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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 551: The Science of Happiness Every Parent Needs to Hear | Arthur Brooks, The Happiness Files
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- [00:00]
Arthur Brooks
Support for this podcast and the following message comes from America's Navy. The Navy offers new graduates hands on training and experience in careers like computer science, aviation and medicine, plus education. And sign on bonuses. Parents help your grads start their career.
- [00:18]
Jenny Ertz
Today@Navy.Com welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Ertz. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I am so excited about today's guest. Arthur Brooks is here. Welcome.
- [00:31]
Arthur Brooks
Thanks. It's so great to be with you. Thanks for having me on this wonderful show.
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Jenny Ertz
So, Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, PhD, social scientist, number one best selling author, columnist at the Atlantic. You speak all over the world and you have written so many phenomenal books. I have five right here.
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Arthur Brooks
Amazing.
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Jenny Ertz
And I know you have way more than this. Five of them. I've read four and a quarter. So the newest one that's coming out and will be out when this podcast airs is called the Happiness Files and insights on work and life. But I have also read and you have just been book after book after book. It's like 2021, 2022, 2023. From strength to strength. Every person in the entire world should read this book, Finding success, happiness and deep purpose in the second half of life. It has like 7,000Amazon reviews. I read the conservative heart. I read build the life you want that you wrote with Oprah. And then I read part of love your enemies and they're all page turners and they all have topics in them that I have not considered. And so I would love to start here with this thought of it feels like the cultural message, even if nobody really talks about it, that our whole purpose in life outside of faith is to retire. Like if you were to say, what is the purpose of life? It feels like, well, why do we do kindergarten? Well, why do we do third grade? It's, you know, it's for the next thing and the next thing and then it's college and then it's to work. And then so that what? So that eventually you can retire and not work. And you're teaching people about the science of happiness. And you say it's not about being happy, it's about being happier. And you talk about these four pillars of happiness. You're talking about family, you're talking about friendship, you're talking about faith and work. And it was so surprising, Arthur, for me to think about work as being one of those pillars of happiness. I think a lot of us are like, well, the whole goal of life is to not work. I mean, that's what we're all aiming for. And. And you just talk so much about the dignity of work. So I would love to start there because I was really surprised that work was part of the four pillars. Can you talk about the dignity of work and why this. It feels like almost an extreme focus on retirement is probably the wrong focus.
- [02:40]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, I mean, that's it. Humans are made to be creative and generative. And so I'm a religious person, I'm a Christian. And you know, the first in the second chapter of Genesis talks about how, how Adam and Eve worked the garden before the fall. You know, so Jews and Christians, they're like, wait a second. So they were working hard in the garden before the fall because God said tend the garden, which was supposed to be a beautiful thing. And it wasn't like, so that you can retire and sit around in the garden. It's because working in the garden is a wonderful thing. And the whole point is, in Genesis, God made man and women in his image. That's the important thing. And his image is generative and creative and doing wonderful things. And. And we're supposed to do that too. And that's one of the reasons that when people are doing something that's really creative and generative as productive, we're happiest. We actually are now. Doesn't mean that you have to have a perfect job. On the contrary, what a lot of people who are listening to us are doing full time is a super full time plus job of raising children. And that's not fun all the time. That's not even enjoyable all the time. I got it. I completely got it. But it's always really meaningful. And so this is where it comes about. One of the things that we find is one of the habits of the happiest people is understanding that their work has meaning. Their work has meaning for lifting other people up, that their work is needed. If you feel needed, then your work is going to be a beautiful part of your happiness in life, even on the worst days.
- [04:10]
Jenny Ertz
So you talk about this work is a blessing. It is a really different frame of mind to come at life with. And also I think it changes how you parent because if we're in this rat race toward college and making sure that the kid gets into this Ivy League school and we set them up because we're trying to push toward retirement. If you can step back and say work is a blessing, it takes a little bit of that pressure off and that push. Do you talk that it's over and over again that work is a blessing? Even Work. And you specify this, which I think is really important. I think that there's a lot of people that will go, yeah, work's a blessing. Once you make this much money, once you're doing this type of a job, once you're a professor, but you talk about how, and you've studied it like the research shows, it doesn't matter what job it is.
- [04:57]
Arthur Brooks
No, it really doesn't. As a matter of fact, there's no happiness distinction between making above or below average wages or having working with a bachelor's degree or not having a bachelor's degree. Now, it's true that if you're working three jobs and not getting enough sleep and you're worried about making rent, that's misery. I got it. That's a really, really hard thing. But for most Americans, thank God that's not the case. For most of the people listening to this podcast, that's not the case. That's a great blessing of modern life. That's one of the great blessings of the pre enterprise system that made it possible for us to get a little bit ahead and have a middle class, et cetera, et cetera, is what it comes down to. But what I find in my work is if you actually see your job as something that people need and you're serving others and you're earning your success, I don't care if you're a roofer or a politician or a college professor or a podcaster or a full time stay at home mom, you're going to be able to find, even on the days that you don't enjoy it, the kind of meaning that your work is.
- [05:54]
Jenny Ertz
Supposed to give you dignity comes from work. It's really important. I think it's really important for our kids to know too, because there is a push to not work or to have it be the laziest job possible, you know, to make as much money as you can without working or to hit a spot where you arrive and don't have to work anymore. And I talked to this man named Jerry Kaplan, who's a Stanford professor, and he would talk, he talks about artificial intelligence and he would say, like these people that he knows in the tech space, they would sell a company, they'd make a ton of money, which is like the dream, right? That's like what you feel like you're supposed to do. And then he said they would stop growing. Yeah, they'd get weird. And you don't really think about that. You don't think about that as a consequence of that. You just feel like this is the dream. And so your books are so important to counteract that, especially since it informs a lot of the ways that we parent. So you have this work pillar, and you talk a lot also then about family. And this was so interesting to me. Arthur. Okay, so we're in this world of dating apps. Never consider this. We've never talked about this before. And dating apps, to a degree, seem ideal because you can find who you match with. You write about how dating apps are mortgage boards of sameness, and the algorithms allow people to find dates like themselves with brutal efficiency. So one of the pillars of happiness, being happier, trying to be happier, is family. Can you talk about the downsides of having dating apps like that?
