time how many followers you have. So that's the key thing. We want that because that's how we know that's how we quantify our prestige. And prestige is really important. Famous is really important. So you can rise in your clan. You have a natural and that's what gets you more mates. That's what to get you more protection. That's what gets you more calories in the place to see 250,000 years ago. And you have the same brain now as you had then. And so the result is you have a desire. Now it's okay with 30 to 50 people. It might make you a little bit miserable to get back to the Satan flapping his wings fruitlessly and the sea of ice. But it's completely pathological. When the tribe of 30 to 50 turned into 300 to 500 million people on the internet. Your brain can't accommodate that. That's nuts. You know, in the year 1600, the Pope in Rome could walk down the streets of Paris and go completely unrecognized. There's no photography. Nobody would even look like. Right. Now Jack Neil can walk down the streets of Paris and somebody can go, "Is Jagnil Jagnil?" It's craziness and the result is that that that will capture your brain. That will capture the dopamine circuits in your brain and make you say, "I want it. I want it. I don't know why." Because you're - It's nice to see Jack. - It's hubris. - Well, it's hubris, but that makes it sound like it's a vice. It makes it sound like it's a moral failing. You know, it can be a moral failing if you give into it. Is it like anything else? Like you have in five years, very high degree of likelihood you're gonna be a married man. You're still gonna be attracted to other women. The cross your field of view. It's not evidence of moral failing that she's pretty. It's evidence of moral failing if you proposition her and are disloyal to your wife. See what I'm saying? - I disagree with that. - You think that actually being attracted to her is a moral failing? - I mean, what's it mean to be attracted, right? - You look at it as if she's pretty. - Based on, yeah, but your desire is biological. The action on the desire. See, okay, so here's what I'm saying. The prefrontal cortex of the human brain gives you two choices in almost every instance. Animal impulse or moral aspiration. This is the great thing about the prefrontal cortex. Your dog only has animal impulse, but you get to choose moral aspiration. Animal impulse is she's pretty. Moral aspiration is, but she's not my wife. See what I'm saying? And so if you see, if it feels good to you because somebody recognizes you in the airport, that's just your limbic system. There's just a little reward, a little reward. But if you're like, you know what? I'm gonna dedicate myself to getting it every day for the rest of my life, that's humorous. And that's failing in the space of moral aspiration. And that's a wholesale phenomenon in internet culture. - Right. - You previously told the story of your middle child, Carlos. - My son, Carlos. - Yeah. - Carlitos, six foot five. - What's the one job for men who want to raise successful sons? And then how do you keep them successful if they're on a bad path? - Yeah. - So the number one secret to raising a successful son is to be a good man. That's it, to be a good man. Now what does that mean, right? But that's what we're trying to do. What does it mean to be a good man? To be a good man is not to earn beyond your needs and marginalize your family. It's to be a person of good character who's impeccable with his word, who has complete integrity, who's totally honest and who most importantly loves his mom. You know the guy, kind of got one job. Go love his mom. It's what it comes down to. But be a good man. Am I a good man or am I not? Now you worry because there's a lot of stuff outside of your control, but you know what? That's the problem with life. People go through life saying, you know I'm gonna be happy when the economy changes. I'm gonna be happy when, you know, when my wife starts being nice to me again. I'm gonna be happy when the situation changes in my job. That's the wrong way to live. Focus on what you can, stick to your knitting. Focus on what you can actually do to change inside you as opposed to the whole outside world. It's insane to try to wait for the whole outside world to change or to try to change the whole outside world. You wanna change you as much as you possibly can. So that's the number one job. Now on top of that, there's lots of circumstances that can be, you can make your kid trouble, right? I was trouble when I was in eighth grade. My parents were gonna send me to boarding school in Canada. That's how much trouble I was, right? They relented in the end, thank God. I made a whole bunch of promises, which I mostly kept, or at least I kept the truth from them. And I became better at hiding my behavior, I think that's what it came down to. But the truth is that then you wanna take particular actions. So what are you gonna do about that? Now there's discipline, there's rules, there's all sorts of patterns of behavior that we can try to instantiate. But there's one special thing that I think is a really important tool for everybody who's religious. There was one really bad stretch when Carlos was a senior in high school. And I can tell this stuff now because Carlos isn't really upstanding, so he doesn't need to be able to get two sons. He's a Marine Corps veteran. He's halfway through college at the age of 26. He's got all this work he does on the side. He's economically, he owns his own home. He's happily married to a great girl. And so it's all well that ends well. So it's not like there's any bad ending of the story. So I can go back and talk about the toughest times. Now remember, he's a senior in high school and I was getting a call from the headmaster of his school into this Catholic prep school. It's like, you know, Carlos didn't show it for school today. Carlos just got an F and math. Carlos might not graduate on time, it's horrible. My wife's like, at least we know he's not cheating. It's horrible. And we were praying about it. We were praying about it. We pray together every night. And she said this. Really had a huge impact on me. She said, Lord, you're having a problem with your son, Carlos. How can I help? And you know, in a way, if you're all religious and you believe that we're children of God, if anybody believes that, not everybody watching us believes this, not everybody watching us is there. You and I, we're there. And so I figured that out years after he was born. If you go into your fatherhood experience, which is gonna, he's gonna come to you, saying, Lord, this is your son, how can I help? That's the most you can do. Outside of being the man that you want your son to see. Why do you feel as though that is so effective? I'll give you the metaphysical on the side of your answers. That will align your behavior to the most constructive thing that you can do. When my kids were born, I was in my early 30s when my kids started coming, right? My brother's kids started coming when he was in his early 20s and he was, he is older than me. So his kids were like teenagers when my kids were being born. And I called him up. My brother Jeff, he's Seattle, he's great. I really have tons of admiration for him. He's a really good dad. And I said, Jeff, give me one piece of advice. Lost. And he said, thought about it. He's a really understated guy. He says, don't freak out. I said, what do you mean? He said, you'll see. You'll see you're going to want to freak out. Don't freak out. Everything has a solution. When you actually devote that your will, you sublimate your will of the divine. When you basically say, I offer this up. This is out of my control. I will do what I can. That's the essence of not freaking out. You naturally do the right thing. You manifest the right thing. You don't try to force. I mean, this is the Buddhist concept of force and resistance. No resistance, no force. It's really, really good for parenting. 