Ted Audio Collective Hi everyone, you're listening to HBS After Hours.
I'm Yongmi Moon and tonight I am here with my dear friend and colleague, Mike Norton.
How are you? I'm good, how are you?
I'm doing really well.
For those of you who haven't met Mike, Mike wrote one of the most interesting business books.
I'm a little biased because you're my friend.
But one of the most interesting business books of the last few years.
That had a red cover.
That's the qualifier.
No, I wasn't going to add additional qualifiers.
I was just going to stop right there.
It's called Happy Money, the Science of Smarter Spending.
The premise of the book is fascinating because the basic premise is that you can buy happiness.
That's right. Or at least more than you're currently buying.
Okay, so I want to spend some time digging into the book.
A couple of observations about this because the book is really it's about happiness.
It's about money. It's about generosity.
It's about lots and lots of different things.
The first observation is the older I get, the more I'm struck with how generosity is completely uncorrelated to wealth.
Some of the most generous people I've ever known are people who have very little money.
And conversely, some of the wealthiest people I know are incredibly stingy, but uncorrelated.
So you mean wealthy people who are generous.
Actually, it's cool.
There's not research of ours, but there's a paper on charitable giving.
Charitable giving doesn't capture all generosity, but charitable giving in the U .S.
and the patterns U -shaped.
So if you look at percent of income given to charity, very poor Americans are pretty high.
Middle class up to like kind of wealthy are pretty low.
Really? And only super wealthy people are up where very poor people are.
But they're kind of like making buildings with their name on it.
You know, so it's a little different kind of charitable giving.
Which I actually also want to talk to you about.
But the second observation I have is the older I get, the more I realize that the way someone spends money, how they spend it, how much they spend, what they spend it on is so revealing.
You can learn so much about someone by just looking at the way they think about money and what they feel like worth spending on.
We was talking to a marriage counselor, not my marriage counselor, who helps couples with their financial decision making actually.
Because couples really struggle on not just managing their finances, but even talking about it.
It's awkward and weird.
And one of the things that he says to do is like before you marry someone, exchange credit card statements from the last month.
And just look, not only the amount, so the amount, whatever, but more than that, what is it, right?
Like who is this person?
Wait, so when you're dating someone, this is a pivotal, is this before or after you introduce them to your respective parents?
Probably before. Right, well, it seems like an early, maybe like the first date you could just Venmo or whatever the kids are using.
You can actually, the first date is even revealing, you know, where you go, what you end up doing.
Anyway, so the wonderful thing about your book is that it's broken down into a very simple set of tips for someone like myself.
I find that more easy to digest.
So what I'd love to do is.
It's written for Harvard Business School professors who can't really get any complicated.
I struggle with complexity.
I know. So this is perfect.
You're the target. Okay.
Your first tip is to buy experiences.
And by that, when I see that, I translate that in my head, as you say, don't buy a boat.
Definitely. Don't buy stuff.
Don't buy stuff. What do you mean by that?
Actually, the idea of looking at your credit card statement is actually interesting to do for yourself, too, because you know what you spend money on, but not really.
Sometimes things just kind of come in and out and there's bills that show up that get auto paid.
You know, you don't sometimes don't know perfectly what you did last month.
And so just looking at your own credit card statement can be cool because it can a little bit tell you who you are over and above who you think you are.
So we did this. We asked people, how'd you spend your money last month, last year, whatever.
And then we also asked them, how happy are you with your life?
And then we just break down your spending into a bunch of categories and just correlated with your happiness.
It's correlational, right?
So we don't know what causes what yet.
But just what makes you happy and what doesn't on that level.
And if you look at the amount of money that people spend on stuff, which is from like cars, boats, all the way down to just stupid things they buy for themselves.
It's not that as that goes up, you're less happy.
It just has no relationship to your happiness.
So there's some theory, like people who buy a bunch of stuff are like miserable.
It doesn't look like that in the data, but it just doesn't do anything at all, which means you're just spending money on stuff that's not making you any happier.