- [07:24]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. No. It's one of the things that my students want to talk about a lot. So I teach a class in the MBA program at Harvard, and my average student is 28 years old. They're intensely interested in their relationships. Most of them aren't married. Some of them are. I mean, some of the kids from Utah, for example, they get married real young, and so they bring their families when they're doing their MBAs. But most of them aren't married. And they want to be. I mean, they want to be, even if they're like, nah, my career comes first. It doesn't come first. Love comes first. That's what people want. People want love because we're built for love. And so what's happened in modern life for all of my students, and thank God I'm 61, I didn't have any idea. I mean, I was like, I fell in love and got married before the Internet. It's like, hey, kids, watching the show. I'm old, but it's like being a caveman at this point. But thank God, because it's really, really tough. That technology of dating apps is actually kind of crowded out everything else. So 62% of couples meet on the apps today, whereas in my time, it was family and friends as well as the workplace or school where people met. All that's been dwarfed by the dating apps is how this works. And the problem is that it actually doesn't find somebody who's your complement. It doesn't find somebody who completes you. The reason is you're not looking for somebody who completes you. You're looking for somebody who copies you. Because we're narcissists. We're natural narcissists. Now, this complicated algorithm for doing this is no match for the complex set of systems in your mom's brain or the matchmaker's brain or your own brain when you're meeting somebody in person. Because there's a million ways to learn things about another person when you're seeing them, because your brain is ascertaining stuff way outside of what you put in a dating profile. The dating profiles, on the other hand, they match you to somebody just like you, and, you know, that's kind of like your sibling, and that's not hot. And so what you find is on the. What you find in the dating apps is that people get way more dates and have way less attraction to their dates. And they're like, I don't know what's wrong with me? I said, nothing wrong with you. Your brain wasn't made to do that. Your brain was. The current version of the human brain was designed to was you were getting a million different ways to see if this is the right mate for you, or your parents were figuring out if this was the right mate for you. Human interaction is the way it's supposed to work. By the way, there's a brand new research article out about dating apps that finds that a lot of times people, you know, fall in love and get married, and that's great, but marriages that start in the apps, they tend to be less stable than those that start in person.
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Jenny Ertz
It's fascinating. I have a friend that talks about it in terms of. It makes it seem better because it seems like the pool is larger.
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Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
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Jenny Ertz
There's an infinite amount of people out there. You just swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. Here's somebody else. But this concept of compatibility versus complementarity. Is that how you pronounce that?
- [10:10]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Complementarity. Yeah. We need our compliments. We need somebody who complete us. Exactly.
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Jenny Ertz
Okay. So you tell. You talk about this research study. It's so fascinating.
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Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
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Jenny Ertz
Where people, they smell the shirt.
- [10:22]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Yeah. So this is. This is a study this worked from the 1990s, where these physiologists were actually doing work to understand the. What the olfactory bulb in the brain does. Now, the olfactory bulb is what you use to smell stuff. So. And it's kind of. It's basically. It's right behind your nose, but it's pretty. It's pretty deep in your brain. And there's all kinds of interesting stuff about it, by the way. So the nerve that connects the olfactory bulb to the rest of the brain, it passes through the hippocampus, where you store memories. And that's the reason that you'll remember stuff when you smell something. So you smell like autumn Leaves and you remember your childhood. That's the reason, because it's crossing these boundaries. Crazy stuff. Plus, it turns out that we use the olfactory bulb, our sense of smell, for all kinds of stuff below our level of awareness. For example, we're able to smell if somebody is enough different from us that our children, our prospective children, will have kind of the cross of our genes and have more defenses from diseases. So you want somebody really different than you physiologically so that they have your defenses and her defenses, and together they have more defenses. That's the reason that you're in. You're not interested naturally in your siblings in that way. They smell weird to you. It's not just a social taboo, that's a physiological taboo. And because your kids are not, it's bad for your kids. You're not going to have good offspring. It's like nobody's attracted to your sister. That's gross. It smells gross, it feels gross, and it has very much to do with olfactory bulbs. Okay, so back to the experiment that you talked about. They wanted to test whether or not people, just by smelling somebody else, would have natural attraction to people who are physiologically different than they are. So what they did was they took had guys at university and they would wear these t shirts for 48 hours and sweating them and live in them and sleep in them. Then they take the T shirts off and put them in shoe boxes, and they put holes in the shoe boxes and they had completely random women, heterosexual women of the same age, sniff the holes in the shoeboxes. Right. And then rate how hot the guys were just by the smell. And they had big differences between them. And it turns out that women in almost every case rated the guys who are most physiologically different than they are as the most attractive on the basis of the sweat in the T shirt smell.
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Jenny Ertz
The dating app is missing this piece.
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Arthur Brooks
Oh, yes, almost definitely. And if you're meeting somebody, you meet somebody in church and you're sitting next to them in the pew and you're like, I don't know about them, I just find them irresistible. That's what you're finding irresistible.
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Jenny Ertz
That's fascinating. That part is in this book, build the life you want. All these books are fantastic. I hope by the time the podcast is over, everybody goes and buys all five. So dealing with these 28 year olds, then you're talking about with the dating. So you, first of all, you say, try and let humans make your matches instead of machines. One of the most robust trends in meeting potential mates over the past three decades. So this has changed in just 330 years, has been the move away from dates set up by friends. So you're Talking to these 28 year olds and you give them the message. Now, this is in the new one that's coming out, the Happiness Files. It'll be out by the time this podcast goes live. That there's going to be flops in your love life.
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Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
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Jenny Ertz
And you say not to give up on love. You give this advice, fall in love like an entrepreneur. Can you expand on that?
- [13:51]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's like a lot of my students and a lot of people listening to us, they really like entrepreneurs because entrepreneurs are cool. And one of the things that entrepreneurs do is that they take pretty big risks in search of incredible rewards. That's dating is incredible. Is pretty big risks in search of incredible rewards. The most entrepreneurial thing you're going to do is to fall in love. That's the most entrepreneurial thing you're ever going to do. It's like, yep, I'm all in. I mean, when I fell in love, I mean, I've been in love once, I've been in love once, and I was 24 years old and it was like, boom. I met a girl who didn't speak a word of English.
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Jenny Ertz
You didn't even speak the same language.
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Arthur Brooks
It's an amazing story. I was a man possessed, and I literally quit my job in New York and I moved to Barcelona so I could learn the language, so I could propose to this girl. And it took me two years to close the deal, which is insane. But anyway, we have now, you know, four grandchildren and 34 years in, and it all is what. But everybody my age has one of these entrepreneurial stories. And, and more and more and more people who are in their 20s today or 30s today don't have those stories. And that's a really important thing to keep in mind. Look, and here's the thing about entrepreneurs. They try, they have a dream, they fail, they learn, they try again. The average person, the average person is going to have her or his heart broken five times. That's part of the process. And so, in other words, fall in love, see if it works out, have your heart broken, learn, try again, try again.
