Authors in August: Arthur Brooks’s “Happiness Files”

Rule Breaker Investing

The Motley Fool

Business, Investing

4.4 • 959 Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this inaugural episode of our eighth annual Authors in August series, David welcomes back bestselling author, Harvard professor, and Atlantic columnist Arthur Brooks. Arthur brings along counterintuitive ideas about happiness as a habit, the difference between joy and happiness, public vs. anonymous philanthropy, and how the pursuit of money can sometimes… reduce freedom?! David and Arthur also dive into what makes feedback actually helpful, and finish with a spirited round of Buy, Sell, or Hold: Happiness Edition. Sign up for The Motley Fool’s Breakfast Newshere: www.fool.com/breakfastnews Pre-order David’s upcoming Rule Breaker Investing bookhere: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1804091219/ Host: David Gardner Guest: Arthur Brooks Producer: Bart Shannon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Two years ago, we welcomed Harvard's Happiness Maestro, Arthur Brooks, to decode the science of
0:06.1	happierness. Since then, the world is tilted. Our headlines have whiplashed, and Arthur has
0:12.8	sifted hundreds of fresh Atlantic columns into a brand new playbook, The Happiness Files. What did he
0:18.8	keep? What got cut? And most of all, what can you and I
0:22.5	borrow today to live with more controlled grace and a lot less outrage? Let's reopen the files
0:30.0	and find out authors in August is upon us only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
0:37.6	It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Full co-founder, David Gardner.
0:45.4	Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing.
0:47.2	It is August, which means I get to talk to favorite authors of favorite books this month.
0:52.7	And I already see Arthur Brooks waiting the wings,
0:55.2	so we're just about to get started. But let me first say that as I shared at the start of the year,
0:58.9	my 2025 book Rule Breaker Investing is available for pre-order now each week until the book launches
1:05.0	on September 16th. I'm sharing a random excerpt. We break open the book to a random page.
1:10.6	I read a couple sentences,
1:11.9	so let's do it. And I quote, Tony Shea turned his shoe company, Zappos, into a billion-dollar
1:18.5	enterprise bought by Amazon. His understanding of the power of happy employees made Zappos the envy
1:25.0	of its industry. Tony was once asked, how do you get all your employees to smile?
1:30.4	He deadpanned, easy.
1:33.1	We just hire the applicants who smile.
1:36.1	That's this week's pagebreaker preview to pre-order my final word on stock picking
1:40.4	shaped by three decades of market crushing success.
1:43.1	Just type rule breaker investing into
	...

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