FLASHBACK: Mitch Albom & Arthur Brooks

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It's Brian Kilmey. Thanks so much for listening to this special edition of the Brian Kilmey Show. It's going to be an exciting half hour. I can't wait to get to it. In fact, Mitch Album is going to be with us.

Maybe the most successful author in the country. What he writes about is not what he does on a daily basis. He does sports writing still on a daily basis, got a hit podcast, but he also writes a book with Tremendous Meeting. Remember, he made his name as Tuesdays with Maury. I knew about him when he was just doing sports.

And now he's got a new book out called Twice. And man, is it worth it? Here's my interview. With Mitch album.

So, Mitch, there's nothing you really can't handle. Also, in your spare time, you're also running an orphanage in Haiti. Yeah, I'm trying to squeeze a few things into my life. It couldn't be a more challenging environment than Haiti. Haiti's a nightmare right now.

And even just to get in, we have to fly to a city that's 150 miles from our orphanage and then take a helicopter to get down.

So the gangs are in control there. Didn't the congressman help get you out? Yeah, we had to be airlifted out. And several people from Congress, thank goodness, got us out in the middle of the night and they were shooting at helicopters and everything. We got airlifted out.

And everyone said I'd be crazy to go back, but I was back about a month later. Because these kids aren't numbers. They're people to you. These are people I take care of. You like your family.

Yeah, we have 60-plus kids that we take care of, and we have 18 of them in college here now on scholarships, two in medical school. But these kids have nothing. They come to us with nothing. Uh, we have to help them. I mean, I wish America was a little bit more involved, honestly.

Right. I hope we get to that soon because I'm actually doing some studying about the Louisiana Purchase. We're talking about Haiti. Is that your next book? Yeah.

Well, kind of. And one of the areas I'm focusing on is the Louisiana Purchase. And you didn't realize if the French didn't get so caught up in what we now know as Haiti, I think it was Santa Domingo, and they didn't get so annihilated by people rising up and wanting their freedom, the French might have said, I'm not giving up Louisiana. You're not going to have any deal to get New Orleans. But because they got so hung up and butchered in that conflict, All of a sudden, I realized, yeah, this is the America would look different.

How about that? Yeah, so Haiti contributed, absolutely.

So you're also up for a Marconi, I understand? Yeah, okay. I have nothing to do with that, and that's crazy. I don't think I deserve that, but we'll see.

Well, you do, obviously. You got nominated.

So tell me the premise of twice.

So, twice is, you know, I wanted to write a book about people who always keep thinking the grass is always greener on the other side.

So, I created a story about a guy who discovers when he's a kid that he has the magical ability to do everything in his life a second time if he wants to, but he has to live with the consequences of his second try. He can't go back to the first one, whatever happens a second time, that's it. And he goes through his adolescence fixing his mistakes and his embarrassments with girls and all that kind of stuff. And then, when he gets older, he finds out that there's one caveat to the power, and that is it doesn't work with love.

So, if somebody loves you and you decide you want to go try somebody else, go back in time and see if that other girl or whatever, then that first person can never love you again. That's it. They'll be in the world. You can talk to them, but that's it. And of course, he finds the perfect person, he thinks, and then he gets tempted and he has to make a very fateful decision with his power.

So, it's all about whether we think. The alternative life that we imagine is better than the one we have. What prompted this? Was it a conversation? Was it something you thought about?

Probably just getting older. And, you know, the more the older you get, and I'm sure you see this too, Brian, the more the people your peers start saying, you know, I should have taken, I should have gone a different career, I should have married that girl from whatever, but they don't do it because it's too late in life to go change it. When you're young, if you're in your 20s and you say, I don't like this career, I'm going to go try that one. I don't want this partner, I'm going to try that one. But you reach a certain age where the concrete starts to settle, and you feel like, well, you just can't change anything.

And then people start developing these regrets. But my thought process is, well, yeah, you could have taken that career, but that would have brought with it a whole other set of problems. Yeah, you could have married that other person, but you don't know what that would have led to, you know, what comes after.

So that whole idea about second chances is kind of floats around me and I hear it all the time. And I tend to try to write books ever since Tuesdays with Maury that are what people are thinking about, you know, issues that they ask themselves questions. I don't tend to write my books like I have this great idea for a plot or a character. I think about the themes that people are talking about, and I try to create stories around those. Because it really sells the story and the belief that people can see themselves in that story.

