The Rachel Cruze Show - What Happy People Know About Money (With Dr. Arthur Brooks) 

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

📈 Are you on track with the Baby Steps? Get a free personalized plan. On today’s episode, I had the honor of sitting down with Dr. Arthur Brooks to discuss the emotions around money and how you can improve your relationship with money to create a life you love. Let’s dive in!   Next Steps: 🎥 Watch my video Easy Ways to Diffuse Conflict in Tough Conversations (With Jefferson Fisher). 💵 Start your free budget today. Download the EveryDollar app!   Connect With Our Sponsors:   Learn more about Christian Healthcare Ministries. Get 20% off when you join DeleteMe. Go to FAIRWINDS Credit Union for an exclusive account bundle! Turn to Minno for kids shows you can trust. Use code RACHEL for $10 off an annual plan with a 7-day free trial.    Explore More From Ramsey Network: 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 🎙️ The Ramsey Show   💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 💰 George Kamel 🪑 Front Row Seat with Ken Coleman  📈 EntreLeadership Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I am thrilled because Dr. Arthur Brooks is joining us again. He is a Harvard professor, a bestselling author. The list goes on and on. And today he's here to talk through the psychology of money. So I cannot wait for you guys to hear our conversation. So here it is. Thanks for being back on. Hi, Rachel.

Nice to see you. So appreciate it. Me too. You were such a hit last time. Thanks. I'm glad. I love your show. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So when it comes to money, I feel like there's these like cliches people, high level kind of believe, either more money will make me happy. Right. And or you hear money will never make you happy, right? And so you kind of hear these extremes from your experience.

Where do you land on the scale, on the spectrum of what does money do with our happiness? Yeah. So one of the interesting questions is why we all kind of know that money doesn't buy happiness, but we always think that maybe we're different. Yes, yes. I can just have to know. Yeah, I'm an evolutionary social psychologist. and social scientists.

So what I'm really interested in is the basis of our misbeliefs. And they almost all come from the Pleistocene era when the human brain was fully developed in a different time and place. So human beings lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals until only about 10,000 years ago. And the prerogatives that you had, the imperatives that you had were to survive

and pass on your genes. And so all of these impulses that you have are to do things that will help you survive. and pass on your genes. Like, get mates, get food, et cetera. And we think that if we give into those things, will automatically be happy because we want to be happy. Well, Mother Nature doesn't care if we're happy. That's our business. And this is an important thing to keep in mind because, you know, everybody who's like, if it feels good, do it. They think they're going to get happier, and then they don't. And that's because you want to be happy, which is a divine thing.

And Mother Nature wants you to survive, which is an animal thing, and you're crossing your circuits. and money is a perfect case of how we make this mistake. We think, because our brains are wired to say more resources is better, that it's going to make us happier. And that's wrong. That's simply wrong as far as it goes. And that's why grandma said money won't be able to buy happiness. And you said, let me try. Just watch.

Let's just see. I can just have that. Yeah. That amount. Exactly right. So to sort it out, here's kind of the way that it actually works. Money will allow you to alleviate many sources of unhappiness at low levels. Happiness and unhappiness are not opposites.

They're actually, they're mediated by different hemispheres of the brain. So your unhappy affect, moods, emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. This is largely in the right side of your brain. Okay. The left side of your brain is that the joy, the interest, the surprise, all those nice things. The left side of your brain. They're not opposites. And you have them for very specific reasons.

You don't have emotions to have a good day or a bad day. You have emotions because they're an alarm system saying something is an opportunity or a threat. So you should avoid it or approach it is what it comes down to. I mean, your brain exists for a reason is the way that this works. It's an incredible gift, right? Yes. And so what we find is that people, when they have a lot of negative emotionality because of bad circumstances in their lives, a little bit of resources can alleviate that.

But they make a mistake by thinking, I feel a lot better. So therefore, money buys happiness. No, no, no. You feel less unhappy because you're able to pay your rent because you're not staying up all night worrying about your bills because your kids are meeting their caloric needs. But it doesn't take very much to satiate that to get to the top of that. And then after that you chase, chase, chase, chase, chase, chase for the rest of your life. You'll get into this weird kind of like hamster wheel of looking for the relief they first felt when they got their first big paycheck. Yes.

Not recognizing that what had happened is that they were able to get, you know, go to the dentist. for the first time in five years. For me, literally, when I first got my first big paycheck, I hadn't been to the dentist in six years because I had been poor for a long time. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of it of my own doing. I was a professional musician in those days.

I didn't have health care for it's literally age 19 to age 25. And 25, I went to the dentist like, man, I feel a lot better. Money buys happiness. Yeah, so it's almost like it can lower your unhappiness to a degree. Yeah, exactly. But the happiness meter on this side, the brain doesn't. Exactly. Now, Mother Nature plays this other little trick on you with money.

which is that you think that when you buy stuff, it will satisfy you and bring you what you actually seek forever. And she's lying to you so that you will display a lot of resources. This is why it's peacocking. This is the human species. Once again, we're 250,000 years ago. If you had more animal skins and arrowheads and buffalo jerky than you needed, you were more likely to get mates. Yes. Right?