- [15:24]
Jenny Ertz
It's so good. Fall in love like an entrepreneur. I love getting our kids outside. The sun, the dirt, the fresh air, but also sometimes the sneezing and the watery eyes that used to be our reality. Most falls and springs using allergy medications.
- [15:38]
Ginny
And lots of tissues.
- [15:40]
Jenny Ertz
Then I found earthly they have herbal remedies for everything with pure real ingredients. Nothing weird, nothing synthetic. I was out there living this beautiful natural life, but we were also taking some unnatural stuff to survive it.
- [15:53]
Ginny
Now that's no more.
- [15:54]
Jenny Ertz
Our cabinet is full of tinctures that.
- [15:56]
Ginny
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- [15:58]
Jenny Ertz
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- [16:29]
Ginny
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- [18:48]
Jenny Ertz
Quince.com outside so we're talking about this pillar of family. This is really important. You say conflict is the cost of abundant love. So I think one of the things that we struggle with is it feels wrong. You know, there's all this conflict and then you talk about, which I thought was so insightful, that everybody is viewing each other differently than how they view themselves. So you say something like the kids, in their mind, they think that they're helping and the parents don't think that they are. How do we handle the conflict that comes up so much in family life?
- [19:28]
Arthur Brooks
A part of it is you have to put it into proper perspective when you're living with other people, when you're cooped up with other people and when you have an intimate relationship with them, you're going to come into conflict if you don't. It's funny because I used to work with a guy, I used to run a company and a guy I worked with in my company. He was talking about his first marriage. He had been married twice and he was talking about his first marriage. I said, how long were you married? And he said, five years. And I said, bad marriage? He said, no, it's fine. I mean, we never had a single argument. We just realized at the end of five years we didn't care about each other. I said, yeah, of course, because you never had a single Argument. I mean, the truth is that anger in a marriage is actually uncorrelated with divorce because it's a passionate feeling that says, I don't like what's going on. And I wanted to change. What's correlated with divorce is contempt, which is a combination of disgust and anger, which is an emotion that says that we're worthless. And there's a lot of science on that. There's a lot of science on that. But, you know, the person I have had the most arguments with in my life is my wife. Now, to begin with, she's Spanish. And there are very quarrelsome people, I have to say, but, I mean, we've had 10,000 arguments. Probably. That's probably how many days we've been married over the past 34 years. That sounds about right. And, you know, we argue all the time. The point is, we argue because we disagree, and we disagree because we want the other person to agree. And that's because we love each other and we're completely committed to being together. So instead of splitting up, we argue is kind of how that works. And that's a normal, normal thing, even if it's not fun.
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Jenny Ertz
And you talk a lot about contempt in Love your enemies. It's fantastic book. And, yeah, so you're not apathetic. You're annoyed, and these things are happening, and you're trying to work it out. There was this amazing quote that said, like, someone was asked, when are you happiest? And she says, I'm happiest when I'm at home with my family. And then they say, well, when are you unhappiest? And she says, well, when I'm at home with my family. I was like, that's so, so, so good. Because you talk about happiness and unhappiness, how they're not the opposite, which is super fascinating. These books are so fascinating. Okay, so let's. Let's add on then, in the family realm. Yeah. Then you say this. This is in the happiness files. Even a hot mess can be a good parent. You will make a lot of mistakes, but mostly they won't matter.
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Arthur Brooks
Y.
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Jenny Ertz
How can that be?
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Arthur Brooks
I know, I know, I know. See, it's funny because there's a lot of research on this, and one of the questions I often get is, for example, from a lot of religious people, what can I do so that my kids will grow up in the faith? Every religious person listening to us is concerned about this because they know tons of people. I'm Catholic, right? And I have tons of friends whose, you know, they take their kids to mass, and they, you know, they harangue their kids, and their kids get, you know, come home from college and they think it's dumb, and they don't go to mass anymore. And they're heartbroken about this. Right. It's a very, very common thing. So what is the most important thing for your kids to grow up in your religion? If you're Jewish, it's the same thing. If you're Muslim, it's the same thing. And the answer is this. They need to see you authentically practicing the faith. It does not matter what you tell them. You could talk to your kids in a foreign language. It doesn't matter. It's like they don't listen. I mean, they don't listen and they don't absorb it. All that matters is what they see. And so people will say, what do I do so that my kids don't turn out to be drunks like so many people in my family. Never let them see you drink. That's the answer. What do I do? So my kids are decent people. Never see them have you screaming an insult at somebody out of the car window in traffic. How do you make sure that they grow up to practice the faith? Have them see you on your knees every night in prayer and every Sunday. That's how you do it. And so that's the important thing to keep in mind. It's like it doesn't. Nothing else matters. All that matters is like everything else is forgotten. Everything else is like summer rain. Right. But what they see is what stays with them. There's a whole lot of neurocognitive research on this, on why this is what the. The image of really powerful people in their lives is what's stored in their episodic memory. That's what forms them as actual people. And so parents are like, I taught them to be good people. Why are they not?
- [23:45]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah.
- [23:46]
Arthur Brooks
I think you should look at your own behavior.
- [23:49]
Jenny Ertz
Oh, gosh. That whole be what you want your child to become. It's a lot of pressure.
- [23:53]
Arthur Brooks
It sure is.
- [23:54]
Jenny Ertz
It's important to know, though, because you do talk about how 11, which. This number was very high to me, 11 of mothers ages 65 to 72 with at least two grown children were totally estranged from at least one of them. So you talk about this in your book. You talk about friendships. So this is another pillar. Family, work, friendships, faith. So you say the healthiest people at 80 are those who are the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50. Then you talk about your son made this up. Carlos the difference between and I thought this was so insightful for a kid. The difference between deal friends and real friends. Can you talk about that?