Yeah, exactly. And also, I feel like. You almost see it as a movie before it's a book because every all your books feel like they're movies. Does it first you picture the dialogue and then you knock it down to a book? No, first you think of the theme, then you think of I always think of the ending because I want to know where I'm sailing to, and then you and then you kind of create the story.

But it's funny you say it about a movie because for the first time, this thing, this one of my books, this book was purchased for a movie before I finished the book. I mean, I don't even know how they got a hold of the early manuscript, but Netflix bought it and got assigned a director and a writer. It's already, the script is almost done. I said to the screenwriter, you're putting out a script before the book is out.

So it was, you know, I guess it's an appealing kind of story. Wow. Are you thrilled by that? Yeah.

Yeah.

I really like the director and writer. His name is Paul Weitz. He's a guy who did About a Boy and some of the other really great films.

So yeah, I was thrilled by it. But I mean, usually they wait to see if a book is successful and then they say, well, let's jump on the bandwagon. This one they did before it even came out.

So. The Mitch album that was due in sports. Do you feel like you're the same guy, the one who was worried if the Tigers were going to win and what the Yankees were going to, how much they were going to spend on their free agency? Does that seem like the same thing?

Well, I never worried about how much the Yankees were going to spend on their free agency. But it would be a topic on the Sunday in the morning. Remember the first million-dollar contract people were worried about?

Well, that's kind of Brian why this book was kind of natural to me. I've sort of had a twice life, you know. For the first 37 years, that's all I did was sports. And you and I know, we go way back. And I was 100 miles an hour, sports reporters.

I lived up in Bristol for ESPN for three days a week and writing five columns a week. And then Tuesdays with Maury happened. And, you know, I wrote a book to pay my old professor's medical expenses. He was dying from Lou Gehrig's disease. You know, we met every Tuesday.

It was supposed to be a tiny book. Nobody, I mean, most publishers told me to get lost. They weren't even interested in it. They printed 20,000 copies for the world. And I thought that would be it.

And they'd be in the trunk of my car the rest of my life. And then. All of a sudden, it took off, and next thing I know, instead of people asking me who's going to win the Super Bowl, they're coming up and saying, My mother died of cancer, and the last thing we did was read Tuesdays with Maury. Can I talk to you about her? And you have that happen.

Thousands of times, and you become a different person, and your interests become different, and you realize the kind of the grief and the suffering that's going on in the world and what people are into.

So while sports kind of always remained a part of my life after that, and I still to this day write a sports column, not frequently, But my interests became much different and I ended up getting involved in charity and in orphanage in Haiti and a lot of stuff in Detroit.

So no, I mean, I'm not the same person, but I don't think we should be the same person. That's kind of the point of twice. Everybody thinks they sh oh, it would be great to have a magic power to go back and undo something, but you already have that power. It's called the next minute of your life. And everything that you learned up to this point.

Enables you to make a different decision in the minute that comes next. Do you have a personal mission of self-improvement, a conscience? I want to be better. Totally. And I want to be a better person.

When I was younger, I wanted to be bigger. That's, I think, the difference between young and mature. There's a big difference between old and mature. You know, you can be old and still be young. But I think when you're young, you just want to be big, you know, and I want my name everywhere.

And when you. Mature, you say I want to be better. Right, and that's where you're at now. That's where I'm at. And do you think in writing this book that you learn things about like uh morals and character and things to that nature?

100%. Because while you're writing, you're you're literally creating. Yeah.

100%, because the reason I made love, for example, the caveat. Is because I was kind of writing the book to my wife after 37 years that we've been together. I wanted her to know that I understood that love isn't. Love is not a basketball shot that you miss, that you want to go back and just make it and then fix everything. Love is like the first day, the hundredth day, the ten thousandth day, and everything that happens along the way.

Is what you get.

So, yeah, it's true. You could say, well, gee, if I could have married that girl in high school, it'd be licensed, but you're only imagining the first day. Right? You're imagining the first date or the first time you sleep with them or the first whatever. You're not imagining 15 years down the pike or 30 years down the pike.

But that is what a love relationship is, all the bumps along the road.

So I think I even became hopefully a better appreciative husband by writing the book. You also wrote in your last book about you adopted a child and then that child passes away and then you put that story to paper. Yeah, that was Finding Chica was a few books ago. She was one of our kids from Haiti. She had a She had a brain tumor and we adopted her.