Because that's why you want to show greater resource acquisition. resource cues means mates and survival to the winter. So we still do that. You know, that's why guys like, I'm going to rent a Ferrari and drive real slow down the boulevard in Miami Beach. And some girl is going to go, wow, he owns a Ferrari. And she won't know the difference with all that is is place to scene behavior. It's like caveman behavior. Yes.

Coming out in 2025. Yeah. And our brains are wired to do that. Right. Okay. So here's the rule. Buying stuff won't buy happiness ever, ever. Buying experiences, which will facilitate relationships, can.

Buying time that you use for edifying pursuits like praying and spending with your kids, can. Giving money away to things that you love and care about can. And saving your money can. And those are the only five things that you can do. You can buy stuff, experiences, time, save your money, or give it away. Those are literally only things you can do. I've quoted you on those five since you were on the show last, which don't even We talked about it.

Well, it's probably like a year and a half, and I haven't stopped. I'm like, literally Arthur Books. Because it frees up this idea that money is a tool. You can use it in your life. Right. It's not bad, right? Like, it's not this, like, good or bad thing, but the belief around it is so important. Right.

And so to have these clear distinctions of what it's doing to us in our life is, it is so important. It's so important. Because, again, it's not something that you want to push away from, that it's a bad thing. In fact, you want to understand how to handle it well so that that unhappiness side, you're not struggling your whole life. But yet in America, do you feel like it's the worst, like the caveman mentality of like, here's what I have here? Is it, are we at the pinnacle of like the worst in America right now

because of like social, because of the access of information that we have and the way we were able to display it? The peacocking's not for the woman over there and the other cave. It's to the world. Does it make it worse? It makes it much worse because we have so much access to, as you say, to the richest people in the world. So if you're doing really, really,

well. You've attained financial independence. You have two million dollars. Yeah. You're comparing yourself to somebody with 20. And then if you have 20 is 200. And then somebody's got two billion and you're always poor. Yeah. It's what it comes down to. And so you have to have perspective on what you want to do with the money. There's new research on this, actually. This is really interesting. A big part of whether or not you'll be happy with money has to do with why you earned it. And so it's the, it's the motives and earning money. This is brand new stuff that I've been reading about and writing about. So if you earn money because you're trying to to prove something to somebody else or to prove something to yourself, money's going to make

you miserable. Money's going to make you less happy. If you're doing it because you're trying to facilitate good, strong relationships and pass on intergenerational wealth, if it's about people, money will consistently be a source of goodness in your life. It'll be a source of blessings in your life. That's what it comes down to. So it's super important.

And I talk to a lot of very wealthy people, and they know what the guy down the street's making and and their sense of, it's a scoreboard. 100%. And if you're doing scoreboard, it's a problem. It's a problem. It's a problem. It's not a scoreboard. Money's going to be a problem in your life.

And it's going to hold you back spiritually. It's going to hold you back emotionally. Yes, absolutely. That's so interesting because we were even talking a little bit about spirituality before we started rolling. Right. But that's what's fascinating about scripture is there's so, there's so much about money in it.

In fact, more than heaven and hell combined. Like they're talking about money. And it's a lot of caution lights. Like when you read it, whether it's greed, it becomes an idol, the love of, like all of it, right? There's a lot of caution lights. So what do you see, even from a scriptural standpoint, that you're like, yes, we're missing that in today's world. Like, we're buying into another lie that happiness, success, whatever it is, fulfillment's over here. But really what it's saying in here, or just even from what you've studied, like, these are things that we're missing to our society when it comes to how we view money.

Yeah. Yeah, so the psychology and the theology work together on this, which is as a scientist and as a Christian, it's very convenient. I have to say, because the iron is always sharpening the iron. I understand my faith better through the lens of science, and I understand science better through the lens of faith for sure. And if I could only have one, it would be my relationship with God, of course. But the whole point is I'm a better Christian because I have a behavioral science background to be sure. So what we find, the two big mistakes that we actually make in modern life, in our attitudes about money, are that rich people are good or rich people are bad.

Those are those two weird polar opposites. And they misunderstand both the psychology and theology of how money actually works. So the idea that money is good and God rewards you with money and God rewards you with a Ferrari, that kind of prosperity theology, it's very, very problematic because what it suggests is that God is a scoreboard for you too.

And by the way, this is not biblical. I mean, the whole idea that somehow God, God loves rich people more than he loves poor people. I'm sorry, Matthew 25, 44. I mean, as you did for the least of these, my brothers and sisters you did for me. It's kind of hard to read that through this weird prosperity theology lens in my view. Yes, 100%. But the opposite is problematic to say that if you have money, it's prima facie evidence that there's something corrupt about you.

