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00:00So in this book, you kind of uncovered this similar theme on people who felt like they were stuck in
00:05this simulation.
00:06So there was a quote in there. I want to read it to you.
00:08Life felt unreal, full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, fake experiences,
00:14all curated to pass the time as painlessly as possible.
00:18I mean, does life feel like this for so many people?
00:22Really a lot, especially for young adults.
00:23I teach graduate students at the Harvard Business School.
00:26You know, a lot of people who watch us here in Bloomberg, they went to the Harvard Business School.
00:30And they have an experience. They remember their time as one of real life and real relationships.
00:35And a lot of our students today are not having that experience.
00:38And the reason is because their lives are mediated by technology.
00:41When you put technology between you and the rest of the world, what happens is you get a simulated life.
00:47What I show in this book, what I show in this research is that simulation.
00:50You wake up and you look at your phone and you scroll while you eat breakfast.
00:53You go to work on Zoom. You date online. You game after work.
00:57Whatever it happens to be, the truth is that you lose the sense of real life.
01:01And what that does is it changes the functioning of your brain and you lose the most important thing in
01:06life,
01:06which is the understanding of the meaning of your life.
01:09I talk about the science behind that. Most importantly, I talk about how you can fix it.
01:12But is it that they're holding themselves up to false ideals that they're seeing online?
01:17Is it that they're dulling their ability to interact in real life because they're so used to seeing it through
01:23a screen?
01:23Is it all of the above?
01:24It's all of the above.
01:25But fundamentally, what's going on is that when you're having a real life experience, really complex emotions,
01:30which you have when you're with other people, you're using the right hemisphere of your brain,
01:35which is the why side of your brain, the meaning side of your brain.
01:38And when you're on technology, you're using the left side of your brain, which is the what and how to
01:42side,
01:43the engineering side of your brain.
01:44And you can't fool your brain.
01:46You can simulate a lot.
01:48You can simulate all kinds of experiences, but you can't simulate the meaning of life.
01:51And that leads inexorably when you don't know the meaning of your life.
01:54When it feels false, you will become anxious.
01:57You will become depressed.
01:58You will become lonely.
01:59And you probably won't know why.
02:01That's why.
02:02You mentioned earlier, how do you fix it then?
02:04Yeah.
02:05The point is that you have to live in a way that used to be ordinary.
02:08And that actually isn't.
02:10Now, this is a real addiction that we have.
02:12The average American looks at her or his phone 205 times a day.
02:16I have two phones.
02:17I noticed you have two phones there, but you haven't looked at them the whole time we've been doing this
02:21interview.
02:21So I want to congratulate you on that.
02:22It's only been like two and a half minutes, but now I have, so I ruined it.
02:26All right, I'm sorry, continue.
02:26What happens is that you send your brain activity over to the left hemisphere,
02:30and you stop doing the real work of mind-wandering and thinking about questions of meaning, questions of mystery,
02:36the things that actually matter to us.
02:38You can't love somebody on the left side of your brain.
02:40You can only love somebody on the right side of your brain.
02:42Every time you look at your phone, you jar yourself out of the part that actually brings you happiness,
02:47which is obviously a big problem.
02:49Now, why did we do it?
02:50It's because, you know, we don't like being bored.
02:52We want to distract ourselves.
02:53So I was just reading that people are, like, so boredom-averse these days that we're not getting that quiet
02:59time in our brain to think about people we love,
03:02things we want to do, even the meaning of life.
03:04Yeah, so when you're bored, and by the way, when I mean bored, it's just you're not doing something.
03:08Your brain naturally goes into the default mode network.
03:11That's what we talk about in the behavioral science world.
03:13It's a fancy way of saying that your mind wanders.
03:16We call it that because we need tenure, and we have to make it fancy.
03:18But the truth is that mind-wandering is really important for understanding the meaning of life.
03:23That's why you get your best ideas in the shower, because the phone isn't in there, for Pete's sake.
03:27But if you're looking at your phone all day long, you'll never be bored, but your life will be weirdly
03:32boring.
