#377 ‒ Special episode: Understanding true happiness and the tools to cultivate a meaningful life—insights from past interviews with Arthur Brooks

The Peter Attia Drive

Peter Attia, MD

Health & Fitness, Medicine, Fitness

4.7 • 7.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2025

⏱️ 100 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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In this special episode of The Drive, Peter presents a curated "best of" conversation with bestselling author and previous guest Arthur Brooks, organized around four core themes: happiness itself, the forces that undermine it, the tools and practices that help cultivate it, and the courage required to live and love well. The episode brings together the most meaningful moments from two past interviews into a single, focused discussion that distills Brooks' most insightful ideas and offers practical takeaways for building a life that's both successful and deeply happy.

We discuss:

Happiness vs. happy feelings, and how happiness and unhappiness can coexist [2:15];
The six fundamental emotions [5:30];
The three main "macronutrients" of happiness [15:00];
Enjoyment: one of the three macronutrients of happiness [22:45];
Satisfaction: one of the three macronutrients of happiness [30:45];
Sense of purpose: one of the three macronutrients of happiness [38:45];
Fame: one of the traps that hijack our happiness [46:30];
Success addiction, workaholism, and their detriment to happiness [49:15];
The reverse bucket list: one of Arthur's tools and practices he recommends for moving past the traps that hijack our happiness [59:15];
Metacognition: one of Arthur's tools and practices he recommends for moving past the traps that hijack our happiness [1:01:00];
Taking charge of your happiness: discipline, transcendent experiences, and other deliberate actions for "happier-ness" [1:11:30];
Tracking happiness: the biomarkers and micronutrients behind the macronutrients of happiness [1:22:45];
The value of minimizing the self and looking outward [1:30:45];
How Arthur surprised himself with his ability to improve his happiness [1:34:45]; and
More.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	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
0:21.5	into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and
0:26.7	wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely
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0:38.2	by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond
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0:55.0	learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratia m.com forward slash
1:01.6	subscribe. Welcome to the drive. Today's episode is a special best of with Arthur Brooks,
1:09.3	Harvard professor, social scientist, columnist
1:11.3	at the Atlantic, and best-selling author. I've sat down with Arthur twice in the past few years
1:15.8	to talk about how to build a life that's both successful and deeply happy. We pulled the best
1:20.6	moments from these two conversations into one focused episode built around four themes. Happiness,
1:27.0	what hijacks it, the tools and practices
1:29.6	that help, and the courage to live and love well, highlighting the most insightful and actionable
1:35.0	takeaway steps from previous episodes. I'm really excited about this one because I've actually
1:39.3	recently gone back and started rereading one of Arthur's books. And I've come to realize in rereading it
1:45.3	that in just a span of a year and a half or two years, it's so easy to forget some of the
1:50.8	nuance. And while I rarely have the time to go back and listen to old podcasts, I love having a
1:56.5	mashup like this that actually brings some of the most important aspects from several podcasts into
2:02.1	one. So without further delay, please enjoy this Best of Brooks episode on the Drive.
	...

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