And this comes from this very anti-Christian Marxist philosophy that we see in a lot of college campuses today. And it's kind of bleeding into American society and very metastatically. dangerous ways that says, if you have disproportionate access to resources, it's evidence that you have power and therefore you're exploiting. I mean, that's what Karl Marx literally taught. I mean, Carl Marx said everything is about power. Nothing's about virtue. Nothing's about value. Nothing is about, I mean, all that really matters is the power that people have. And so everything is a power struggle. That's why you talked about. The expression, power struggle comes from Marxism. And so that's one of the reasons that Marxism is almost always a direct line to anti-Semitism.

Because if you see a community that does well, and then you say they must have more power, and so they're lording it over others. And then this is always this direct line to anti-Semitism you get from Marxists. And European Marxism, for example, has always done this. And it's really dangerous and really bad. And we have to be careful about that too. So what the Bible clearly says, and science shows, is that the root is that the love of money is the root of all evil. Paul doesn't say to Timothy, money is the root of all evil. It says the love of money is the root of all evil. And the problem with the passing through the eye of the needle,

the camel passing through the eye of the needle, is that it's what we care about and not what we have. This is that, you know, show me what you're storing up, what treasure you're storing up in your heart, and I'll show you, you know, what you're worshipping is really what it comes down to. Now, Aquinas talked about, St. Thomas Aquinas, who, an ancient Christian thinker from the 13th, century, he wrote the Sumo Theologia, which is this masterful text, understanding the Bible,

in ways that people just hadn't before, and great philosopher. He said that we have idols, and he didn't say that money is bad. He said that money is bad if it's an idol, which is to say that you stop it money. Okay, more of my conversation with Arthur in just a minute, but first, I do want to tell you about one of our sponsors, delete me. If you don't remove your personal data from the internet, your name, address, email, even your kids' names are out there on sketchy data broker websites. And data brokers then collect your data, sell it, and that puts you at risk for scams and fraud.

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That's go-mino.com code Rachel. Money, power, pleasure, and honor of the four idols. That's interesting thing. As a behavioral scientist, those are the four idols that people have. You see that today. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, I have a game I play with my students called What's My Idol? Because here's the thing.

There's nothing wrong with those things unless they're the goal. Yes. And then they'll hurt you. They'll hurt you. They'll hurt you spiritually. They'll also help you. They'll hurt you psychologically if you're all about those idols. But the problem is that everybody has one.

And if they know what it is, then they have power. Because then they can recognize it and not make mistakes. Yes. I mean, you're still all this sin. Sure. No, no, no. But the self-awareness is really big. Which we talk about a lot.

Yeah. So I play a game with them about what's my idol. Do you want to play? Yeah. You want to play what's my idol? Let's do it. So we're going to find out. Okay, when you said, okay, because money, sex, power, we're always like the three that I've always heard.

I haven't heard honor. Honor means fame. Adoration. It means prestige. Okay. It means like, that's Rachel Cruz. She's got a big famous show. Bouginess.

Like in where they recognize you at the airport and you're like, that's awesome. Okay. Okay. Got it. So we are propit. And again, we're human. You know, we're Christian people and we're trying to be virtuous, but we're still human. 100%.

And we're prone to idolatry. 100% yes. Okay. If you know your idol, you're going to avoid the things that you would later regret, and you're going to actually be focused on the thing that you want the most, which is love. Can your idol change? Because I know what mine used to be. Yeah, it can, depending on circumstances.

But we have kind of one lodged in our heart. There's a lot of behavioral science about why, et cetera. But here's how it works. I'm going to eliminate the idols, not find the idol directly, because the elimination approach is more accurate. Okay. And when I eliminate them, you say, I'll get rid of that one. That doesn't mean you don't have it at all. It means you have the average amount in the population.

Okay. Now, that's important, because if it's your idle, average sucks. Mm-hmm. If it's your idol, then, you know, having the average amount of money is not good. It's like worse than nothing. Yes, yes. Okay. Okay.

Money, which is resources, not just cash, resources. Power, which means influence over other people. People do the thing that you want. You're not a dictator, but they do. I don't feel that. Pleasure, which means feeling good, or security or comfort. So people who are checking their stock portfolio every day, they have a pleasure motive. Okay.

They have a pleasure idol because they're security mongering. Okay. They're worried about their security. Yes. And honor means honor like internet famous or admiration of strangers or prestige among the right people. Right? Everybody knows me at church. Yep.

That kind of thing. Yep. Yep. So I got to get rid of one for you. Which one do you get rid of? Power. Power. Power.

That doesn't bother me. Probably you don't like people. people having power over you? Yes, it's probably true. That's what I find. Yes. You know, people who are like, don't call me boss.