They told us she would be dead in four months, but We said, well, she's a fighter. You don't know this kid. You know, she survived the earthquake when she was three days old.

So we traveled around the world with her, and she lived two years. And honestly, what's interesting, Brian, is she died. And we thought, well, that was our chance of being parents, you know, and at least we got the opportunity. And then three years ago, a little girl was brought to us. who weighed six pounds.

And she was six months old. And she'd never hadn't had anything to eat in her life but sugar water. She'd fit in the palm of my hand. Her eyes couldn't open. She couldn't make any sound.

And we raced her home and we put her on this nutrition program to try to feed her around the clock. And we prayed every week. We brought her to the doctor. We'd put her on the scale. Please gain an ounce, just an ounce, just an ounce.

And that little girl is now our little girl. No, you know. Yeah.

We have a three and a half-year-old. Wow. Yeah.

And she's a pistol. Her name is Nadi, and she's the joy of our lives.

So we got a second chance, just like this book twice. From Haiti? From Haiti, yeah. And was that, was she in your orphanage? Yeah, she was brought to our orphanage, yeah.

Wow. And do we know anything about her background? Not a lot. No, we don't know a whole lot about a lot of our kids' backgrounds. Wow, that's incredible.

So the people that come to you in Haiti.

So you'll just say there's a need there, and will they have to stay there too in the orphanage? They don't come just for school. If we say no, they live there. If we say we're taking new kids, there's a line down the block. Of I have to say no to 10 kids for everyone that we can say yes to.

And yes, they live with us, we take care of them, we get medical treatment, they go to school there, four hours in English, four hours in French. We have, you know, they're fully fed three meals a day, everybody gets their own bed. These things in Haiti are not common for children.

So it's a big deal, actually, if they can get into our place. But we can't, obviously, can't take everybody. And I can imagine how much more money you'd have for the kids if you'd have to pay for security. Yeah, 24 security guards I have now. Uh, ringing our place because of the gangs in Haiti.

I mean, it's crazy. Why should an orphanage have to have twenty-four security guards? Have you talked to the State Department about this at all? I've talked to everybody. And what do they say?

There's not much interest in Haiti. They don't have much to offer us in return. You've got to put a government in. I mean, they literally, there is no government, right? Yeah.

What I hear a lot is a lot of complaints about what happened after the earthquake and the Clintons and the money that went down. And I hear that a lot.

Well, we gave money to Haiti before and it disappeared. And so, you know, it's just a big black hole and it just, you know, so we don't want to fund it. But hey, you know, you're a student of history. We occupied and ran Haiti for 15 years in the early 1900s. We wrote their constitution.

Their money was in our bank. We have a history with this country. And they're right off our shores. I mean, you know, if they had oil, If the Chinese or Russians were suddenly interested in it, we'd be down there in a heartbeat. But because that's not happening, we're just allowing people to just, I mean.

Tens of thousands of people are murdered down there by gangs, and nobody's doing anything about it. People, you can't go out in the street. Our kids haven't left our orphanage in four years, haven't gone outside because it's not safe to go out there. You know, the other thing is, there's this thing called the United Nations a few blocks from here. If you talk about a humanitarian effort, that would be it.

And I think they have money for security. And all they do is just keep meeting and making suggestions and all that. The problem actually began when the United Nations left in 2017. They had been there after the earthquake, and they ostensibly were there to help rebuild the country. But when you see UN trucks going around and they have guns and whatever, the gangs don't act up.

As soon as they left, there was a void. The gangs started rising, and now they basically run Port-au-Prince. And in many ways, they basically overthrow the country. And they overthrew, didn't the... They killed the president.

Did the first lady kill the president?

Well, I have no idea. Nobody's figured it out yet who killed him. But once he was gone, The power vacuum created this opportunity for these gangs and. They own 90% of Port-au-Prince. Can you imagine if 90% of New York, where we are right now, was under gang control?

Our orphanage is in the 10%, thank God, that isn't under gang control yet, but we have bullets landing in our. Yard all the time.

So the UN would have to come in guns are blazing. They'd have to come in looking to. I don't know about guns blazing. Most of these gang members, more than half of them, are under 17 years old. They're mostly just kids with guns, but because nobody else has guns in Haiti, The people who have the guns are running things.

