Yeah, your purpose. Your destiny is to love. My destiny is to love. And I, of course, would die for my

kids and die for beliefs. And as you say, hopefully, for friends. And your co-host. And my co-host.

That's right. I'm Rufus Criscombe. And I'm Caleb Bissinger. And this is the next big idea.

Today, the meaning of life. I like how you're really under-promising there.

Yeah, I want to manage expectations.

But we are just going to try to explain why we're here today.

I mean, this is just a breezy topic, you know, for philosophers, theologians, poets.

But our guest today says this question isn't just a chinstrumming luxury for men and women of leisure.

It's a central part of the daily challenge we all have to stay sane.

Because if your life starts to feel meaningless, it's not just spiritually inconvenient.

It turns out this makes us anxious, compulsive, lonely, and weirdly vulnerable to conspiracy theories.

Arthur C. Brooks has a new book coming out tomorrow.

It's called The Meaning of Your Life.

And he says, modern life is practically engineered to

produce exactly that condition. We built a world that's astonishingly good at giving us stimulation,

notifications, options, hacks, headlines, things to optimize, but spectacularly bad at answering

the most important questions.

Why am I doing what I'm doing? Why does my life matter? Why, after six minutes on my phone,

do I feel like the spiritual equivalent of having finished a family-sized bag of Doritos?

Coming up after the break, the importance of boredom, the tyranny of dopamine, the prescience of the matrix, the real difference between the two hemispheres of the brain, and yes to the next big idea podcast.

Thank you, Rufus, and thank you to you too, Caleb. Nice to see you both.

Well, the topic of your forthcoming book, The Meeting of Life, is a topic, Arthur, that I think of as

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