Episode 362: The Key Ingredients to Finding Happiness as a Family with Dr. Arthur Brooks

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Dr. Arthur Brooks is a social scientist, best-selling author, and Harvard professor, whose work focuses on the science of happiness and how people can build meaningful, purpose-filled lives. He writes the popular How to Build a Life column for the Atlantic, and is the co-author with Oprah Winfrey of the number one New York Times bestseller, Build the Life You Want. Dr. Brooks is known for translating cutting-edge research into practical tools for families, parents, and communities. We are honored to welcome Dr. Arthur Brooks to the Raising Boys and Girls Podcast. And y'all make sure to listen all the way through, because towards the end, he talked about something I loved, where he talked about the right and left hemispheres of the brain and the impact screens have on our brain development. All of us, you all, it's such an important conversation. Dr. Brooks, it is a joy to meet you and share time together. You are a professor at Harvard University, a New York Times best-selling author, a national columnist, speaker, podcaster, but you'd say most importantly on your website, husband, father, and grandfather. And with this being a podcast about kids and families, and that last role in mind, we'd love to begin by asking you what is something you have learned from one of your grandchildren? I've been reminded by my grandchildren about how to change diapers. It was, it had been a long time, but we actually live in an intergenerational home with three generations under one roof. So two of my four grandsons live, or my roommates, and it's been extraordinary. But, and so for me, it's been a period of reflection as a behavioral scientist. I used to think, what am I learning from my children now? Now, indeed, what am I learning from my grandchildren? I have to say something I didn't learn from my kids, which is that it's going to sound weird, but then I'll clarify. Nothing matters. It's, you know, everything feels like such a big deal. And I have this very funny because now I'm older. I'm in my early 60s now. And my little grandson, Joey, he and I live together. And, and, and he's always freaking out about something that totally doesn't matter. And he doesn't care at all about what I'm freaking out about. And so I realized that this person I care about so very much in love completely, doesn't care about what, what I think is so important. And I don't care about what he thinks is so important, but we love each other. And what that proves is that love is the only thing that matters, and nothing else matters at all. Great reminder. That is a great reminder. Well, so we would love for you for a minute, if there are any parents out there who are listening who are not as familiar with your work, would you summarize your research on happiness and flourishing and talk about what originally drew you to studying what makes a meaningful life? Yeah, absolutely. So I've been a behavioral scientist for the past 30 years doing a lot of different research on different areas. A lot of it in public policy and economics, et cetera. And near, I guess about seven years ago, I came to the conclusion that if I was going to have any big, big difference on how people lived, public policy and politics were not the way to go. And it's not that they're unimportant. It's just that they're not very effective for changing people's lives. To change people's lives, it's not that you have to impose something better on them. You have to make them want something better. It's like when we're raising children. You don't actually impose rules on them so that they will be happier. You inspire a desire in them to do the things that will make them happier. It's this indirect route. So I thought to myself, what am I doing wrong in my work? Oh, I know. I want people to want to be happier. And when they are, they'll do all the things that really matter the most. They'll pursue their faith. They'll pay attention to their families. They'll cultivate deep friendships. They'll look for more meaning and service in their work because they want to be happier. So what I need to do is to study happiness and convince people that they can get happier. And that's what I dedicated myself to seven years ago, precisely, because I want to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. So I went back to my behavioral science roots. I added on to it a whole body of knowledge that I didn't have at the time, which was neuroscience. I retrained in neuroscience. And I started teaching classes on the science of happiness at Harvard and writing about it very, very broadly and giving about 150 talks and doing a lot of media on it as well. And it's really changed my life. I have to say, I think I finally cracked the code to having some little bit of impact in the world by doing that. The approach is purely scientific. The approach actually looks at the way that human beings learn new skills. And I started by asking the question, why is it that all the self-improvement stuff doesn't really help very much? And the reason is not that it's wrong necessarily, but it tends to be based on epiphanies. If you buy a self-improvement book, it'll say something really wise and you'll say, yes, yes, that's true. That's absolutely true. I should not be so worried about somebody else's feelings. But then a week later, you're back where you were. And the reason is because that's not how we actually learn in impactful ways. The way that we learn requires understanding of what you're trying to change. The science and philosophy, for example, it requires changing habits and behavior. And then the most important part is sharing the ideas with other people to make them permanent. So if you want to be a good