- [24:33]
Arthur Brooks
Yep. Yeah. So the great philosopher Aristotle was sort of the greatest voice ever on friendship. Believe it or not. He talked about friendship as having kind of three levels to it. At the lowest level of friendship is friendships of transaction. And he doesn't mean that in a bad way. These are people you work with, for example, and the test of this is what are their kids names? If you don't know, that's a transactional friendship. Slightly higher than that is a relationship of beauty where you're friends with somebody because you admire something so much about them and you want to be around them. Physical beauty, sense of humor, intelligence, whatever it happens to be. Now that's an only slightly higher friendship because if the beauty goes away, so does the friendship. The highest friendship, which Aristotle called the virtuous friendship, is one where the person is actually useless. You just love the person, you just love them. They're not worthless, they're useless. I mean they're not useful to you is what it comes down to. I boil this down to the two kind of friends that we have in modern life, which is the deal friends, transactional friends and friends where you get something and the, and the real friends, the friends who are actually useless to you. What they have in common is usually that you have a shared love for a third thing. So a useless friend is somebody who, you know, also loves God or also, I don't know, loves the Yankees. You know, I don't think anybody should love the Yankees, but you get my point, that that's, you know, it's that there's that shared love which is kind of a use of cosmic uselessness in its own way. And here's the thing, unhappy people have tons of deal friends and no real friends. That's what it comes down to. And that's what we need. So I know a lot of guys who are trying to retire and they're super afraid to retire and they don't know why they're so afraid. The answer is because they know that all their deal friends, they're never going to see them again. And they're about to go like Robinson Caruso and live on a desert island effectively because they never made any real friends and their only real friend is their wife. And you know, it's funny, there's a statistic that I always love which is that 60% of six year old men, their best friend is their wife, but 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband.
- [26:41]
Jenny Ertz
Problem mismatch.
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Arthur Brooks
It's a unrequited love is what that is. It's like, oh, she's my best friend. And she's like, not my best friend.
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Jenny Ertz
Well, the cool thing that you do in this book is you give a lot of really practical advice for these types of situations. And you talk about how a lot of people don't know how to manage social interactions outside of work. A lot of successful people, the successful in the world as they don't know how to manage these social interactions outside of work. So you give different ideas because it's built in during childhood. So no one explicitly teaches this to you. And then you go to college and it's built in. You're around all of these people and all of a sudden you're not. So you talk about even just making sure that you have cool things to talk about. You say you organize social life around conversations about profound issues. Or you have parallel play for adults. Like these men sheds. I love it. Well, he's like, we're going to go, there's going to be a building. It's filled with tools and wood.
- [27:39]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
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Jenny Ertz
You just go, I know.
- [27:41]
Arthur Brooks
I mean, but it's really pathetic in its way that men are so bad at having real friends that after they retire and their wives get so sick of them following them around the house that they have to drop them off at a shed and then they neighborhood where they can build a birdhouse with some other guy and hope that this little play date will turn into a relationship. This guy's like 68 years old and they're doing this. I mean, and, and by the way, the government is paying for those sheds in Australia and Great Britain, right? I mean, it's like the government is trying to actually orchestrate parallel play for older gentlemen who never actually figured out how to maintain their friendships. Don't let this happen to you kids.
- [28:17]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah, you say we are willfully neglecting friendships and even pushing them away. Screens is doing it, Social media is doing it. And you have really good advice. Choose interaction over vegetation. Limit your screen time. Have a communication hierarchy. Like if things happen, you know, you have an order of operations. It's never too late to relearn friendship skills and restart old relationships. Friendship is incorrectly seen by many people as something that just occurs naturally without conscious effort or work.
- [28:44]
Ginny
This is false.
- [28:45]
Jenny Ertz
So you say, start now. Like start today. If you're listening to this, start right now. Your relationships really matter a lot for your happiness, for being happier, for sure.
- [28:55]
Arthur Brooks
And you need people besides your kids, by your way. You need people besides your kids. And so everybody who's your age. How old are your children? Jenny?
- [29:02]
Jenny Ertz
My oldest is 17.
- [29:04]
Arthur Brooks
Okay.
- [29:05]
Jenny Ertz
I'm about to graduate. I'm having to let go.
- [29:07]
Arthur Brooks
I know. The thing about it is that they. You want them to leave the nest. Yeah. But it's hard when they leave the nest because a lot of people, they haven't cultivated real friendships, not even with their spouse. And so one of the reasons that a lot of people struggle in their marriages after they. If they get an empty nest is they're kind of going, blink, blink, blink, and looking at the spouse going, we got nothing to talk about, do we?
- [29:28]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah.
- [29:28]
Arthur Brooks
And so friendship matters.
- [29:31]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah, yeah. And you have to cultivate it. And you have really practical ideas in your books. Okay, let's talk about money. Okay, so here's the situation. You talk about this in your book. You can either go on a short vacation. This is in the conservative heart. Okay? So this is the options. Go on a short vacation. Now, everybody comes up against these all the time because you have limited resources, or you need a couch. And I think that everybody would be like, well, we need a place to sit, so we should probably buy the couch. But you say it's better to go on the short vacation.
- [30:02]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. So. So here's the thing. If you have money, there's five things that you can do with it, right? And this is if you're rich, you're poor, you're middle class, there's only five things you can do with money. And you have to do one of these things. Spend it on stuff, buy experiences, buy time by paying people to do things for you. Give the money away or save it. Now everybody gets money in some way, shape or form, and you have to do one of those five things with it. Your brain tells you that you'll get the most happiness from buying stuff. And that's because of our ancestral environment. We're evolved to think that if we have more stuff, more clear resources than we need, then we'll be happier because then people will admire us and we're more likely to get mates and we'll have more stuff for the winter. And that's very anachronistic thinking. It turns out that buying stuff never brings you happiness, but the other four things do. Buying experiences, which you have. And by the way, the experiences should be with your loved ones. Buying time that you spend either with your loved ones or in something that's really edifying, like prayer or a walk in the woods not scrolling. Instagram. That doesn't count. That's not how you should use your time when somebody's cutting your lawn. Number three is giving the money away to something you're really passionate about, you know, and number four is saving your money because that's progress. You know, people love progress. By the way, the best way to use money to make yourself miserable is by borrowing money for consumer purchases. By running a credit card balance, it will reliably lower your happiness. I'm a, I'm, I'm absolutely, I'm Dave Ramsey eight days a week on this one. He's a great guy. And I completely agree. A credit card balance is a horrible mistake if you can avoid it. And by the way, so are car loans. Get a cheap car. Get a cheap car. It's a huge problem because the minute that you're in debt and you're paying back consumer purchase that you have today and you're paying it off into the future, you're behind the line of scrimmage for your own happiness. And I've got tons of data that show that you'll be unhappier.