So all we did in our research really is to say, can we beat nothing?
Like, is there anything else you can do with your money?
Does anything move the needle?
Literally, right? So it's actually easier.
Like, imagine stuff made you kind of happy, then we would have had to beat that.
All we have to beat is nothing with any other intervention.
And that's where we started.
And so then you have this category called experiences.
So anything experiential.
So in my mind, I'm thinking restaurants, travel.
Is that how? And even a lunch out with a friend is better than buying yourself something and then eating lunch by yourself in your office.
So really not just big, but also little everyday things.
And I have my own personal theories about why you see this correlation.
What's your theory?
I think there's a bunch of reasons why experiences are better than stuff.
Some of them are are weird, actually.
So like, for example, let's say you were going to buy like a $2 ,000 vacation or $2 ,000 TV, like classic experience, classic thing, whatever.
So let's say you paid for them and you're waiting for them to start.
Like the TV is in the mail, vacation is next week.
It turns out that even before they get to you, experiences already make you happier than stuff.
So there's this cool study where they ask people who are waiting for stuff, how do you feel?
And they mainly feel like impatient and annoyed.
Like, where's my TV?
I want my TV. Where's my Amazon delivery?
Exactly. And if it's like an hour late, they're like furious about it.
Right. But when you're waiting for a vacation, the number one emotion people report is anticipation.
So I mean, yeah. Even if it's a small thing, if you have tickets to the Celtics game, if you know you're going to a restaurant that evening with friends.
You're just a little excited about the fact that it's coming.
There's this super cool study.
I forget who did it, which I feel badly about, but they ask people the week before their vacation, the week of and the week after, how happy are you today?
For a pretty significant percent of people, the happiest day was the day before.
Oh, I understand. So you're like sitting in your office.
It's Friday. It's snowing out.
Like here we are in Boston, but in your mind you're on the beach.
So like Friday is an amazing day for you, actually.
And you don't think when you're buying a vacation, you don't think of adding in the Friday, but it happens.
Right. So you should think how's Friday going to be before the vacation.
So the before the vacation is actually part of the consumption experience.
So if you get a bonus check, the lesson there is blow it on a vacation.
Don't blow it on a big TV.
Totally blow it on a vacation in a while from now.
I do have to tell you that as I was driving to work this morning, I told my son about your book because he's always buying stuff.
And he said, but I do buy experiences.
And I said, no, you buy stuff.
And he said, mom, when I buy clothing, I'm buying a lifestyle.
Wow. That was pretty good.
That is dramatic. Yeah, that's pretty good.
Yeah. So he had many things to say.
By the way, when I told him about your other tips, which is to buy time.
His response to that is like seasoning.
So this is someone who doesn't take life that seriously right now.
Yeah. Yeah. I think buying all spices actually is good, but time in particular is certainly.
Okay. Can we go to that?
Can I say one more thing though?
He's mainly just trying to justify buying stuff like we all are.
But like you're opening an example of buying a boat.
If you bought a boat and used it every day to go out with your family and friends and enjoy life, it would be way more experiential and it probably would make you happier.
Instead, what most people do is they buy a boat.
It sits on land for half the year.
They put it in the water.
They use it twice. So it's stuff.
Right. So even the same thing can be used experientially, but we typically default toward.
Now it's just another expense on my monthly budget.
It's amazing how good we are in this country of just accumulating stuff.
Just stuff. We just buy stuff.
Tote bags. Yeah. Exactly.
Can't get enough. Patagonia vest jackets.
We can't have too many of this.
Okay. Time by time.
That's another one.
Yeah. This is in a way.
I use the word obvious because I do think a lot of these are.
It's not like what we came up with was like, you know, spin in a circle for an hour a day.
It'll make you happy.
You know what I mean?
Of course, the way you spend your time is going to affect how happy you are.
But when you look at again, how people spend their money, they're often not spending it in ways that maximize their time.
We kind of get it right, but not really.
So with Ashley Willans is a professor in the negotiations, organization and market unit here.