golfer, learn about the game, play a bunch of rounds, and explain the game to somebody else. If you want to learn math, it's the same thing. And it's also true for happiness. So my method is teach people about the actual science of how their brains work in a way that they can understand, obviously, not being too technical, give them a whole bunch of new practices where they can change their habits and behavior, and then turn them into happiness teachers. And then it gets sticky as the entire crux of my approach. And then their lives really start to change. Okay, we want to dig deeper into that. So let's talk about your book, The Happiness Files. You often say happiness is not a feeling, it's a direction and a set of habits. As therapists, we could not agree more. Why is this distinction so important for families? It's important because people, when they have the wrong goals, they're not going to get what they want. It's very, it's interesting because, you know, you say, I really want to go live on the West Coast. So my goal is to reach Wichita. Well, that's the wrong goal. You're not going to live on the West Coast if you're aiming for Wichita. There's nothing wrong with Wichita. And the problem is that a lot of families, they want to be a lot better off. They want to get, they want to love each other more. They want to have less conflict. And so when they have the goal of being happy, we want to be a happy family, a happy family. Well, you can't be perfectly happy. I actually do, let me clarify, I believe that you can be perfectly happy just not before you die. And there is one, in my view, there's one place that you can be happy and that's in heaven. Perfectly happy means an absence of negative emotion, an absence of negative experience. But the whole point is that we have this hunger to be happy, I believe, because we want to go to heaven. The problem is that we think, oh, I have a hunger to be happy, which means I probably can be here on this earth. No, no, no, no, that's bad religion. That's actually a heresy. What you can be is happy you're here on earth and do good and be virtuous and be full of love. So you have a good shot at being perfectly happy when it really, really counts. So you have to have the right goals as a family. What do we want to be? We want to be a happy year family. We want to be happier than we were. We want to actually make progress. That doesn't mean we want to have conflict. It doesn't mean we won't have sadness and anger. It means we won't be disgusted with each other. No, these things are going to happen. But the truth is that we can be better off than we were with a little bit of knowledge and practice and a whole lot of love and prayer. That's great. I cannot wait to read this book. So parents today, we in our work on a daily basis counseling, we would say parents feel more overwhelmed than we've ever seen them feel. They are stretched thin, they're anxious, they're distracted. Based on your research, what habits actually help families move toward greater well-being? Yeah. So this is my new book coming out at the end of March, The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. And it's a lot for young adults who are really, really struggling, but it's really a lot for parents too. People come to me all the time and say, I just, I'm really, really overwhelmed. And the first question I ask them is how much are you on your phone? How much are you on your devices? Because the best way for you to anesthetize yourself and at the same time become unbelievably stressed out and lose all of your discretionary time is to be looking at your devices. The number one picture of being an overwhelmed parent is spending a lot of time on social media and a lot of time scrolling. The best way for you to be less overwhelmed as a parent, more present, having more time, being able to be thinking about things with your kids and really be concentrating on them so that everybody's less stressed out is putting it away. Don't waste your time and you'll have more time is what it comes down to. Don't waste your attention. You'll have more attention. Don't waste your energy and affection. You'll have more energy and affection. You know, we are firm believers that we all need a little more laughter and a whole lot more grace. And if you are raising a child with ADHD, dyslexia, autism, or another learning and thinking difference, you know how intense some days can feel the advocacy, the school meetings, the meltdowns, the moments when you wonder if you're getting any of it right. If that hits home, we recently found a podcast we think you'll really appreciate. It's called Everyone Gets a Juice Box for Parents of Neurodivergent Kids. Check out a few episodes, including one about parenting regrets after an ADHD and autism diagnosis and another about how, quote, fine isn't always fine when it comes to dyslexia. You'll appreciate the tone. It's honest. It's warm. It's funny in the way that only parents who truly get it can be. You can hear the relief in their voices when they realize they're not alone. It feels like sitting down with other parents who understand the mysteries, the multiple diagnosis, and the beauty in the middle of it all. If you could use that kind of community and encouragement, we really think you'll like it. To listen, search for Everyone Gets a Juice Box in your podcast app. That's Everyone Gets a Juice Box. Okay, I need to confess something. Patches staged a silent protest this week. A protest? She could not get settled in my bed circling, sighing dramatically, flopping down, getting back up. And then I realized I had washed the bedding and forgot to put the bowl and branch sheets back on. 