- [32:03]
Jenny Ertz
All right, so just don't get the couch. Go on the trip. Well, because you say you remember the trip. All right, so then back to your son who seems to be very wise at a very young age, age at age nine, which is elementary school, fourth grade, he says, look, I don't want any Christmas presents anymore. I want you to take me on a fishing trip. And it is counterintuitive. I was thinking about it because I can think back on. We have five kids that are 17 down to nine and you think about Christmas and as a mom, you put in a lot of effort into what would the gifts be. What do they love this year? They love Imagine X, they love Legos, they love Magna tiles. But truth be told, if you think back, you cannot remember at all what you bought them. And here's what you say. You say you've gone every year since you go on a hunting and fishing trip, just the two of you, no toys, no new objects at all. Just the trip, just us. The toys would have long broken. Yet both of us can tell you every place we've gone together and every critter we've bagged every single year.
- [33:04]
Arthur Brooks
That's powerful, amazing. I know. And you know, he's 25 years old and he's a father of two and he's like a responsible, as responsible as a 25 year old man is going to be. He's a veteran. He's a marine corps sniper, and now he's a big manager at a construction company. He's a grown up. And he just said to me, I said, carlos, what do you want for Christmas this year? He says, I want to go to southern Florida and I want to go fishing with you, dad. You know, it's the best.
- [33:29]
Jenny Ertz
What more can you want? What more can you want?
- [33:31]
Arthur Brooks
Totally, totally. And you're like, by the way, that's 50 times as much money as a bike. So. Yeah.
- [33:39]
Jenny Ertz
It sure is. It sure is.
- [33:41]
Arthur Brooks
Father of the year. What can I tell you?
- [33:44]
Jenny Ertz
Oh, look at the beginning. If you're just going down the street to go fishing, it could maybe be a cheaper is thing. But it depends on.
- [33:49]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. Not. Not the way. Not in Carlos's head. Is not. No, no.
- [33:54]
Jenny Ertz
Oh, but like you said, you can remember every single, single one.
- [33:58]
Arthur Brooks
Oh, yeah. Every fish. I know.
- [34:00]
Jenny Ertz
No one can say I remember what toy I bought them when they were eight. You can't. You can't. You think you will, though. You think you will, but you can't.
- [34:06]
Arthur Brooks
I know.
- [34:06]
Jenny Ertz
So you say this in terms of money, which is so mindblowing. A billionaire is not likely to be any happier than you are. Yet for the most part, this truth remains hard for people to grasp. This is in your brand new book. Americans work and earn and act as if becoming richer. And this is how we parent, too. I think this is what we do with education. As if becoming richer will automatically raise our happiness no matter. Matter how rich we get. Okay, so then you have the statistics. You're like, yeah, right. You know, I'm like, if I were a billionaire, I'd do it differently. That's what everybody but you say. This, you give the actual numbers, say your job satisfaction is a 6 out of 10. Not bad. Could be better. What would make it better? Well, hey, if your boss comes someday and says, I'm. I'm gonna double your pay, I mean, that's huge. That's huge, Arthur. I'm gonna double your pay. So you're like, I'm at a six out of ten. So there's research. What does that take you to? It takes you to a 6.5, which eventually goes back down to a 6.2.
- [35:03]
Arthur Brooks
Yep.
- [35:03]
Jenny Ertz
Hardly any difference.
- [35:04]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, that is correct. That is correct. And if you leave it long enough, by the way, it'll be back to a six. And after that, it'll be in the fives, is what you find. Because we're. We're creatures dedicated to progress. And so the result is when we think that things are going better. We think that's going to be a permanent. A permanent state of affairs and our happiness. And simply isn't that all that is, is an error? That's a cognitive glitch in our. In our psychological software, is the way that that works. And so the reason that that's. That's the reason you have to keep things in perspective on what you're trying to do. That's the reason that you have to have a balanced portfolio of what you're doing in your life, not just trying to earn as much money as possible, but by investing in other ways. The one thing that will give you enduring satisfaction is love. That's the one thing that will give you enduring satisfaction. So if you're going to take an extra hour, spend it with somebody that you love as a. As opposed to getting an extra few bucks if you're above the level at which that few bucks is going to eliminate sources of misery and unhappiness in your life.
- [36:01]
Jenny Ertz
I read this book called the Boy Crisis by Warren Farrell, and he talked about how the qualities that make you successful at work are often opposite of the qualities that make you successful in love. These are interesting things to think about, and you talk about. Then a way to deal with this is to manage your wants. So satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want. So manage your wants because your wants have a tendency to sprawl and they will always outstrip your halves. So when that happens, your satisfaction fails. And you talked about this man named Abdurraham. I said that wrong. I'm not quite sure, and you might.
- [36:37]
Arthur Brooks
Know how to say it, but he was actually the Emir of Cordoba in the 14th century.
- [36:44]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah, yeah. Say it one more time.
- [36:46]
Arthur Brooks
Abdelrahman. He was the. The third. He was the emir. He was the Muslim ruler of Muslim Spain at the end of the Muslim period of the Iberian peninsula in Spain. Yeah. And he was like limitless riches, limitless concubines, limitless power. He had the perfect life according to what Mother Nature tells your brain. And yet. What did he say? You got the quote in front of you?
- [37:11]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah, I do have it. You say nothing was denied him. Right. This is. This is his life. And then he said, well, I'm gonna number up how many days that I have felt pure and genuine happiness. I'm gonna just. I'm gonna tally him up. He gets to 14.
- [37:26]
Arthur Brooks
I know, I know. You know, in other words, his problem. His problem wasn't happiness. Paul Rahman had the same problems as everybody else in life. My guess Is that he had tried to look for his happiness and riches in the comforts of ordinary life, in the idols that people actually chase. I'd be very shocked if he had a loving relationship with one of his, you know, hundred wives. I'd be surprised. I'd be surprised. I'd be surprised if he knew his children. He did everything wrong because he did everything according to the idols of life that we still have today. And he got the 14 days of happiness. We don't have to settle for that 14 days.
- [38:08]
Jenny Ertz
Winning the lottery brings no satisfaction. And this is because your once sprawl. That was a conversation then I started to have with my husband, which was, okay, how, you know, how do you manage your wants? It's a really important thing, an important thing to know about.
- [38:24]
Ginny
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- [40:40]
Arthur Brooks
Never join the Navy, never climb Mount Fuji on a port visit or break the sound barrier. Joining the Navy sounds crazy. Saying never actually is. Learn why@navy.com America's Navy forged by the sea.