Her dissertation was about using your money to buy yourself better time, which is just a really interesting.
So give me an example.
This is like, think of what is the thing that you hate to do the most, like the chore or task.
Yeah. So you could pay somebody to cook for you.
Not everyone can afford to pay somebody to cook for them every night, but even once a week or once a month.
Like so paying for someone to clean your apartment or house.
Even once a month, it's expensive.
But compared to what you might spend that money on instead, you're often buying yourself like an entire free Saturday with your family or for your hobbies or whatever else it might be.
So we're not thinking across all of our time and all of our money.
How should I allocate it the best?
We're just thinking like, what do I need?
I need a coffee right now.
I need a coffee today.
I need it tomorrow.
I need it the next day.
And then over a year you spend like $1 ,000 on coffee.
Yeah. And if I tell you that you go, oh, I don't want to spend $1 ,000 on coffee.
Maybe I can take some of it and buy myself better time.
I love the implicit prioritization in these decisions, right?
Because you're basically saying, what's the most precious thing I have?
And the most precious thing I have is 18 waking hours a day.
And how do I make sure?
And particularly if you live a busy life and you have family and you have lots of things that you care about putting your money against, maximizing how you use those hours.
And we know it's so important because you know you have those experiences where like a meeting cancels and you have like 30 free minutes and it's just heaven.
Oh yeah. You know what I mean?
It is unbelievable.
But then the next day you schedule all the meetings in a row anyway, right?
So we know that this free time or better time is great.
We've experienced it, but we don't structure anything around it.
It's true. It's like hooky.
Or it's like when my kids get a snow day or school.
It's just free time.
It's so, so glorious.
Make it a treat. This is another tip from your book.
This one's harder to put into practice.
Okay. Because you have to give stuff up.
So what do you mean by make it a treat?
So here's a super...
So this one actually involves deprivation.
Unfortunately. Which makes it very hard to put it into practice for all of us.
But there's this really sad thing about being a human, which is that the more we have of things, the more tired we get of them.
For example, like the first bite of a chocolate cake.
Second bite. Still amazing.
Fifth, ninth, tenth bite.
It's not as good as it was.
The thing is we keep eating it because it's still better than no chocolate cake.
So that's the curse of life, right?
Even though we don't like it as much, we should never stop because it's still chocolate cake.
And then we've eaten the whole cake.
It's like you're describing America.
That's exactly right.
Or like even like marital satisfaction slowly declines over time.
Because of the cake?
No, just like the person you like the most in theory, the person you marry.
Even then we just get like a little tired of things.
Familiarity, breath, contempt, that idea.
If you're saying not contempt necessarily.
It's just less. Yeah.
Like chocolate cake is still great.
Your spouse can still be great.
But it's just kind of getting tired of it.
So the question is like is that just inevitable and there's nothing you can do.
That's really sad. And the answer is no, if you give things up and come back to them, you kind of disrupt that I'm getting tired of cake.
I'm getting tired of cake.
So if you save half the cake and start again tomorrow, the first bite's going to be amazing again.
Now we never do that, right?
We're just like eat it all, consume everything now.
But even little breaks in between things can disrupt that like and get you back to being excited about things.
So give me an example of this in action with respect to how you spend money.
Yeah, there's a cool, I mean, if you think about most religions in one form or another have the give something up for a while kind of deal, like the amount of time varies and things like that.
We've interviewed people like after you give up whatever and then you come back to it.
You know, you give up like bread, no bread for a while and some religions, right?
And then you come back, first off, you're craving bread, which you didn't ever crave, it's just bread.
And then you eat it and it's like, oh my gosh, this bread.
Nothing has ever tasted as good as this bread.
And if I said do you want to like a steak or is it no, I want the bread.
The bread. No, right.
Like that it's amazing to give things up and come back to them.
We just never do it.
So and the worst thing is that the things we over consume are the things we like the most.
Like that's the definition of liking something is consuming it all the time.
So we're in a trap, right?