I think if you just sent down a peacekeeping force and went in there and they started to try to take back these neighborhoods that have been taken over by these gangs, they would quell it, and a lot of these gangs would run, they'd disappear. I don't think it requires an army, but it does require some kind of effort. And right now, nobody's making that. How much of your time is taken up with this? I go every month.

Every month? Yeah, for about a week. And in my That's incredible. And you're able to balance things out and still write a sports column?

Well, I don't write very many sports columns, uh but once in a while, yeah, when I'm home in the other three weeks and uh the people around me are very forgiving and allow me to, you know. Do this work and do the other work. Lastly, are you worried about baseball? As the sport or about the Tigers? No, about it as a sport.

Um Well, yeah, I mean, I do think it, uh, I think it's losing young people. You know, I think football has just taken up all the oxygen in the room. I do think they made a good move with the pitch count thing and the clock to speed up the games because they were on a death spiral before that. Especially if you're covering them, yes, you can't get it. Yeah, yeah.

And now it's funny, you go to the playoffs and we're back to three and a half-hour-long games. It's like, what happened? You know, during the season, they were over in two hours and 10 minutes. But. You know, it's the nature of the game.

I mean, I don't know how much you can do. You can't make it look like the NBA. But. You know, I think there'll always be a market for it, but it's not going to be the nation's pastime. Right.

And, Mitch, you're not upset that the Yankees lost yesterday for the record. No, I'm not. I live in Detroit. We're still alive. I know.

Absolutely. And doing it on a budget. Mitch Album's got a brand new novel out. It's certainly going to be a movie. Netflix has bought it and wrote it, wrote the script.

It's called Twice. You got to pick it up, and I know you will. Mitch, congratulations on all this. Brian, it's great to see you, man. Thank you.

Back in a moment. Thanks for basting the turkey while listening to the best of Brian Kill Mead. Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at the Brian Kill Meat Show. Hi, everyone. It's Brian Kilmead here.

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The more you listen, the more you'll know. It's Brian Killmead. Officials in Ireland are saying that reports of a lion wandering in the woods was actually just a dog with a new haircut. Ireland. I guess we are pretty drunk.

Yeah, that is pretty funny. I'm not sure if that's true, but I do know Ireland, on a serious note, has let way too many immigrants in. It's changing the texture of the country. But their left-wing government, one of the first to condemn the Israelis when they came back after the attacks on October 7th. And that's why Connor McGregor was on our show.

And I interviewed him in a pre-tape and he said, I'm running for president. And then a little bit later that day, he withdrew. Had to kinda Only a small section of that interview with Conor McGregor. But one day I'd like to go to Ireland only when they straighten out their government. Just a quick announcement: it's coming up quicker than you think, coming up on February 14th.

And I'll have more dates to announce shortly, but to be able to go on stage and bring history to life, History, Liberty, and Laughed. You'll see it streamed on Fox Nation, but better in person, Fort Myers, Florida. I hope to see everyone there. Just go to briankillme.com. I'm going to have a whole lot of other announcements coming up, too, about a whole lot of things are going.

A few in the spring, a few more in the summer, but a whole lot in the fall. A lot of events. And we have a good time. What I like most about is getting a chance to see you guys, the listeners, in person, find out what you like, what you want to talk more about. I also think there's going to be a lot of pressure in the next month or two as we get through the holidays for the President of the United States to lead the charge, to make sure his next two years are like his first two years, with Republicans able to enact his legislation and not spend the whole time fending off impeachment opportunities for wannabe presidential candidates on the left.

And that is for the president to go ahead with the affordability push. He's got to be relentless on it, just like he is in the Middle East. And he's also got to keep coming up with these ideas and explaining them. The other thing I would do, Mr. President, go to the border.

He sealed it. When you go, the cameras follow. Make everyone report the story. They're not taking it for granted that we're controlling our borders. Everybody in Europe is envious of it.

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Arthur Brooks, is here, Harvard professor, Atlantic columnist, host of Office Hours Podcast, best-selling author of The Happiness Files, Insights on Work and Life. And he has a new book coming out, too, which I can't wait to find out more about. And also, he's got a new article, How to Heal Our Country, which is a big thing to say. And also, how to make your individual life better, healthier, right, Arthur? Yeah, for sure.