- [40:56]
Jenny Ertz
All right, I have to tell you this conundrum that I'm in.
- [40:58]
Arthur Brooks
Okay, tell me.
- [40:59]
Jenny Ertz
So all of these things happened at the same time. So you talk about your life as a musician. French horn player. I started playing the piano when I was really young. I can't remember when I didn't play. And when I got to high school, I started taking lessons at the University of Music at the school of Music with the head of the piano department there. Her name's Lynn Bartholomew and she didn't take kids. But I auditioned, I was able to get an audition and she took me on and it was really intense. You know, it was like you're expected to practice three hours a day. You're expected to come in each week. She had this incredible office, Arthur, with like these concert two concert grand pianos next to each other in this desk and like a whole wall filled with piano music. And I hit my junior year and I just was so overwhelmed. It's like you're taking honors, physics and calculus and all of these things that you're supposed to do in childhood. And I couldn't keep up with it and I quit. So it was a breaking off point for me, for my life trajectory. I felt like I went the responsible route and left behind this thing I really loved. So it's always been sort of tucked in the back of my mind that we've got these five kids. My life went a different route. Ended up getting a degree in mathematics that it could come back around. And the other day, my kids take piano lessons, my younger two, from this phenomenal teacher in our area. And one of them was at camp. So I was like, well, I'll take her spot. And so I take her spot. I was like, I'll take a lesson. I haven't taken the lesson in a couple of decades. And I was like this. My brain feels really good doing this. And in the back of my mind, ever since, you know, after I quit, you know, hit adulthood, and you're kind of like, was that the right decision? I've thought about. There's this piano competition called the Van Clyburn, and it's for adults.
- [42:40]
Arthur Brooks
That's famous. That's. That's like the.
- [42:42]
Jenny Ertz
It's so famous. Right? Okay. All right. So here's my conundrum, Arthur. So it's called the Van Clyburn. And I've always thought, you know what? Someday I'll be able to get back to practicing three hours a day. And I am going for that Van Clyburn. Like, I want to win. So then I read your book, or at least I want to participate. I read your book Strength to Strengthen. And this is about how your fluid intelligence tanks and your crystallized intelligence goes up. And I started to think, oh, no. Oh, no, my dream might not be actually practical. So then just recently, I looked on the website. I was like, I wonder how old these people are that win the Van Clyburn. And I popped on the website, Arthur. And I was like, oh, these people look really young. Like, no one has gray hair. I was like, oh, shoot. Anyway, turns out it caps at age 30, which was totally related to your French horn. Like, your. The contest is from age 18 to 30, which is basically the years that you did your French horn. 18 to 30. So this is really important. I. You know, it's like, I don't necessarily want to live life with regret. However, had I read your book way back when, I think I would have done it differently. What you say is, do the most interesting thing you can.
- [44:02]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, that's right. And, you know, you're told to pursue your passion, change the world. You're told to take the highest paying job. You know, you're giving all this advice. The best advice that I give people who are graduating from college and starting their lives is find the thing that's most interesting to you, that actually is a practical way to make a living and do that thing. Just be humble about it and do that actual thing, and don't be that strategic. About it, your gut will. Will be a good guide for you on that. Now, when it comes to something like coming back around to the piano, here's actually how I'd recommend that you think about it. Here's how I'd recommend that you think about it. So there's a German philosopher from the mid 20th century named Joseph Pieper. Big Catholic. Right, Joseph Pieper. Big Catholic and Pieper. He wrote a great book called the Four Cardinal Virtues. It's thick as a brick, but it's really great. But probably the thing that he wrote that affected me the most is called Leisure, the Basis of culture. He said that our culture is run by leisure, not chilling on the beach. He said you should take your leisure as seriously as you take your work because it's just as morally important. And so what you need to do, especially in the second half of life, when you have a little bit more time because, you know, junior is, you know, going off to university, etcetera, is to actually think, what am I going to morally and technically and intellectually dedicate myself so that my life is better and I can be better toward other people? Not with what I'm thinking of as my vocation, but as a serious godly avocation. And that, for you, is probably the piano. That's probably the piano. And so that you're not scrolling Instagram when you got time off. No, no, you're playing your scales. You know, that's. Because that turns out to be what would be classified as leisure, but is serious. As people would say, that's serious business. And you'll get good at it. And then occasionally, like once a year, you'll do a recital, and then you'll take on a couple of really talented students, and it will become this incredibly fulfilling part of your life and more beautiful and more enjoyable and more meaningful than probably it ever was, even when you were a kid.
- [46:15]
Jenny Ertz
I'm winning the Van Clyburn, which I would forget.
- [46:19]
Arthur Brooks
Van Clyburn. Those people are miserable.
- [46:21]
Jenny Ertz
Currently disqualified from. Anyway, well, let's talk about this path that you were on. I think that this is fascinating because if you read the book and you learn about this fluid intelligence, to me it informs parenting because I think it's so often. Okay, so now I think after reading the book, we do this backwards. We should do it like how you did, which is you, you know, you. You hit adulthood, and then you went and played French horn all over the world. I mean, this is incredible. And you meet your wife in. In Barcelona, and you're playing your French horn. And then you say, look, it starts to decline. You weren't expecting it, but once it started to decline, then you went back to school. And I know you say like for a period of time, you're like self conscious about it. You're like, gosh, I went at 30, I did. I didn't go to the Ivy League when I was 20 years old. I went at 30, I did it. Distance learning, you know, it's not the same thing as what a lot of people do. It's actually very different. And you say you're embarrassed, you're self conscious, but that appears to be the aligned more with this timeline of fixed intelligence, with crystallized intelligence.