'Cause you can't force these things and things always get worse. Force and parenting is what my brother would say. It's freak out. And to say, how can I help? It's a very different thing than I'm going to show them what's what. I'm going to show them what's what. Every time I made a mistake with my kids, my three kids, it was always 'cause I was forcing and resisting. Every time I did things right is because I was offering things up and I was trying to help. I was trying to be more helpful. I was trying to help my kids. I was trying to help my wife. I was trying to act in accordance with my own values. And that's what actually made that so. That's the whole process of manifestation. As a social science matter. When you pray, when you make your desires known to God, when you pray, you align your actions toward that. That's the reason that petitionary prayer. That's the social science secular reason why petitionary prayer works. Now, the metaphysical side of it is that that's the, if you're a Christian man, that's the deal you're making with God. Deal with what you're making with God is like, I believe that I'm your child. I believe that he's your child. I believe that you'd love your children. And I'm aligning my will with yours. That's the metaphysical truth. And look, we believe, Jack, we believe it or we don't. Either we, it's like, he's so funny because we go through life like Lord, guide my path but we don't mean it. We don't actually mean it. You know what's really good and adventurous and strong is to say something and actually mean it. It's crazy, you know? And that's a perfect time to trust yourself. Yeah, that's, and you know, there are a lot of people who they want to be, you know, yeah, I'm Christian. Yeah, I want to be a Christian, but it's really up to me. It really is up to me. Look, do you believe these things? Do you not believe these things and laying down in front of it? And say there is only so much that I can do paradoxically is what aligns you to do the most that you can do. As a Catholic Christian man, when you think about free will and you think about identity, do you think there's anything to me saying, I am a wealthy person. I'm the type of person that wealth comes to me. Do you think there's any metaphysical thing that God triggers to allow you to have free will within your identity? Yeah, so yes, sure. So there's sort of two things in there to unpack that a little but there's the whole concept of sort of new age manifestation. I'm going to look at myself in the mirror and I say, I have a billionaire, you know, and I'm going to manifest all these things so that the wheels will turn to the universe, there's no evidence of that. But it is evidence that manifestation techniques actually work to align your behavior to your desire, right? So the more that you do that, you see yourself as such. That's one of the reasons that I had breakfast yesterday with Michael Jervais, who was one of the performance coaches at the Seattle Seahawks and one of the things he talks about is them visualizing winning. visualize your way. What that will do is you'll practice prospectively, you know, you'll go up one branch toward when he say, "That's not winning." And you'll go up another branch and say, "Uh, the interception, hmm, hmm, hmm." Well, go up another branch and say, "Ah!" And you're practicing the future, practicing the future. When you're doing that kind of manifestation, and that's the time travel that makes us the dominant species. I mean, the dog can't do manifestation because they can't practice prospection. He can't time travel because his prefrontal cortex is too rudimentary to do that. That's why we're so good at what we do. So that's the case on all that. But the essence of your question is, "Okay, so if I'm, you know, if I say I am a wealthy person to God, and I have that particular identity, I don't actually think that that necessarily is the right way to go about it, because I think the right thing to do is not to say, "God, I'm a billionaire," to say, "God, what is your will? What is your will?" Number one, here's what I want. But what I really, really want is, is, is your will be done. And I want to want your will. I want a will your will. That's, so you see free will as a choice of either you submit to God or go against it. I think our free will is whether or not we're aligning ourselves with God's will or not. But by the way, that's free will. Yeah, that's free will. That's real free will. And that's you can go orthogonal to that. And that's it, like, probably feel, that's at least the logic that's an exercise in futility is what it comes down to. But that's super hard to do. You know, super hard to do. And when you really, really want something, but I mean, not like I want to be a billionaire, because who cares? It's really more like, I want my child to live. I want my child to live. Of course you do. Of course you do. But the really mature thing to do is, I want my child to live, but I want to want your will, even when it's painful. That's fully alive. Last one, what's one behavior everyone should delete to find more meaning in their life? Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of things that are really metaphysical, like you talk about, you know, trying to align yourself spiritually with the device center. But the one thing, and I'm just going to be a really practical, don't look at your phone for the first hour of the day. The neuro cognitive programming that happens at the first hour of the day is magical. That's why that's why Catholics call it the Holy Hour. That's why Hindus call it a Brahma Mahorta. That's super important that you actually not contaminate the Holy Hour, the neuro cognitive magic that actually happens with your brain in the first hour of the day, by filling it up with devices. That's a really important thing to do. Look, I know that you know, we're all doing businesses and okay, open it up. Nothing in fire. First hour is free. First hour is free. That's the one practical thing that will virtually guarantee greater activity in the right hemisphere of your brain, in which not that you find your meaning, but you allow your meaning to find you. I love that. I bet it completely changes your day. It's amazing. Well, everyone, this has been your guest Arthur C. Brooks. This is the Jack Neil podcast. I appreciate you coming on, brother. Thank you, Jack. Where can people find you? Arthur Brooks.com. You know, I write a column in the free press. I have a podcast called office hours with Arthur Brooks and one stop shopping is that's all posted on my on my website where you can take free surveys and all kinds of cool stuff to learn about how to be a happier person and the amazing science of well-being. Beautiful. See you guys.