I teach happiness at Harvard, and that's wraparound happiness, man. How do you do it for a country? How do you do it for yourself? How do you do it for your family? And it's all based on science.

So this is not just self-improvement. This is the neuroscience and behavioral science of how to be a happier person. And are you still learning this? Oh, yeah, for sure. It's a goal for the rest of my life.

You know, I got my PhD about 30 years ago, and I've been studying this stuff. But over the past seven years, I've dedicated myself completely to human happiness and what it actually means. You know, the science of how this actually works, how you can change your habits and protocols and then teach it to other people so your family and the people around you can get happier too. And did you teach this past semester? Yeah, I mean, I teach in the spring.

So I teach in the spring. up at Harvard. And, you know, I'll have 180 students in my class starting in January. I'll have 400 on the waiting list. There'll probably be an illegal Zoom link they think I don't know about.

Right. And this could be, it must feel good to have that type of. It's fantastic. It's the best. You know, it's a, you know, we get one pass through this mortal coil, man.

And you can make life better for people. You can make life worse for people. And I dedicated myself. Look, I'm a Christian. And I said, I'm going to dedicate my Christian faith to my secular job.

And I want to make people happier. I want to help people understand how to have more love in their life is what it comes down to. And I'm a scientist, so I got to do the science behind it. It's great. What's the relationship between success and happiness?

So that's an interesting thing that most people don't get right. And here's the key thing to remember. Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. Mother nature wants you to survive and pass on your genes. Happiness is your job is what it comes to.

Everybody listening to us, happiness is something that you have to choose and do things that actually stand up to your natural impulses.

So you want to have more money, more power, more pleasure. More admiration of other people. And that'll give you more, you know, all of the stuff that the world promises, but it won't bring you more happiness is the problem.

So, what I tell my students is: you think success will bring you happiness. Going for happiness directly, which comes from faith, family, friendship, and work that serves other people, then you'll be successful enough.

So, what role does in more practical purposes? Let's say you have this, you have great friends, you have a great family, but you have to stress every day, which a lot of people listening to us right now. Yeah.

Was it the number 70% of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck? They worry one thing goes wrong. They don't worry about the safety net. And Social Security won't be enough. That's real worry.

How do you figure happiness? How do you work happiness into that? Yeah.

So the problem with that is that these real world tensions and anxieties, they actually don't hurt your happiness, but they raise your unhappiness. And happiness and unhappiness are not opposites.

So you can be a very happy person and also have a lot of sources of unhappiness in your life. The key thing to keep in mind is that you do the best you can to lower these sources of unhappiness. You find the best job that you can. You have a good relationship with other people who can help you, et cetera, et cetera. But then focus on the real sources of your happiness, which all come from love.

Love that you have with God, love that you have with your family and friends, love toward the whole world through the way that you're trying to serve is the way that that works.

So you think about, you know, obviously a balance through. That. Yeah, for sure. You can't change the whole world, but you can change yourself. Focus on the things that you can actually change to become a happier person.

And is it the voice? What do you do with the voice in your head that wants more? I know. Well, that's Mother Nature, once again. And that's one of the reasons that every religion and every philosophy has always said: stand up to your nature, man.

I mean, there's kind of two parts about being a person. Your dog. You have a dog, Brian? Two. You have two dogs.

Your dogs really only have animal impulses. They're awesome. They act like humans, but they really have an animal impulse. We have this part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex right behind our foreheads. It's huge.

It's a supercomputer that gives us more than animal impulses. We also have moral aspirations. We can make decisions in spite of our animal impulses. And that's what we're trying to do all day long. If you live with your animal impulses, you'll just get drunk every night.

You'll sleep in every morning. You won't show up for work. You'll cheat on your spouse. And that's because your animal impulses say, I don't feel good. Don't do it.

You want to live up to your moral aspirations and then you get happier by making conscious decisions. And it becomes A habit, right? Totally. You start showing that discipline, it becomes a habit, and then it becomes a reinforcement. Animal habits reinforce themselves, moral habits reinforce themselves as well.

Is there a number that you should go through in order for it to be a habit? People talk about how many days you should do something, whether it's a diet or exercise. It depends on what you're actually doing.

So, you find, for example, exercise, generally speaking, takes about six weeks, four times a week doing exactly the same thing.

