How to Use AI Without Damaging Your Brain, the Science of Looksmaxxing & Leisure | Arthur Brooks

**Arthur Brooks** (0:00)
So your phone is a tool, it's a tool. It's not a friend, it's not a therapist, it's not there to give you the girlfriend or boyfriend experience. It's a tool, it's a hammer, it's a toaster, is what it is. The way that people treat their technology is much the same way as alcoholics treat alcohol, that gamblers treat gambling. I use AI constantly, and there's an AI Arthur as well, but it's not a substitute for me any more than AI Dave is a substitute for you. The problem is, it makes us less human when people use it in the wrong way. And the wrong way is as follows. We have a set of complex problems in our lives that are all about love and mystery and meaning. AI is great at complicated, information-based problems, and so I should use it for those things in my work, and then it should free up my time to spend more time with the complex problems of mystery and meaning and love and happiness. You know, today, when you've got your phone, your life moment to moment is never boring, but your life overall is extremely boring. And I've studied leisure a little bit because as behavioral scientists, it's a very interesting topic. It's not chilling. It's not recharging so that you can actually do more work. It's a serious business, actually. It's a serious part of life, per se, if you want to live the best possible life.

**Dave Rubin** (1:03)
The young person who grew up with this device, and they say, I'm more depressed, I'm more anxiety-ridden, etc.,

**Arthur Brooks** (1:10)
etc.

**Dave Rubin** (1:10)
What are you telling them to do?
Guys, I'm off the grid, but I'm still Dave Rubin. And joining me today on The Rubin Report is the leading expert on the science of human happiness, as well as the host of Office Hours with Arthur Brooks, my old friend Arthur Brooks. Arthur, welcome to the show.

**Arthur Brooks** (1:34)
Good to talk to you, young man. And hope you're right now having a great time off the grid.

**Dave Rubin** (1:39)
I hope I am too. We are agreed on that. Well, I thought actually you'd be the perfect person to have do my first show with me being off the grid. So we're taping this a few days before August begins. And I realized right before we started taping, you were actually my first guest on the show in 2026 We aired our show on January 2nd of the year. And now you're my first show off the grid. Says a little something about what you've done with your career that I hold you in these very high regards. Would you say that's the top award? There's gotta be an award behind you there somewhere.

**Arthur Brooks** (2:14)
I like that award. I like that, you know, these moments of significance where you're actually doing the things that you love with the people that you love the most. I'm delighted to commemorate that.

**Dave Rubin** (2:24)
Wow, well, thank you. And I do mean it.
I have found you to be, particularly this year, where things have been a little bizarre, just a great, clear voice, not totally bogged down in the endless minutiae of politics and the culture world, but trying to get us to aim for something a little bit better. And I think for those of the audience that don't know you, it'll be fairly obvious why I wanted to have you on this first Off the Grid show. So just give me the, I do this every time with you, but give me the one minute recap. Someone had to say, what does Arthur Brooks do? And then we will dive in to all the stuff.

**Arthur Brooks** (2:57)
Yeah, thank you, Dave. I'm a behavioral scientist specializing in the science of human happiness. It's not what I've done my whole career. I've done a lot of different things. I was a classical French horn player for 12 years, and then I was an economist, a professor of economics for 10 years. Then I was the president of a think tank called the American Enterprise Institute for 11 years. And then I went back to what I did my PhD in, which is behavioral science.
And I've dedicated the last seven years in the rest of my life to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. And so the culture war is off-brand for me. What's on-brand for me is lifting people up, helping them understand that we're all brothers and sisters, and we're all making our way hand in hand to get through the world together with happiness and love.