Like I really love coffee, I better drink it a thousand times a day.
And then that like getting tired of it is even bigger and bigger.
So giving up coffee for a week and come back to it, even if you just simulate it, it would be amazing.
And the pleasure you get out of saving the money and not buying it and then coming back to it like totally outweighs the fact that it's nice to have a coffee every day.
So even the things that you love experiencing.
Especially those. You have to put some discipline around them.
Yeah. That's really sad.
So you can't be on vacation all the time.
Vacation satisfaction declines a bit over the course of the vacation.
So it is a thing that we, you know, you're like, the beach, the beach again.
But I'm skeptical. Like maybe I have never had a vacation that lasts long enough for me to, you know, maybe, maybe my limit is 17 months.
You know, pay now, consume later.
That's another tip.
This is a hard one.
Pay now, consume later.
This one's tricky because the world...
Which honestly is not great financial advice.
No, no. So that's what's cool.
That's what interesting about it.
It is and it isn't.
If you think about the world now, basically you can get everything you want right now.
Like any movie, any book, any...
And pay later. We can get it immediately.
And then the credit card, you pay next month.
So those are amazing innovations in the world, no doubt.
And often it's good to like get credit, you know, all that sort of stuff.
But just from the standpoint of your happiness, they're exactly wrong.
Because when we pay for things close to when we consume them, it hurts the experience a lot.
Because there's economists have this thing called the pain of paying.
So if I pay for something right when I consume it, I'm kind of thinking about the payment instead of just about consuming it.
And then the worst thing is that if you consume it right away...
Remember we talked about like vacation looking forward to it?
You totally rob yourself of anticipation because you buy it and you consume it right away.
So you don't get that like, wow, next week something awesome is going to happen.
So this is kind of the psychological version of sunk costs.
Like if you do something way in advance and then there's time, by the time you experience it, those are all sunk costs.
So they're not even part of the calculus anymore.
We did these interviews with people on prepaid cruises.
Huh. How to go. You know, you prepaid and then six months later you go on the cruise.
Literally the number of people that say, it was amazing, everything was free.
I mean, that's so common that people say that.
And you're like, what do you mean it was free?
And I'm like, I could just walk around and get whatever I wanted.
Nobody stopped me. And they know that they paid, but that's the thing, right?
They paid, as you said, they paid so long ago, it's gone.
And now it's just like they're on a free trip.
There's these funny examples where you can see it in action, where paying way before and consuming it later is cool.
So I was at a Celtics game recently and that's an example of something you pay for way in advance.
You pay much too much for particular because the Celtics are doing well this year, but you pay well in advance and then you go and then you go and everything there is overpriced.
You know, $17 for a hot dog and all the rest, which you just happily pay.
You're just, you're so happy to pay it.
As you know, you're talking about this, it occurs to me that if I had just bought my tickets in that moment and was feeling the pain of having just spent that much money for those tickets, I would not have stopped at the concession stand to get all the things I got.
Exactly. You were running around with a free ticket.
I was running around with a free ticket.
Great night. Right.
And it felt like a really affordable date night to me.
My husband and I had a blast.
Okay. This one is my favorite because I actually think it's complicated and it's invest in others.
And this is kind of back to the concept of generosity.
I want to expand on this one a little bit.
So first of all, when you invest in others, it seems purposely phrased in a really open way to allow for lots of different kinds of generosity.
So say something about this one.
This was actually the research area that we started with.
This is with Liz Dunn, my colleague at the University of British Columbia.
In fact, we started this research on generosity probably 15 years ago now because Liz said, at the time in my career I was studying things like prejudice and discrimination, which of course I think are very important things, not like I don't.
But she was like, you're getting to be like a bummer.
You mean just to be around?
Yeah. You're not fun.
You're not fun to hang out with anymore.
And so she demanded that we study happiness together.
So this is how we started studying happiness.
And she said, I think one place to start is just, I wonder if when people spend money on other people it makes them happier than on themselves.
And it's one of those ideas that in all the best ways is simple, right?
