Coleman Hughes and Arthur C. Brooks on Happiness

I was too tired to work, even too tired to read. But I wasn’t ready to take a nap, so I thought I’d watch this videoof Coleman Hughes (whom I’ve been following for a while) and Arthur C. Brooks (whom I wasn’t familiar with) talking about Happiness, Wealth, Poverty, Buddhism, Thomas Aquinas, and Foreign Aid.

It’s a one-hour, 10-minute conversation. But it is a good one. Good to the last drop. Hughes is relatively new to the podcast game (I think), but he already knows how to conduct an interview.

1. He prepared for the interview by either watching enough of Brooks or reading his books and essays (or both) to write a list of good questions.
2. In crafting the questions, he wasn’t trying to show how smart he is or surprise his guest with a catch-ya question. No, he was asking him questions about the ideas that he found himself asking himself after becoming familiar with Brooks’s ideas.
3. He allowed Brooks to lead the conversation because he understood that, as a good writer and a popular university teacher, Brooks knew how keep the conversation interesting.
4. Included in the conversation is a very interesting four-question personality test that Hughes took from Brooks. I played along and gave the same answers in the same sequence that Hughes gave, which Brooks said were the same answers he gave, and in the same sequence.

Since this is a topic, I’ve been studying for years, I was familiar with the subject matter and most of the studies and theories they mentioned. (One notable exception was the writings of Thomas Aquinas on happiness, which I’ve put on my to-read list.) Nevertheless, I enjoyed watching it because of how much ground they covered in so short a time., and because most of the observations Brooks made and his views on the topic were (a) consistent with what I’d concluded myself, and (b) backed up by a considerable amount of research.

I’ve posted a review of his book, The Happiness Files, below. Before you read that, however, I encourage you to read my take on Eat, Pray, Love, the 2010 film starring Julia Roberts as Elizabeth Gilbert, based on Gilbert’s 2006 memoir of the same name.