That seems creepy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you don't want to call somebody boss. Yes. So, yeah. And it makes sense because you're doing your thing. Yes, yes. Okay.

Good, I believe it. Me too. Okay. Second. You're getting, now it's get harder because you got rid of the easiest one. Yep. Which one do you get rid of the best? What was it?

Money. You've got money left, pleasure left. Pleasure. Which is comfort of security. Yeah. And honor. Which money do you get rid of next? It's funny because pleasure and honor keep coming to the top for me. But money's funny to get rid.

I mean, but I would say money. Yeah. Like, and I feel like as long as I'm good. Like, I don't want to feel a paycheck. Well, I just said you're good because you're that you've got absolutely. I mean, being middle, the middle of America is. Yes. It's unbelievable good.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And you have enough. Yes. It's just not, you're not buying beach houses. 100%. Yeah.

Great with that. Yes. Totally. Totally. And what you've probably figured out over the course of, doing what you do for a living, is that it's, the stuff you can get with money is not that great. Right.

After a while, it's just not that interesting. Yes. Right. I mean, it's, wow, three watches instead of one watch. Right. 100%. Okay. Got it.

And I believe it. Yeah. Now you've got the two hard ones for you, which is number one is pleasure and the other one is honor. Yes. And you got to get rid of one. And I know you like them both. I know.

Which one? So that's why I asked if it could change because I really do feel like I'm a a place in my life where the honor would have been my number one for a long time. And I don't know if it's kids age. I don't know if it's season of life, I don't know what it is. But apart of me is like, if all of it went away, I genuinely am like, oh, I'll just go to the elementary school and like, do be the Friday reader ever for. Like, I can plug in other places in my life and be really content.

I really do feel that. Yeah, that's great. I don't know if I'm lying to myself. Well, I mean, if we're all lying to ourselves all the time. So I'm going to, so, okay, and define pleasure one more time. Pleasure is feeling good or comfort or security. That's mine. So that's so.

Okay. And you also said that still honor would be hard. Yeah. But, but. I don't think it would, it wouldn't rattle me like if you took pleasure away. The stuff you like. Yeah. The stuff that you like.

Okay, good. That doesn't mean anything bad. All that means is that that's when you'll cut the corner. That's the thing that'll make you cut the corner. Okay. That's the thing. Cut the corner of what? What do you mean?

Of the things that you really. the person you want to be. Okay. So that's the good, you'll cut the corner in a relationship. You'll cut the corner in your prayer. You'll cut the corner in work, something, right? Yep, yep, yep, yep. The person that you want to be, as opposed to the person that you are right now because of that, that idol, because that lure, because of that temptation. Yes. And that's important because, you know, sometimes you're going to fall prey to it, but you're like, there I am again. There I dig it. And that's power. That's so powerful is the way that that works, right? Yes. Yes. And so for me, it's always been, you know, it's been honor. Yeah. I want people who think,

God, that guy's smart. You know, the guy's so smart things. Sure. And I don't want to want that, but that's not the point. That's not the point. I would kick away power. I would kick away pleasure. I'm an austerity guy.

Yep. I would kick away money. Yeah. But that. That's hard. That feels good. And I don't want it to feel good. But, you know, it is what it is.

And that knowledge is a lot of, that information is really, really valuable. And what's interesting, even though money is one of the four, it can be a tool to use. to prop up the others to. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, they're all interrelated. And that's what, yes. And there's nothing wrong with these idols if you put them in a proper place like anything

else. I mean, if the, you know, if you use the golden calf as a doorstop, fine. Right. Right, right, right. But money will allow you to do wonderful things and support a family and create intergenerational wealth. Sure. And make it possible for your kids to do things they wouldn't have been able to do.

It's great. Yes. And the power that you can have, the persuasive capacity you have or the other people, you can run a company and create. jobs and opportunity and growth. And fame, by the way, whatever that means to anybody. Sure. You refract that to a love of God. How? How? Because when people admire you, which they do, they're like, they know the true source of power in your life, which is your relationship with Jesus Christ.

And they get closer to God as a result of that. That's how you refract your idol onto what really matters to you. Yes. Which is all these different loves. Totally. And it's going bigger. Yeah, that's right. So much to think about. Well, I so appreciate you being on. I love this.

I thank you. Hearing about it, but being able to go to these different levels and understanding who we are as people and how we interact with money, I think it's so crucial. It's not just the tactical side, which that's important. But knowing who we are in the midst of it, which you do so eloquently to explain it. So thank you. Thanks for coming back on. Of course.

All right. If you enjoyed our conversation, be sure to check out my interview with Jefferson Fisher on Easy Ways to Diffuse Conflux. in tough conversations, you can click right here, or I'll put a link down below. All right, you guys, remember to take control of your money and create a life you love.