It's not that people don't know it kind of.
It's not that people don't already do it a little bit.
But it really felt clear to us that they didn't do it enough or as much as they could to really get all the benefits from it because we're so obsessed with buying stuff and getting our lifestyle closed and all that kind of stuff as well.
But this is not just charity you're talking about, right?
You're talking about investing in others in lots of different ways.
Gifts for your friends, gifts for your family, buying somebody lunch, really broadly thinking about if you think about it just as using your resources on somebody else instead of you.
That's kind of how we thought about it.
And that can encompass time as well, all sorts of resources that we have where I say I could use it on myself and instead I'm going to give it to you.
Why do you think charitable giving is on the decline in this country?
There's a lot of skepticism now of charities, I think.
Because there's been some kerfuffle kinds of things.
So I have this theory that the less mediated you're giving is, the more happiness you experience around it.
And so I think this speaks to organized charities.
When you give money to organized charities, it used to be that that was really the easiest mechanism for you to give.
And today there's still organized versions of this that feel less mediated.
So GoFundMe is a great example, crowdsourced stuff.
There are websites where public school teachers can essentially advertise what they need and you can just go on and help them.
And I find that when I participate in these kinds of platforms, even though they're strangers, it just feels so much more meaningful.
And there's so much more gratification in knowing where your money is going and then it's going to people who really need it and also getting just a sense of how it's going to be used.
So that converges with what?
Absolutely. We've actually done some research together with DonorsChoose .org, which is what – Oh, that's the one I was talking about.
Yeah, which is the public school teachers.
I love that site. Amazing, right?
It's amazing. And by the way, I'm not getting paid by that.
I'm just saying, I love that.
But you can type in your location so you can actually help schools around you, far away from you.
You can sort by – anyway, it's a great – If you think everyone should play the flute, you can find – I am doing an endorsement right now.
It's hard not to. And if you give a sufficient amount, the kids in the classroom write you thank you notes and you get a big packet.
So you never know who the kids are.
As you said, you don't really know who they are, but you feel like you know who they are, and you know that they got it because they write, I got it, thanks, write in crayons.
So it's this very visceral connection, even though it isn't exactly, I know who it's going to, right?
Yeah. That's really hard to do.
This is like the middle ground.
Some of the most prominent givers in the world are folks like Bill Gates, folks that have accumulated enormous amounts of wealth and then decide to become philanthropists.
And what's interesting now is that when I'm talking to people who are engaged in entrepreneurial things and are really busy, they say that their approach to giving is one of when the time is right, they'll do it, okay?
So it's almost like I'm going to just spend the first part of my life accumulating a bunch of wealth.
And that's why you don't see me giving now.
But then when the time is right, I'm going to be really generous.
What do you think about that?
I'm glad that very wealthy people give a lot of money to charity, full stop.
But I've never ever understood that logic at all.
It doesn't make any...
That's like I'm going to be a jerk.
I'm not saying they're being jerks, but it's like the same thing.
It's like I'm going to be a jerk until I'm 65, and then I'm going to be like really, really nice.
I'm going to eat anything I want until age 65, and then I'm going to really, really exercise.
But you've heard it too, right?
Yeah, you hear it all the time.
It's a very strange...
And they follow through.
So they're not... They're often not being hypocritical.
They actually do it.
It makes no sense, you know what I mean?
Like I'm not going to spend any time with my kids until they're 40, but then I'm going to spend all my time with them.
That's not how life is.
That's not how it works, you know?
When you're around wealth, you're around money, you're very aware of how corrosive it can become.
In reading your book, you get the sense of like if you're just more self -aware of how you're thinking about this gift that you've been given, there are ways that you can put it to use to build a lot, just deeper meaning in your life.
One of the things that when you write books about money, then wealthy people want advice because wealthy people have a lot of money.
And so the biggest concern that most wealthy people have is that they don't know how to make sure their kids aren't jerks because they don't have to work, right?