03:33You know, if you think back to your great-grandfather, you know, he never came home and said to his
03:37wife, your great-grandma,
03:38Honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today.
03:42And the reason is because his brain was working the way it was supposed to.
03:46He was bored a lot behind that mule, but his life wasn't boring.
03:50But if I talk to a lot of young people today, and by the way, a lot of people my
03:53age, too,
03:55their life is never boring from moment to moment because they've eradicated the boredom problem.
04:00But their life is actually really boring.
04:02They don't know what they're scrolling.
04:03They don't know what they're doing on the Internet.
04:05They're just staying distracted.
04:07Life is like an airport lounge.
04:10And the meaning of your life is the flight that never takes off.
04:13And you're just kind of distracting yourself.
04:16That's the problem to solve.
04:17And you first solve it by trying to eradicate the addiction.
04:20You've got to break the grip because this is neurochemically functioning like a substance or behavioral addiction.
04:26And then you have to go live like your great-grandpa.
04:28Is it the serotonin kick that it gives you?
04:30It's a dopamine.
04:31Dopamine.
04:31Sorry, I knew that.
04:32This is why you have a degree and I do not.
04:34Well, you know, but the neuromodulator is very, very powerful.
04:37That mediates all addictions, to be sure.
04:39And it's very easy to break, believe it or not.
04:41The grip of addictions over you is very easy to break with certain protocols, not using your phone intensively for
04:48the first hour of the day.
04:49I mean, you have to.
04:50The two of you have to because you're in media.
04:51You wake up and you look at the phone and say, what happened at markets, right?
04:54But don't scroll.
04:56Don't use it to distract yourself.
04:58Never use it during meals, which you're telling your kids anyway.
05:01And never use it for the last hour before you go to bed.
05:04More than anything else, never look at it during the night.
05:07And if you do those three things, your relationship will change.
05:09And then you're able to start living differently, like good old great-grandpa, which was ordinary for him, but not
05:16so much for us.
05:17Well, it's a rule at our table, like at dinner time.
05:19Yeah.
05:19No phones.
05:20No phones.
05:20That's a good thing.
05:21You know the number one predictor of kids using their phones at dinner?
05:23If the parents.
05:24Mom and dad using the phone at dinner.
05:26Well, of course.
05:26You've set a wrong example.
05:27Can't do that.
05:28Yeah.
05:28Now, how do you think, I'm curious, how do you think AI is going to change the game?
05:32I mean, or is that the next book?
05:33Well, no.
05:34I mean, it's like people ask me all the time, because I'm a happiness specialist.
05:36How will AI affect happiness?
05:38And the answer, it depends on how you use it.
05:39So the brain is hemispheric.
05:41The right side is the why, mystery, meaning, love, and happiness side.
05:44The left side is the how-to, the what, the engineering, analysis, and tech side.
05:49So AI is the ideal part of the left hemisphere of your brain.
05:52It extends the left hemisphere to answer analytic questions for you.
05:56But it's horrible for asking questions that matter.
05:59The problem is when people try to use it for their right hemisphere.
06:02These are the complex problems of love and meaning.
06:04And when you ask AI questions about friendship, about love, if you use it as a therapist, you're using it
06:11wrong.
06:11The way to use AI to get happier is to get rid of all the nonsense tasks, all the quotidian
06:18things that bother you,
06:19and using the time that you have left over in real life and loving other people.
06:23That's how you use your brain correctly.
06:25Are you concerned that that side of the brain that AI helps will become less astute, will start to paralyze
06:33itself,
06:34because people are not forcing themselves to not only not solve complex problems,
06:38but really basic things that I feel like you could do.
06:41My friends are going, oh, I put into chat GPT.
06:43Well, we're already seeing brain changes because of the technology in general.
06:47Can you see them, like, physically see the changes?
06:49For sure.
06:49So, for example, your brain is highly synaptically plastic.
06:52In other words, your brain grows in areas that you use for particular tasks, even after childhood.