So, I put people, I do a lot of work on biology too. I mean, I do a lot of work on wraparound wellness, health and wellness. And so, and I'm a real gym rat and fitness guy. And so, what I tell people is if they want to start working out. If you're doing people not watching and not watching the stream, you're in unbelievable shape.

I mean, I'm in at 61, I feel better than when I was 31. That's for sure. And because I've got my diet and exercise on point, yeah, totally. I work out seven days a week, an hour a day, but nobody's going to do that from nothing. The way to do that is to do is to do a workout, usually a cardio, a zone two cardio workout.

That means like that little elliptical thing or going for a really brisk walk. Four days a week for six weeks and then start getting fancier. But four times a week for six weeks, and then it becomes a habit, and then we'll talk about how to make it fancier. Right, one bill is on the other. How do you feel about the shortcuts?

Which ones? Zeptide, or whatever. Zeppbound, Zeppbound, Munjaro, the GLP-1 drugs, those things are a miracle, actually. And what they do is they actually. Among other things.

I mean, they're thought of as obesity drugs, but they're changing behavior as well. They're changing other kinds of bad habits. People take them and find they don't want to smoke anymore. People take them and they don't want to eat junk food so much anymore or drink alcohol anymore.

So it's kind of an amazing thing because what it does is it interrupts the reward cycle in your brain where you get these big, big dopamine-based rewards for these particular behaviors. And so they're a great thing and they can be a good adjunct to how you're trying to improve your life.

So when you see so, you know, Serena Williams, and when you see Charles Barkley, say, Yeah, that's what I'm on. I mean, that's changed even since the last time I talked to you. People were taking it and they said, Well, I'm not going to tell anyone.

Now it's out there. Here's why I think it would be good.

So, you think to yourself, no matter what I do, I can't lose weight. When some people do work out and they don't get the reward they want, well, you can't out exercise a bad diet, can't be done, can't be done. You got to change the behavior of the input of what you're putting in your mouth and not just actually how you're expending exercise.

Sorry to interrupt, yeah, because it'll lessen the weight, but you're not going to get the tone, you're not going to get the muscle. But it's a jump start to say, Wow, look what's possible. Yeah, that's you know, it gets you out of a rut and ready to go. Yeah, totally. I mean, I got nothing against those particular things.

Now, the whole idea that a lot of people who don't really need to lose weight are doing it for pure vanity reasons, that's another psychological problem. Vanity will mess you up, vanity will ruin the quality of your life. That's just the truth. If you're looking in the mirror thinking all day long, what do people think of me? What do people think about how I look?

That per se is a problem, actually.

So, if that's the reason you're using it, I'm working out because it's for me for three basic reasons. I get up in the morning at 4:30, 4:45 to 5:45. I work out every day for three reasons. Number one is mood management. By the way, can I also tell you that's hard to roll out of bed and work out?

Yeah.

That's a habit. It's a habit. It's a habit. And it's a habit without doing it without coffee because I drink my coffee much later. And you and I have talked about this before.

So, number one is I'm trying to manage negative mood. The best way to manage negative mood is picking up heavy things and running around. And if you have a naturally negative mood, which half the population is above average in negative mood, they just are. And it tends to be most acute first thing in the morning. Don't drink alcohol.

Don't take drugs. Don't be a workaholic. Don't blunt your feelings by distracting yourself with behavior and substances. There are two things to do: pray more, worship more. Religion is incredibly good for negative mood.

And number two is work out, go to the gym, pick up heavy things, go work, run around. And that's what I do first thing in the morning. That's why. Arthur Brooks is with us. And he's, what's the name of your new book coming out?

The new book is coming out. It's coming out March 31st of 2026, The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Energy. Wow. Where do you start with that book? Oh, man.

This has been five years in the making. It's the hardest book I ever wrote. Topic sentence is tough enough. I know. So.

Couple of things. This is what I find interesting: is that when you go to countries, developing countries, their goal, especially early man, their goal is we got to eat every day, we got to find shelter every day. You know, early, like you study early Americans when they start moving west. Right. Well, we got to find a place to live.

We got to find out there's going to be a road. We got to find out what we're going to eat. Right. You don't have necessary time to go, what makes me happy? Right.

You have goals called survival and then hopefully success and wealth. And then you read about these stories and these accounts. But There's something healthy about that. And it just wipes out a lot of the outside sources. I'm not really worried about my biceps.