- [47:25]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a very interesting theory that comes from a guy named Raymond Cattell, who's a social psychologist from Britain. And he talks about the fact that our intelligence takes different forms in different points in our lives. The first part of your adulthood, like when you're a teenager until you're in your late 30s and even 40s, it's called fluid intelligence, which is innovation. It's working memory, it's processing speed, it's your ability to figure stuff out. That's what you do when you're like really hustling at the law firm and climbing the ladder, or when you're becoming a, you know, a financial professional, you know, that sort of stuff. And that peaks around age 39 and starts to decline and people feel horrible about it. That's the reason that people start to burn out on their careers in their 40s because they feel like they're not as good as they used to be or they're not as interested as they used to be in their careers. That's correct. But that's not the end. On the contrary, the second intelligence that comes in behind it in your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and stays high in your 80s and 90s if God gives you your marbles that long. And it's called crystallized intelligence, which is not based on working memory, thank God. Right? Because, you know, when you're my job, 61 years old, like, what is that guy's name? I have no idea. Right. But it's not based on innovation. You're not going to come up with the brand new shiny ideas like you were able to do before. It's not based on indefatigable energy at work. It's based on pattern recognition and wisdom and knowledge and teaching. That's what it's based on. You're super good at that in your 40s and 50s. And getting better in your 60s and 70s, because you know a lot and you know how to use your knowledge. That's the reason that people in their 60s, you talk to them, they're like, you ask them advice and they don't. They've never heard of the situation that you're in, but they give you really good advice because they're triangulating across all the other stuff that they know. You know, it's an amazing thing. That's the reason that when you're in college you're a math major, that the best calculus teacher was like 68 or 72 or something. You know, I saw my dad lecturing, my dad was a math professor and I saw him lecturing in an advanced calculus class for 90 minutes with no notes when he was near the end of his career. And I'm like, it's like, it's like watching, you know, Van Clyber and himself on the piano. It was amazing. And I said, how did you do that? He says, I don't know, I'm old. And what he had was the crystallized intelligence brain that made it possible to do that. So here's the point. When you're early on, yeah, yeah, do the fluid intelligence stuff, be the cowboy, be the ninja, be the hotshot. But when you're in your 40s and 50s and 60s, become a teacher, whatever that means. You know, maybe that means you become the managing partner at your law firm instead of the star litigator. Maybe that means going from being an entrepreneur for startups to being the venture capitalist who identifies entrepreneurs. It means, you know, doing something where you're bringing along the next generation, you know, who's really good at this. Jenny, Women are really good at this. So what you find is I talk to couples all the time and the husband's having a horrible time in his career because he doesn't know that he's between his fluid and crystallized intelligence. And he can't get from one curve to another because he can't reinvent himself. Meanwhile, his wife has actually spent her fluid intelligence years raising a bunch of rugrats. And then they grow up and they just walk right on the crystallized intelligence curve. Reinvent themselves doing something like running a non profit, teaching people. Yeah, and like super accomplished and super happy. And I inevitably find that these 55 year old wives are much, much happier than their 56 year old husbands.
- [51:01]
Jenny Ertz
Well, they didn't have as far to fall.
- [51:03]
Arthur Brooks
They didn't fall at all. They just like walked right on. Yeah, sure, women are super good at inter. At. Yeah, they reinvent themselves. Women are great at reinventing themselves.
- [51:13]
Jenny Ertz
A nurse for 12 years, and then now I'm doing this.
- [51:16]
Arthur Brooks
Is that right?
- [51:17]
Jenny Ertz
I think. I guess a long time. Probably longer than that, actually. Yeah. We got these five kids. Yeah.
- [51:24]
Arthur Brooks
So.
- [51:24]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah. And you just switch. Now you're doing something different, but it is hard to fall. And you say, this is such an important book. And I. I mean, I'm not the only one saying it's a New York times bestseller with 7,000 reviews. Your professional decline. This is on page one. It's so good. And you're like, wait, your jaws dropped. Your professional decline is coming much sooner than you think. And then you say. You say you have to be prepared to walk away from it and know what else to look for. You say, the average American considers the beginning of old age to be six years after the average person dies. Whoops. And I love it. You talk about composers in this. You talk about Bach versus Beethoven, the. And all of the incredible things that they did with their lives. Bach had 20 kids. So just really interesting. You think about your resume. Virtues versus Your eulogy versus. And liminality limit is. I pronounce it liminality.
- [52:17]
Arthur Brooks
Liminality means the time between different eras of your life.
- [52:21]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah.
- [52:21]
Arthur Brooks
Which, by the way, people hate. People hate change. And the average person has a pretty substantial life change every 18 months and a major earthquake every five years. And most of those things are uninvited, and so they're unwelcome. Those are liminal phases, and those are the most creative times in your life. You have to see those things as opportunities.
- [52:42]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah, That's a lot. That's. Often. You talked about that. Your grandpa did it. You said at 49, he up and moved, and then. Was it your grandpa? I wrote it down. His dissertation. Is this your grandpa or your dad?
- [52:54]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, my dad. My dad. Yeah. Yeah. My dad is like my dad. He. You know, he. He realized that he had to get a PhD to be a successful math professor because the world was changing. And so when he was 42 years old, he went and got his PhD. He became like this superstar in his PhD program. And, you know, he reinvented himself because his dad had reinvented himself. And that's what made it possible for me to reinvent myself a whole bunch of times. That's what's made it so much easier to go from. I was a French horn player, then I was an economics professor, then I was a CEO. And now I have a happiness company. I mean, it's Just great. It's great. But I had to see the model and it was really helpful to see my dad do it and his dad do it.
- [53:31]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah, they both did it and in their 40s. And this dissertation, I wrote it down because I was amused. An analog of multiple R square for uncensored survival data with coverities. I don't even know.
- [53:44]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what he was doing. Because you're a mathematician. My dad was a biostatistician. And for those of us who are watching, what that means is he did that. He does. He did like health statistics. And so a lot of actuaries at insurance companies, they can tell you when you're likely to die based on actuarial tables. That's what biostatisticians do. My dad was writing biostatistics theory. That's how smart my dad was. I mean, theory. So he was doing this like long haired stuff this whole time. That's what I grew up with, actually. So that was kind of the model. But you know, he had his own issues too. But he really wanted was, you know, my mom to be healthy and he loved his kids. And so the whole point is, look, we all start in different places. We all do different things, but we all really want the same things, which is we all want faith, we all want family, we all want friendship, and we all want our work to actually serve other people. So it's meaningful. That's what we all want.
- [54:36]
Jenny Ertz
I read the actuaries have a really high job satisfaction.
- [54:39]
Arthur Brooks
They do, they actually do. They think it's super fun. But also, by the way, it's because actuaries are a certain kind of people. They're freaks.
- [54:48]
Jenny Ertz
Okay, I want to hit one last topic that really, really is fitting with this audience because what we're trying to do is we're trying to get outside. This is a really simple concept, but it makes a pretty profound impact in the quality of your life. And the quality of child development is just prioritizing hands on, living over screen life, at least trying to balance it out. And so one of the things that you talk about is focusing on small things, focusing on the smaller things in life. You say satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things. And you told this story about watching flowers pop open.
- [55:25]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, that's right. One of the things that. I have a new book that's going to come out in 2026.