06:58For example, you'll find that in the ancient times, London is a very hard city to navigate.
07:04Taxi drivers in London, before the onset of GPS, actually had more developed, physically developed parts of their brains for
07:10navigation,
07:11and now they don't because they're using GPS.
07:13So, you will see synaptic changes in the brain.
07:16However, we'll learn new skills.
07:17I'm not worried about it.
07:18It's what it comes down to.
07:19My dad was a professional mathematician.
07:21He was a math professor.
07:23And he said, in my day, we would evaluate a logarithm manually, and you kids just plug it into a
07:29calculator.
07:29It's like, yeah, dad, but we're doing other stuff.
07:31It's what it comes down to.
07:32The problem is when you atrophy on the right, and that's what's happening today.
07:36When you don't use the right side of your brain, when you don't ask the questions of complexity and meaning
07:41and mystery,
07:42then you will become depressed and anxious and lonely, and that's where we are today.
07:46Is it also that AI is not going to challenge you?
07:49You know, there's this fallacy sometimes that, like, the easier thing is going to make you happier, but that's not
07:53always the case?
07:55Well, that's absolutely true, but that actually speaks to another big problem of meaning.
07:59Challenge and hardship is central to the meaning of life.
08:03When you suffer, that's when your right brain is really active, and that's one of the reasons that we have
08:09a big problem today,
08:10where we teach a lot of young people, if you're sad and anxious, that means there's something wrong with you,
08:14and we have to lower that pain.
08:15Well, that's wrong.
08:17I mean, that could be a big—
08:18That's part of life.
08:18That isn't—I mean, I tell my students, you know, it's like, you're studying at Harvard.
08:22If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy, and it's an important part of life.
08:28Next recruitment video coming your way from Arthur Brooks.
08:31I have a whole chapter in the book about never wasting your suffering, because when you understand the nature of
08:36suffering, how you can grow from suffering, life gets richer, and you find the meaning of your life.
08:41Well, I mean, are the kids going to be okay?
08:43I mean, I have a son who's the age of some of your students, and then I have a daughter
08:46who's, you know, 18, going on 19, getting ready to go to that.
08:50But are they going to be okay when it comes to—you talk about loneliness, I mean, relationships, things like that.
08:56We are losing a generation right now.
08:57We absolutely are.
08:58The reason I wrote this book is because it's necessary.
09:01I wrote this book because I want people to have a way out.
09:04This book promises that in six ways you can find the meaning of your life in six months and change
09:09your life, because I've seen it.
09:10I've developed this protocol over the past five years with my graduate students at Harvard, and I wanted to get
09:15it out into a mass audience, because that's actually what we need.
09:18Look, we will figure out these problems, but I don't want to lose a generation of people in the meantime,
09:23which is why I'm talking about these ways of living alive, fully alive.
09:28If you could give—I know we have a lot of advice, and there is a very good book with lots
09:32of it in it.
09:33I've read it.
09:33But if you could give—if you give one piece of advice to our audience, regardless of age, about how to
09:39be happy, what would it be?
09:39Yeah, the number one thing is actually breaking the grip of what's sending you—what's breaking your brain, and that's putting
09:44it on your phone.
09:45Not all the time.
09:46You don't have to throw it in the ocean and join a monastery unless that's your thing.
09:49But the truth is, actually, in strategic times during the day, when you're neurocognitively programming first thing in the morning,
09:54when you're eating your meals, and when you're loving your spouse or partner or dog an hour before you go
10:01to bed, just do those things.
10:02Just put down the phone.
10:04My dog hates my phone.
10:05He actually hits it with his paws.
10:06Oh, yeah.
10:06No, no, no.
10:07They know because they have a very developed—
10:09No, he hits it with his paws.
10:10They have a very developed limbic system.
10:12They've developed emotionally in parallel with us.
10:14Your dog knows you.
10:15I love that.
10:16All right.
10:17Arthur Brooks, thank you so much.
10:18The book is The Meaning of Your Life.
10:19In stores now?
10:20It is.
10:21In stores now.
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