So either they give their kids everything they want, which we don't feel like is good, or they don't and their kids are then resentful, give them everything they add.
So, I mean, it's not the worst problem to have in the world, like how do I give my wealth to my children, obviously?
But it is, they're still parents, they're still people.
It is still a painful thing to think about how I'm going to make this kid understand the value of hard work or whatever else it might be.
And what's the answer?
Nobody knows. We're working on it a little bit now but it's a very difficult...
Well, work on it faster.
The problem is you're taking too many vacations.
It's true. You need to just work.
Like be a worker. A lot of time.
A lot of naps. Okay.
Are there any lessons you've learned about money and how to use money and spend money that didn't end up in the book?
Maybe because you didn't have enough research around it.
Are there any life lessons you're a parent now as you think about how to use money, how to think about money, how to spend money that you would offer?
There's a thing... Liz, Donna and I started to write a piece and then we got busy with other stuff but we were going to call it the curse of counting.
And the idea is that humans like to do many things but one of them is we want to know if we're doing better than we were.
Like am I making progress in my life or not?
And ideally, yes. And then also, unfortunately, we're like am I doing better than everybody else around me?
We want to know. Like am I making more money than my brother or whatever it might be?
So we have these things where we're trying to compare to our former self and to other people and we...
Like what should we use to make the comparison?
And the problem is like money is a really easy one, right?
Am I doing better than I was five years ago?
I don't know but I'm making more money, I guess I am.
Am I doing better than my brother?
I don't know but my house is bigger.
So you can count square footage, you can count money.
So it's a curse in a sense because those things aren't associated with happiness.
The things that are are like having a partner who loves you for who you truly are.
But I don't know if mine loves me for who I truly am more than your husband loves you.
I can't count it or like spending time with your children.
There's no way to really count it exactly, you know?
Or like having friends is good for you.
So on Facebook people collect a million.
Well that's not what it means to have friends but it's fun to count.
So we really tried to think about how can we get people off the counting things toward the things that actually do relate to your well -being.
We haven't figured it out actually but I think whenever I get in a trap of counting, comparing to myself or to others and then using accounting thing, I'm sure I blow it all the time.
But I try to stop and say, wait a minute, this is this thing again.
I was trying to think of, to the extent that I have my own personal philosophy about money, I was trying to think, oh for this conversation I should think of like my three personal tips.
Yeah, what am I hearing?
So one was... Bitcoin.
So it's number two and so it's number three.
Yeah, no. So one was, I think framing is so important.
Framing your consumption.
I don't like to accumulate material things a lot but it took time to get there and there was like a ten year period where I had to transition and it felt like deprivation in the beginning.
But what I did was I reframed it as an ethos of simplicity and being more minimalist about my lifestyle.
Totally narrowed my wardrobe, eliminated all jewelry, everything.
Just got rid of so much stuff and framed it again in terms of ethos and that just made all the difference for me.
Yeah, I think you and I both wear probably the same two things.
Oh, it's amazing to me.
Sometimes my more bold students will actually come up and say, you know, it's just so courageous, Professor Moon, that you've taken such a simple approach to dressing every day but I gotta tell you, it saves...
What a back -headed compliment that is.
Yeah, no, isn't it?
That takes courage.
Not everyone could pull off that hat.
My student Annie Wilson is studying minimalism and one of her ideas is, she also studies clinical hoarding.
One idea is that they're actually opposite of each other.
So clinical hoarders collect stuff and her idea is that minimalists collect space.
Like maniacally, like, I must only have one lamp in the house.
And you're like, do you want this free lamp?
And they're like, no.
So they make decisions that they're not irrational exactly, but it is an ethos.
When I was training my family, there was this period of time when I told my husband, every time we accumulated a new shirt, he had to get rid of one.
It was just this notion of we have enough stuff.
So anyway, that's one.
The second is, I mean, you spoke to it.
Don't wait too long to learn how to be generous.
And I tell it to my kids all the time, like generosity is a muscle.
You just got to use it.