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Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bowlandbranch.com slash raising with code raising. That's bowl and branch, bowlandbranch.com slash raising, code raising to unlock 15% off. Exclusions apply. Okay, let's talk about the three components of happiness that you write about. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. How can parents cultivate these three things inside their homes for both themselves and their kids? Well, to begin with, it's important to remember that happiness actually isn't a feeling. Feelings of happiness are like the smell of your Thanksgiving dinner. They're evidence. They're not the thing. You don't say, wow, Thanksgiving dinner smells so great. Well, let's call it a night. That's not a good Thanksgiving dinner. That will not be nutritious for you. But you do say that's part of the experience, is part of the evidence that something really nice is happening. It's how we discern that there's something that we really want. Feelings of happiness, which are emotions that emanate from the limbic system of the brain, are evidence that things are going right. Now, what's going right? What is the happiness that we actually wanted? Happiness is a combination of three macronutrients. Your Thanksgiving dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Well, your happiness is enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three things to actually be looking for in life, to have in balance and abundance. The good news is that everybody's bad at that, which means that everybody can make progress. Everybody can get happier by figuring out whether they're weak. I have a thing that I administered to my students and to everybody I worked with called the Happiness Scale. It's on my website. You take the Happiness Scale and you can find out where your weakness is. A lot of people don't know, but for example, for me personally, my level of satisfaction with my accomplishments is very high and my sense of meaning is it's okay. My level of enjoyment is really low. I don't enjoy my life enough because I'm a super striver. I have workaholic tendencies. When you take this test, called the Happiness Scale, you find out actually what it is. The first thing that I do with my students is I explain, here's what happiness is. Then I talk about how to get better at each one. Every role in life is actually involved in this, including your life as a parent. Parents need to have more enjoyment with their families. They need to take more satisfaction with the accomplishments of what they're doing as parents. They need to get a sense of meaning, which is the most important one of all, the why of their family, the mission of their family. That's what I work with in family life is enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning inside the house's walls. You can do this stuff as families too, by the way. People ask all the time, I know they ask you all the time as family therapists, what do I do to get my kid to do stuff? The way to do it is always by deflection. You never say, go read this book. No need to say, I'm reading this book and I don't know how I want to think about it. Would you read it too and give me your opinion? By the way, your teenage kid will have all kinds of mind-blowing insights. Yes, yes. Well, we love that your work integrates both science and spiritual wisdom. And we would love for you to talk about how you see faith forming the foundation for a flourishing family. Yeah. Well, when people ask of the habits of the happiest people, I've worked on that a lot. The happiness habits, basically, and there are four. I mean, I could come up with a thousand things that are associated with greater levels of happiness, you know, broccoli versus asparagus. I mean, that's what we do in academia to get tenure is finding tiny little effects and, you know, getting it published in academic journals. But there's only four huge things that are really big swingers. And when people have these four habits, things that they focus on every day, they get remarkably happier as individuals and as families, also as communities, as nations, as companies. I see this as a matter of fact. Number one is they cultivate their faith. Number two is they cultivate their family life. Number three is their friendships. And number four is finding meaning in their work. So for each individual listening to us, if you want to get happier today, make sure you're thinking today about your faith, your family, your friendship, and finding meaning in your work, finding calling in your work. Now, the first one is often misunderstood because, you know, we live in highly secularized cultures. I teach at secular universities. And so, and a lot of my colleagues, for example, they're actually atheists. They say, well, what are you telling me that I should go be a Christian? I'm like, you know, kind of, but, but, but the truth of the matter is, I'm not going to deal with the metaphysics. I mean, that's above my pay grade to say, you know, what's right and what's wrong, cosmically. For when it comes to happiness, what we're really talking about with faith is a sense of transcendence. And here's kind of how it works. You know, life is very tedious because Mother Nature always wants us to focus on ourselves. We're the star of our psychodrama. She doesn't care if we're happy. She just wants us to be, you know, passing on our genes and surviving and eating and getting everything that we can for ourselves. But that means me, me, me, me, me, and it's so boring. It's so unbelievably boring. It's just tedious. My job, my car, my money, my television shows. And one of the things that we find is that when you focus less on yourself, you stand up to Mother Nature and you focus outward on other people by serving them or upward to the divine, or even focusing on a serious, philosophy or meditation practice, that it helps you to stand in awe of something greater than you. It