I'm not worried about my chest development. Man, I got to make sure that this move I'm making with my family works out, and I'm not going to be attacked by the American Indians and things to that nature. And that's what you see in a lot of developing countries today. Survival is the key. That's a different situation than what Americans deal with because survival in most cases is not an issue.

Right. No, that's right.

Now, the problem is that when you have avoidable sources of misery, like caloric deficits, or your kids don't get vaccines, or you can't send your kids to school, that actually does raise a lot of unhappiness. That really does raise a lot of unhappiness. That's true. The problem is that when you actually are not thinking in the way that your brain was intended to think, which is about doing your work every day and your basic relationships and focusing on the people around you. And, you know, I'll tell you, you know, my great-grandfather was a farmer.

And there's one thing he never once said. I mean, he had a hard life and his job was really boring. And, you know, he didn't know if there's going to be food on the table. But he never once went home and said to my great-grandmother, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. No, because that didn't exist is the whole point.

And part of the reason was like his life could have been better and mine is, but he was using his brain the way that nature intended for him to use his brain, which was focusing on the here and now, doing his work, taking care of his family, and not looking at the stupid screen in his pocket.

So he wouldn't need your course. No, no, no. He would not need your course, would he? There's certain things that actually could have been better, you know, that he could have learned more of, but he could have taught a lot of things to me too, because his brain was working the way evolution intended it.

So, I mean, we get to a certain point. Do you believe? In with these kids and the therapists that are in school, that we're working almost, we're giving. Kids too much therapy, too much convenience, worried about too much of their thought, worried so much. I mean, bullying obviously is a problem, especially if it's health.

But a lot of the friction that kids go through with parents that weren't necessarily there, or school teachers and nurses, and psychologists that weren't even employed, or perhaps at your school. Those things that you learn to work through through high school and through grammar school, a lot of kids are getting the soft landing with therapy and there's something wrong and we can work with you. Are you under the school of thought that there's a lot of um There's a lot of negativity to that, even though the objective is correct. In the current day, the way that we understand adolescents' mental health, a lot of it's misguided. There's this idea that if you're sad and anxious, there's something wrong with you and you got to cure it.

That's encouraging. I tell my students, look, you study at Harvard. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy. It's a hard thing that you're doing. And good for you.

You're making sacrifices and you're struggling. And that's life on earth, man. And you don't need to, you should never try to eliminate your suffering. Your suffering is sacred. You learn from your suffering.

You learn how to manage your suffering by suffering.

Now, it can be dysregulated. You can be depressed and anxious, and there can be a medical problem, to be sure. But the idea of eliminating suffering, that's a misguided approach and it's making things worse. You could solve a multitude of problems with some relatively simple protocols for a lot of young people. Take away the phone and go run around outside.

That's number one. For a lot of young people, that just solves a multitude of problems. And to back up your thoughts, Arthur, is these people that in most schools are doing This down, making the kids put their phones away, whether it's in a box or leave it at home. Almost all the kids are embracing this as well as the teachers. They love it.

But of course, it's hard to do, and 27 states are still not doing it. There's not one classroom in America from kindergarten through PhD that should have one phone in it. And that just takes fortitude and courage on the part of politicians, and it's going to raise mental health dramatically. This is a new problem. Yeah.

And it was like one of those things where you put a frog in the water and you slowly make the water hotter. You didn't even know what the water was a problem.

So when we first invented this, I never remember as the BlackBerry went to the iPhone. People weren't saying this could be a problem. Right. I always thought about the possibility. Yeah.

I mean, this is what technology is. Did you recognize it as a problem?

Well, yeah, because I'm a behavioral scientist and I was looking at this. And, you know, I pall around with guys like Jonathan Haidt down at New York University, who wrote The Anxious Generation, a great book. There's no small talk.

Well, you know, it's like it's when we do shop talk. It's like when you're talking to one of your buddies here at Fox, you know, you're talking about the business. And it's true. We saw actually this thing coming a long time. And we've been collecting.

Data and doing studies on this as well. We can solve this problem with proper discipline, proper protocols, good schooling, and good parenting. And I'm sure that we will solve this problem, just a lot of damage along the way. One thing that's working against me in my texting is spell check. Yeah.

Because most of the time it doesn't know what I mean. Yeah, yeah. And I got to check it more. But that's pretty much my problem. It's the people I text that are unhappy about it.