- [55:32]
Jenny Ertz
Of course you do.
- [55:33]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. There's always another book. I'm like a hamster on a wheel. Right. Am I done yet, Jenny? Am I. Can I win yet? Anyway, and it's called the meaning of your life. Finding deep purpose in an age of emptiness. That's what the new book is about. And one of the ways that in an age, a digital, technologized, empty age, where there's so much clinical depression, generalized anxiety, especially among young adults and adolescents, is to actually have more beauty in your life. Beauty is a complex phenomenon that exercises the right hemisphere of the brain, that's idle when you're looking at your phone. And the best way to do that. There's three ways to do it. There's artistic beauty, there's natural beauty, and there's moral beauty. So you can see people doing moral, beautiful things, and that stimulates that right hemisphere of the brain. You can listen to the most beautiful piano music ever written. And if that's your thing, it'll. It'll open up that right side of your brain. Or you can go outside and watch a flower open. And it's an extraordinary experience because you can't. It's like it chokes you up, you know, it's like, why? Why? Why? I don't know. And it's because it's beyond words. Beauty is beyond words. When you see something that's ravishingly beautiful, you can't describe it. When you have true love in your life, and I think about that. So I say, jenny, why do you love your husband? And anything you tell me will trivialize it. Anything you tell me, any words he has, like, he's a good father, he's a good provider. No, it's mysterious and it's beautiful. And if kids actually get into the routine of experiencing beauty, they get addicted to that right side of the brain. Just like, I want that feeling. I want that feeling. I want that. I want that experience. I want that understanding. I want that mystery. That's what I need. And that's why you take them outside again and again and again. It's like, yeah, we're going camping. We're going camping. Yep. That's what we're doing. We're going out. We're going for a hike right now, right? Yep. We're gonna go pick strawberries. That's what we're gonna do. And why? Because you need to touch the ground and see the God's creation. Because that's what needs to actually happen. Because your brain needs it. Yeah.
- [57:48]
Jenny Ertz
And you talk about the serendipity, which is an interesting piece. It. It provides. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what you're going to see. And there tends to always be something.
- [57:57]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [57:57]
Jenny Ertz
You don't know what the sunset's going to look like. You don't know if you're going to see a deer. All of these things happen when you're out there. You talk quite a bit about nature and you are comparing the flowers popping open to a hot air balloon ride that. The bucket list. The bucket list is the expansion of wants.
- [58:12]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [58:12]
Jenny Ertz
And this sort of being happy with these small things is a management of the wants. It's incredible. You talk about when you were fishing as a kid, you casting into the falling tide. A lot of nature references in here. Talk about the trees and how underneath the roots are all connected. So, so many things to learn. What an honor. What an honor.
- [58:31]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you, Jenny.
- [58:32]
Jenny Ertz
Okay. I can't wait for the next one. This has been such a fantastic thing. Every single book is different. Every single book is about topics you may not have considered. The love your enemies. It's a fantastic story where you write this book and someone sends you like a 5,000 word email that's like, I hate your book. And here's all the reasons why. And how do you deal with that? I mean, it is a phenomenal. It's so phenomenal. You talk about how you respond and you say, I really appreciate that you read my book. It's a big deal. I'm an author. And then he says, well, let's get dinner. You know, I mean, every book is just different things you think about that you never considered. So it's such an honor to get a chance to talk with you. We always end our show with the same question.
- [59:13]
Arthur Brooks
What's that?
- [59:13]
Jenny Ertz
The question is, what's a favorite memory from your childhood? That was outside.
- [59:18]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. So my. I know, I know what it is. So I told that story. And from strength to strength of fishing off the rocks in a place in Oregon called Lincoln City. I grew up in Seattle and Seattle's a beautiful place. But every summer I would go see my aunt who had a trailer, lived in a trailer in Oregon on the Oregon coast. On the really rugged Oregon coast. Now this is not, folks. I mean, this is like. This makes the Jersey shore look like San Tropez. I mean, it's like a. It's. It's pretty rough and tumble, but it was paradise for me. I fished every day. I, I would. I was a rockhound. I would look for agates on the beach every day. I would collect driftwood and make it into sculptures. I went hiking every Day. It was just the best. And it was this. This glorious explosion experience of the ocean crashing onto the rocks. I can still smell it. I can still hear the seagulls. And right now, it's funny. It's really in my mind right now because my older brother Jeff, who's three years older than I am right now as we're taping this episode today, he's in Lincoln City, and. And he's sending me pictures of, you know, like, the. The. Like the. The rain coming in from the Pacific Ocean onto the beach. And the whole thing. I'm like, I want to be there. I want to be there so bad. It's my favorite childhood memory. It's not just an outside memory. It's my favorite childhood memory, bar none.
- [60:44]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah. And it was outside. It's so powerful. You talked about how you'd fish in your childhood, and you said no one else in your family fished. And you were able to buy your own fishing rod.
- [60:54]
Ginny
You worked for it.
- [60:55]
Jenny Ertz
I thought, gosh, this is just different. In a couple decades, like, no kid can have a paper route anymore. Hardly.
- [61:00]
Arthur Brooks
It's illegal.
- [61:01]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah. To go. To go earn their money.
- [61:03]
Arthur Brooks
To get this. With the way that we've made life worse for young people. I mean, the way that the education system has made life more boring and turgid for young people. It's a real problem, actually, that we've done this. You know, the old school is kind of the best school in a lot of these things.
- [61:20]
Jenny Ertz
Yeah. And it's really interesting. You teach about happiness, and it's like, who's struggling? It's the kids.
- [61:26]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah.
- [61:26]
Jenny Ertz
And so these books are really important for parents to read, to read together as a family. And Arthur, this is a huge honor. I actually can hardly believe it happened, so I so appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. Huge congratulations on your brand new book. People can get it now. It's called the Happiness Files. I recommend all the other ones as well. And there will be a new one out next year. Thanks for being here.
- [61:46]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, you're great. You're like hot. Super high energy. I love it. Hope to meet you in person one of these days. Thanks, Jenny. You say you'll never join the Navy, that you'd never track storms brewing in the Atlantic and skydiving could never be part of your commute. You'd never climb Mount Fuji on a port visit or fly so fast you.
- [62:13]
Jenny Ertz
Break the sound barrier.
- [62:15]
Arthur Brooks
Joining the Navy sounds crazy. Saying never actually is. Start your journey@navy.com, america's Navy forged by the sea.