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Conversations with Tyler

Arthur Brooks on Reinvention, Religion, and the Science of Happiness

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Education, Society & Culture

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2026

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Click here to find Tyler's new generative book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution!

Arthur Brooks reckons he's on the fourth leg of a spiral-shaped career: French horn player, economist, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and now Harvard professor and evangelist for the science of happiness. His new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, argues that happiness isn't a feeling but a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the macronutrients of happiness, he calls them — and that most of us are gorging on the wrong ones. Tyler, naturally, wants to know: what's the marginal value of a book on happiness, and what does spiral number five look like?

Along the way, Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you'll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that's not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI's effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he's reading Josef Pieper, how he'll face death, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded March 19th, 2026.

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

Other ways to connect

Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:10 - The Macronutrients of Happiness
00:07:54 - What Happiness Books are Worth
00:12:28 - The Habits of the Happiest People
00:14:27 - Why the Young Reject Happiness Advice
00:17:35 - Curiosity's Role in Happiness
00:20:22 - Self-Deception
00:22:04 - Facing Death
00:25:44 - Choosing a Religion
00:28:41 - Immigration
00:30:27 - The American Right Wing
00:33:55 - AI's Role in Happiness
00:37:12 - What Drives Generosity
00:38:37 - Oprah's Political Views
00:40:16 - Which Political Leaders Arthur Admires
00:41:59 - The Best French Horn Players
00:43:40 - Arthur's Spiral of Careers
00:48:20 - The Future of Think Tanks
00:49:50 - The Future of Classical Music
00:51:27 - Living in Spain
00:55:34 - Age and Peak Performance
00:56:12 - What Arthur Will Do Next
00:59:14 - Outro

Image Credit: Jenny Sherman

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hi, everyone. This is Tyler. Just letting you all know that I have a new book out. It is online and free. It is called The Marginal Revolution, Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution. The last chapter focuses on how AI will change our world and change science for good. More generally, it's a history

0:22.6

of economics, my vision of where economics is headed and where it has been, and the book itself is

0:28.8

attached to Claude as a kind of guide. The book is fully written by me, but as you're reading,

0:34.0

on the other side of the page, you can ask Claude any question you want about the book, its materials, maybe where I went wrong, or to explain something you'd like to

0:42.2

know more about. So please check that out. There's a link in the show notes. Or also, you can just

0:47.1

go to Tyler Cowan.com. And now on to the show.

0:55.5

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

1:00.6

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

1:04.8

Learn more at Mercadis.org.

1:06.9

For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit

1:12.0

Conversationswithtyler.com.

1:18.1

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.

1:21.7

Today I'm delighted to be chatting with Arthur C. Brooks.

1:24.9

I've known him for a long time.

1:27.2

Arthur's life trajectory is a little

1:28.9

difficult to describe. He recently said to me, well, he changed his careers every 10 years.

1:35.0

He was a professional French horn player in the world of classical music, a well-sighted economist,

1:41.2

often in the area of cultural economics. He has been president of the American

1:45.8

Enterprise Institute, has done things with Oprah, has done yet more, now is a professor at Harvard's

1:53.0

Kennedy School of Government, and he has a recent track on the notions of happiness and the

1:58.7

meaning of life, and he has an important new book out

2:02.0

called The Meaning of Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Arthur, welcome.

...

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