Arthur Brooks is here. He's got some great things. Also, when we come back, when you should have your coffee and why, and how you should start your day, if you want to be happy, don't move. This is the best of Brian Killmead. Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo.

There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand.

It was just the five of us.

So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people.

Killing each other. All her fault. A new series streaming now, only on Peacock. Hey, Ron Reynolds here, wishing you a very happy half-off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service.

Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price.

So, That means Half day. Yeah.

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See MittMobile.com. Information you want, truth you demand. This is the Brian Kill Me Show. He wanted. The best for them.

That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent. And I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry. I am sorry, Erica.

Now, Erica can talk to me and the whole group, and maybe they can convince me that that's not right, but I can't stand my opponent. Charlie's angry. Look at that. He's angry at me now.

So I think that's perfect for our next segment. Arthur Brooks, we have a few more minutes with the Harvard Professor, best-selling author. His podcast is also very successful. It's called He's a Host of Office Hours. You can get it on Spotify.

Dr. Brooks, the name of your column is basically forgive your enemies. That's what I thought. That would be love your enemies. Don't forgive them.

Love them. All right.

So I think Trump was having fun with that. Of course. But you were shaking your head. No, he's being provocative. And I got it.

I was the National Prayer Breakfast keynote speaker in 2020. And I was on the dais with Donald Trump. And, you know, that was the morning that he had been acquitted from his second or third or 40th, whatever it was, the time he was impeached by the Democrats. And he comes out and I was given a speech called Love Your Enemies and Pray for Those Are Percy. It's a National Prayer Breakfast.

And Donald Trump, who's such a great performer, I have to say. And he gets up and he says, I love a good speech by Arthur Brooks. But. But I gotta say, I disagree. You know, and it's like the gall to get up and disagree with Jesus at the national prayer breakfast.

But, you know, it happened tongue-in-cheek. Of course. Of course, he's a performer. He's a performer, absolutely. But he's, you know, it's very hard.

But loving your enemies. Yeah.

And what Erica did do. Uh, Erica Kirk did do by saying, I forgive the assassin of my husband. Yeah, I mean, that's that's. That's an incredible example for your premise. Yeah, well, here, the important thing to keep in mind is that Jesus didn't say to like your enemies.

Martin Luther King gave a sermon on this part of the gospel. This is Matthew 5:44, the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says, You've heard that you should love your friends and hate your enemies. Today, I give you a new teaching: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Hardest teaching ever.

But that means you have to make the decision notwithstanding your feelings. And that's really what we're talking about. People.

Well, you get out of that by doing that. How does that help you? That gives you control because when you're not hating and somebody else is, you have control. You have cognitive control. You have literally more power.

That doesn't mean you have to like somebody, invite them over for dinner. It doesn't mean you have to be best friends with them and have tender feelings toward them. It has nothing to do with your feelings at all. It's the decision that you make actually to will the good of another person. And sometimes the good of the other person requires that you do a really, really hard thing that they don't like, but never do it out of hate because if you do, you're weak.

I mean, you're not actually going to be as effective as you could be. Do you practice that? I try. I try. I pray about that every time.

Day. It's very important to me to actually practice that. I don't like everybody, but I'm commanded by my master to love everybody. On a lighter note, what have you found out? You were talking about your schedule before how you work out right away and you get going, but you wait a while to have coffee because health is very much a part of your school.

Absolutely. And one of the things that we understand about coffee, coffee actually blocks a neurotransmitter called adenosine. Coffee doesn't pep you up. Coffee blocks you from actually feeling lethargic. That's how it works.

Adenosine is one of these circulating neurochemicals that makes you feel groggy, makes you go to sleep at night. And there's a lot of it in your brain when you first wake up, and that's why you feel groggy. It'll get blocked by caffeine. Don't do that. Let it clear naturally.

That way you won't have a crash and you can use it to focus on your work instead. In 20 seconds left, what should we plug for Arthur Brooks? What book should we get of yours? Oh, the last one is the Happiness Files: Insights on Life and Work. I get through it.

I downloaded it, even though you gave me a couple inch of copy.

So you got money there. Thanks, man. Thank you. Thanks. It's Will Kane Country.

Watch it live at noon Eastern Monday through Thursday at FoxNews.com or on the Fox News YouTube channel. And don't miss the show. Listen and follow the podcast five days a week at FoxnewsPodcasts.com or wherever you download your favorite podcasts.