By the time you're going to school, you're a kid, you're a teenager in your 20s, just teach yourself how to be generous all the time.
I think that's... There's this nonprofit, I think they're in Seattle and a couple do this, but the one I'm thinking of is in Seattle and they teach kids about money.
And the way that it works is you get, when you get your allowance, you have three bins.
And one is to buy something for yourself.
One is to buy something for someone you know, and one is for charity.
When you get your allowance from age, whatever you start getting it, there's the three buckets that money is for.
So like trying to have people think even earlier, like money is not for you.
And then if you feel like it, you can do nice things.
That's part of what it's for sort of thing.
I don't know if they haven't tested it, but I like the idea.
I still remember being like in kindergarten or they always play these games with you.
What would you do if you want a million dollars?
And the rote answer at that age is, well, first I would give a bunch of money to charity.
And then the rote answer for any child.
And then there's this, at some point in our lives, we lose that, we just lose it.
And that's not the knee jerk reaction anymore.
It's the notion of just sort of not losing that sense of generosity.
The third one is don't spend what you don't have.
You know, I grew up in a family that was just allergic to debt, period, just pay cash for it.
And I sort of still have a little bit of that mentality.
We did a survey, this is years ago now, but we asked people, we wanted to study, this isn't a different kind of project, but we were trying to study people's perceptions of wealth inequality in the United States.
And in order to do that, we had to understand if they knew what wealth is, like what is your net wealth?
So we did surveys with people to understand what they were thinking.
And so we said literally to some people, write down your wealth.
So they would write their house, their car, whatever else, and then their savings and whatever else they had, and they'd total them up.
And they'd be like, that's how wealth I am.
And then we'd be like, well, do you own your house?
And they'd be like, oh, no, God, no.
I'm totally underwater on my mortgage and my car.
So their wealth they thought was the things they had.
There's a problem with that period.
And then the biggest problem is, if I'm comparing myself to you, all I see are the things you have.
So you're wealthy, right?
She's got a great house.
And I have no idea if you're a million dollars in debt or way up on it, but I'm trying to beat you.
So as soon as some people start going into debt, it's like a race to keeping up with the Joneses is the phrase and things like that.
It's just so seductive.
It really, really, really is.
And it seems like a simple thing to only spend what you have.
But anyway, this was great.
Thanks. Thank you. You seem surprised.
You know, whenever I know that I'm going to spend time with you, I know I'm going to have a blast, but I don't know ever know how appropriate it's going to be and whether or not it's for public consumption.
So this is like a three second delay.
Right? So the sensors.
Yeah, but listen, before you go, do you have any recommendations for our listeners?
Like what are you reading these days?
What are you watching these days?
What are you consuming, listening to?
I can tell you the one thing that I'm obsessed with now is books on parenting because they, you don't need no, but here's what's cool.
They're completely contradictory.
Oh, so you like for comedic effect as a scientist.
Okay. So it's fascinating to me how there's these million books on it.
It's like, definitely don't do that.
And the other ones like you definitely should do that.
You know what I mean?
So anyway, I found this to be so fat, like self help books, not only are they often not based on like facts, but they're also completely contradictory to, like if they were at least agreed on whatever the thing was, totally all over the place.
So now I'm super interested in thinking about like, where are people figuring out how to, I mean parenting is a very basic common thing.
How are people figuring out if the whole thing is like all over the place?
The amazing thing about, for me anyway, when I was parenting children of the age of your daughter, is you go through these moments of feeling like euphoric and confident.
Like I, I have figured this out.
I know what I'm doing.
And then within minutes you are just wrapped with insecurity and convinced that you are the worst parent in the world.
And it can be that a two hour nap versus a one hour nap.
You know what I'm really saying?
You look remarkably together.
Yeah, I'm very chill.
I must have caught you like at a really good nap.
Well, I took it to our naps.
Okay. Well, you thought I meant the baby.
No, I meant me. Okay.
All right. So thanks for joining.
Thank you. All right.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
This is HBS After Hours.
HBS After Hours.