gets your attention off yourself and you get happier. So this is one of the, and now we get to the real magic of this, because if you practice that with somebody else, with somebody that you love, it's, I mean, it's just that there's nothing else like it. You know, every married couple, every serious, religious married couple knows this. And it's funny because my wife and I, we counsel couples about 35 to 40 couples a month that are engaged. And we talk to them about, you know, what are the practices that are going to keep you married? You know, I've been married 34 years. You know, what are the practices that do that? Number one is praying together. Number one is praying together. You know, and why? And the answer is because that's the most intimate thing and it's a, it's an antenna to the divine. Where neither one of you is focusing on yourself, you're both focusing on and talking to God, and you're deeply, deeply in communication, in intimate communication with each other. It's like those old nuclear subs where to launch a missile, you know, the captain and the, and the navigator have to both turn their keys at the same time. It's a two key approach to the divine. And when you realize that your marriage is really your intended to God, that, that when you deny love to your wife or husband, you're denying God's love to that person because God's love flows through that other person. That's, man, that's one flash is the two right hemispheres of the brain that are communing with each other. That's no joke. Now actually add more in together. We're two or three are gathered together and you add in the whole family and you're turning all your keys at the same time. This is really, really a magical experience. I believe that it's, that God gives it to us. But I know this is a behavioral scientist as well, that when people engage in transcendence together with the people they love the most, their life changes. Okay, let's build more on that as, as we talk about the, the mechanics of, of life together. So what daily or weekly habits most reliably contribute to happiness and connection inside a family? Are there any small rituals that you'd say you recommend every family try? Yeah, part of it is, is, is just putting in the time. I mean, for the longest time, people have always said it's about quality time, not quantity time. Sorry, you need quantity time too. It's not good enough. You need to be around. And the reason is because, you know, when, when parents are picking the times to be together and really, really focusing, well, I'm sorry, I've raised three teenagers, you know, and, and, and I, I survived three teenagers and you don't get to pick when you've got the moment with them. You don't get to pick when they're actually going to be talking to you. It's like you're sitting in the car going to the laundromat, right? You're doing whatever you're doing, you're going to, you've got to spend the time together. This is really, really important, which is why it's such an incredible blessing to, you know, when, when, when everybody doesn't have to work 80 hours a week, you know, when parents can actually be around. So number one is find times that you can actually find a way to spend literally more time together. That means doing more time together. That's, that's, that's really, that's really important. So for me, I've always worked super hard, but I've always had a complete limit on making sure that I never take dinners out when I'm in the city where I live. So I live in Northern Virginia now when I'm in Northern Virginia. And again, my kids, I was going to say my kids don't live at home. One of my kids does live at home with his wife and two sons. So, so I still got kids. When I tell people my 27 year old son lives at home still, they're like, oh, I'm sorry. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, you don't understand with his wife and kids. It's the best thing ever. Strong recommend. So that, but number one is quantity, quantity, quantity, quantity. Now, when they're littler, one of the things that's really clear, that's quite important is that you find a way. And this is especially true for dads. If dads are the primary people working outside the home, it's really, really important that dads spend one on one time with each kid doing what the kid wants to do. And I saw this in the literature over and over and over again. I started doing it because I got to eat my own cooking as a behavioral scientist. I'm sure it's the same thing. I mean, you're therapists and people want to make sure that they don't see you screaming at each other in the supermarket or something. It's like, I told you that they want to make, there's kind of a high standard, which is nice to be held to. And so what the literature was very clear that is good to do is to ask a kid, what do you want? For Christmas, what would you like just you and me to do? And it was funny. One of my kids was really, really, I mean, my littlest, my baby, who's not a baby anymore. She's a second lieutenant at the Marine Corps. She's like 411, 100 pounds and a trained killer. She's a danger to America's enemies. But she just wanted to go to these amusement parks with her dad. Her brother, her older brother, all he wanted to do was go hunting and fishing. I'm not a hunter and fisherman. I grew up in Seattle. Are you kidding me? But we did it. We did it. Every single year, since he was nine years old until he graduated from high school, over Christmas break, we'd go to, I had a friend with a ranch, we'd go fishing off the Florida keys. Every year we hunted and fished. To my oldest son, he's really, really into the arts. Over his birthday in May, we would always go to New York. We'd go to the Metropolitan Opera and we'd go listen to chamber music. And that was his, it was their thing. Each one of them had their thing. And it was really beautiful. And they looked back on it with extremely fond memories. I bet they do. Okay. I've been doing a little spring reset with my closet lately. Fewer pieces, better materials, quality over quantity, which is how I accidentally discovered something like changing. I feel a little nervous. Quince makes a short sleeve Mongolian cashmere polo. Of course they do. 