The science of happiness | Arthur Brooks, Ph.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Arthur Brooks. Arthur is a social scientist, Harvard professor, bestselling author, columnist at The Atlantic, and host of the podcast, How to Build a Happy Life with Arthur Brooks. He's the author of 12 books, including his most recent book, The New York Times Best Seller, From Strength to Strength. In this episode, we sit down and we focus the conversation around happiness and how we define happiness, including talking about enjoyment, sense of purpose, and satisfaction, kind of the trifecta of happiness. We also talk about friendship, companionship, and envy, and the dangers of having a success addiction, something I can't relate to at all. Just kidding. One thing I'll say before we start is that happiness can be a much harder concept for people to address and to quote unquote fix than many of the things we talk about in the podcast, such as poor sleep or high APOB or low muscle mass or strength and things like that. However, I think Arthur is so eloquent in how he talks about this complex problem in a way that we can all learn a lot from his words. I certainly have.
And I've talked about this elsewhere that there are three books I've read this year that are not technical books that have had a really profound way of getting me to think about the quality of life.
And this is one of them. The other two, I'll hopefully be interviewing the authors of those books as well. But for now, we're going to focus on From Strength to Strength and the work of Arthur Brooks. So without further delay, please join my conversation with Arthur.
Well, Arthur, this is a first in that we're doing a repeat podcast. Although unfortunately this time we're not in person. The last time we did a wonderful podcast, we were in person and I enjoy that even more. You want to tell everybody what happened?

**Arthur Brooks** (2:32)
Yeah, for sure. Hi, Peter. Nice to see you again. And I wish I were down in Austin where all the cool kids live with you too.
Showing up at your podcast studio last time, we had a great conversation for a couple of hours and then learned afterward that we hadn't turned the sound on, which it turns out you need for podcasting, you know? People can just stare at two bald guys for two hours, looking like they're talking, but that turns out to be not the most interesting programming. So we had a great time together and now we're doing the parts here.

**Peter Attia** (3:01)
And we did have a great video from that first podcast, and we actually were able to get some people who could sign it.
We even contemplated releasing it with subtitles, but in the end we decided, ah, what the heck, let's just do it again, even though it won't look as good because we'll be on video. The good news, I think, for the listener is, though I have a pretty good memory, I have an awful memory for podcasts. So when I record a podcast, if you asked me two months later, what did we talk about? If I remember two things, that's a lot. So it's almost like we're doing this from the beginning, at least for me, because I don't really remember what we talked about. And I hope that that allows us to reproduce. What I recall gestalt-wise or valence-wise was a pretty positive discussion and a really enjoyable one.

**Arthur Brooks** (3:45)
Yeah, me too, I agree. And I don't remember exactly what we talked about, except it had to do with happiness and longevity and living a prosperous, flourishing life. I see it, by the way, also, when we were together last year, you turned me on to Gia and you're drinking it right there.
And I've been drinking it ever since too, by the way. I've been on a constant diet of it. It's the best.