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Go to quince.com slash RBG for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash RBG. Okay, let's just be honest for a moment. At our age, we can't remember what we had for breakfast. Or where we parked the car. Or our login information for literally anything. If a website asked me to create a new password, I immediately need a snack and a nap. That's why I love that little purple shop pay button. You know the one where you're checking out online and suddenly there it is, like a beacon of hope. No digging for your wallet, no resetting your password for the fifth time. One tap and you're done. It's the best feature in the chaotic world of online shopping. 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Would you talk a little bit more about what the science says about the impact of constant distraction and what are practical ways families can reclaim attention? So this is the central focus of the meaning of your life, the book, the meaning of your life. What screens and technology in general are doing is they're changing our brains. They're changing the way that we work our brains. Now, our brains are hemispherically lateralized. That's just a fancy way of saying that the two sides of our brains do different things. We have to put fancy words around it. That's how we get tenure at Harvard. So hemispheric lateralization means that the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain do different things. The left side of the brain is all your technical stuff. It's your tasks. It's your questions that start with how and what. How and what questions are the left side of the brain? The right side of the brain is your complex side, which is to say problems that you understand but can't really solve. Your love questions, your faith questions, your mystery, your meaning, that's all the right side. So the right side of your brain is the why questions. Why do I want to go to work and figure out how to solve problems and make money, which I'm figuring out on the left side of the brain? Why? Because I love my wife and I love my kids. Why? Because I want to be a good member of society. Now, explain more why you love your wife. It's like, I don't know. I mean, anything I tell you will be stupid. I'll say, because she's good to me. Well, so was my third grade teacher. It's just not adequate. And the reason is because your language centers are on the left, by the way. And so you know love on your right. Now, here's the thing. Devices keep you on the wrong side of your brain where you can't find the meaning of your life. They force you into the left side and keep you there because they addick to you. They make you eliminate all the boredom from your life by distracting you constantly. And you're never in the part of your brain that you need to be in to ascertain and understand life's meaning. And that's a really, really important distinction. So this is what's actually going on neurobiologically in the brains of teenagers and young adults. They don't remember them four times like I do. I remember before these things. They don't know how to live like their grandparents did. As far as they're concerned, you know, grandpa had an iPhone. No. And grandpa's brain actually worked the way it was supposed to, which is why he was happier than a lot of people are today. Yes. Okay, we want to explore something else you've written about that we love. You've written about the strivers curse, the pressure to always achieve more. How would you say this is showing up in kids today and how could parents help them build identity around something deeper than achievement? So most of what you hear in the press is people complaining about their kids because they're slackers and Gen Z are a bunch of slackers and, you know, junior is just down in the basement playing video games. It's no joke that a lot of people really are having trouble with their adolescent and young adult kids this way. But that's not the only problem. I talk to people all day long whose kids are working their themselves to death, you know, working to get into the best colleges, you know, working to get straight A's working to get the best jobs and they're super, super, super stressed out and they can't maintain a relationship and they're anxious and they're depressed and they're taking medication. I talk to people like this all the time. And that's not because the kids are slackers, it's because their kids are excessive strivers. Different problem. Now again, pick your poison is what it comes down to. But I specialize in the strivers because the strivers are the ones who are most likely to be falling prey to this psychogenic epidemic of loneliness, depression and anxiety, quite frankly. What you're finding is that people under 30 who are most likely to be anxious and depressed, they're actually more likely than the others to be college educated. So what's up with that? And what's up with that is that they've actually lost the ability to have their brains work the way that they're supposed to their brains, even when they're just working and hustling and grinding. That's just more of the technology for all intents and purposes. Our society works today, it doesn't say be a real striver by, you know, chopping down more trees. It says be a real striver by spending more time with your devices, more time with your technology. You know, develop that software that does something so critical for society, like how to find the closest pizza at 10 p.m. or whatever it is. And what that does is it sucks the life out of life. More importantly, it dooms you to spend the eternity of your days on the left hemisphere of your brain, and you will not know the meaning of your life. You won't even know how to ask about the meaning of your life. That's the reason for depression and anxiety among young strivers today. Thank you for sharing about that. I know we could ask you about so many different things. We want to go to another book if you'll let us for a minute, because your book Love Your Enemies feels more relevant than ever, especially in families raising kids in a polarized world. And so we would love for you to talk about how parents can model civil discourse, empathy, and respect even with differing opinions in today's world. Yeah, I wrote Love Your Enemies in 2019, and I didn't really expect to solve that problem. The master didn't solve that problem in the year, but when is the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew 544, the Sermon of the Mal, what was that, the year 31 AD? The most transgressive thing, the most transgressive idea ever is to love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. That's a hard thing to do, but what it requires is an understanding of what love actually is, to love is to will the good of the other. That's Thomas Aquinas in 1265. Nothing about feelings, nothing about sentiments is to will the good of the other. It's an act, it's a decision, and that's really where it starts out about how to be a good parent. How do you love your kids by willing their good as them? It's inadequate to say, I'm going to just feel all the sentiment toward my kid. On the contrary, you know how it is to raise teenagers. I mean, you feel pretty rotten toward your kid a lot of the time, but you love them 100% of the time if you're a good parent. It's the same thing with the way that you treat everybody else. If you want to raise kids who can actually function in a society and they're not pugilistic and activists and angry and aggrieved and victimized, you have to demonstrate that to love is to will the good of the other. That means toward them, that means toward each other, and that means toward the whole world and not ever let them see you treating with contempt people with whom you disagree. Because what that is is a lesson. It's a boot camp and misery is what it is. It makes them less able. Remember, the key thing about, I mean, you know this, parenting is about not about what you say at all. It's what they see. You want to raise kids who practice the faith, then never have them see you not practicing the faith. If you want to raise your kids to not be drunks, never have them see you drunk is how it, when it comes to that. It doesn't matter what you tell them. You can talk to them in a foreign language. All that matters is what they see. And for me in my life, it's the secret to everything. My dad was a serious Christian man. And when I was a little boy, I thought he was so strong, he could lift the corner of the house. He was a math professor, so he couldn't. But he was a proud guy too. He wouldn't have been on, he would have taken down the knee to any other man. But every single night, he was on his knees at my bedside saying his prayers with me. And that's what I learned that to be a strong man was to bow before the Lord, was to bow before my Creator. And this is the key thing with anything. Do you want them to grow up and not be contemptuous and hateful? And by the way, the more contemptuous and hateful they are, the more miserable they're going to be, then you actually have to love your enemies and have them see you praying for those who persecute you. That's what they need to see. Yes. Dr. Brooks, this conversation has been so rich. It has. And we don't really want it to end, but we are committed to respecting your time. So we want to end with asking you where could families find out more about your work, your books, the great practical things you're offering. And tell them about the new one one more time, please. Yeah. So the new book is the meaning of your life, finding purpose in an age of emptiness. I wrote it for everybody. I mean, I kind of position it for young adults, but it's actually for adults like me who are not so young and maybe feeling a little bit of emptiness in their lives. It defends, it sort of defines what meaning is and where to find it and then how to live in a different way, how to raise your family in a different way so that meaning is really part of your whole family life. That book is on sale on March 31st, 2026. All of my work. And we'll put the links to. It's on the books, up on the site for the show. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. All of my work is available at arthurbricks.com and there's lectures, there's columns, there's tests that people can actually take and including to do it with their families. There's all sorts of things that they can teaching materials to people that can actually use in their churches and people can use in their book clubs. And so there's all that and this is what I want is I want all of us to become happiness teachers, to spread love and happiness around and so doing to live up to the, live up to the promise that I think that we've been created to, to live up to in our lives and help other people do so as well. We're grateful. Yes, thank you for your work. Yes, you're so grateful. Thank you so very much for your joy to meet you. Yeah, likewise. Likewise. I hope I get to meet you in person one of these days. Us too. We would love it. David, what a team we have that we get to call friends who help make this podcast possible. Chris Sterrett, our engineer, our management team at KCH. 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