Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference.

To make a donation, please visit Tarbck.com. Namstay, welcome my friends. I am excited to introduce you to today's guest.

Arthur Brooks is joining me, he's a best-selling author who's currently teaching a happiness course at Harvard University.

And his most recent book, and this is what we'll be talking about, he co-authored it with Oprah Winfrey. It's entitled

Build the Life You Want and it's full with teaching science-based tools that are

designed basically to build your experience of happiness.

So in this conversation we discuss ingredients of happiness, what makes it up, the role of unhappiness in our lives, how to work with core ego fears,

the power of metacognition, the necessity of transcending the small self and the love that is the grounds of true happiness.

I trust you'll find much of value in this. Enjoy. So welcome my friend. Thank you for joining us.

Delight to be with you. Thank you to you for doing this and all the people listening to us today who want to help us

make the world a little better.

Yeah, which is what we're talking about, which is getting happier, having a happier world.

And as I mentioned to you when we were just talking, I wanted to start by acknowledging what's going on in our world that there is a very raw suffering right now.

There's few degrees of separation for many in terms of what's going on in Israel and Gaza and so anger, fear, powerlessness, grief, that's up.

And so I thought maybe you could begin because I feel like you shine a lot of light on the relationship between happiness and unhappiness. So I thought maybe how do we talk about happiness when so much is going on that's so painful.

Yeah, the world is a complicated place and I can't think of any time in human history that I'm aware of where heaven was coming to earth and there wasn't a lot of unhappiness.

Happiness is not a destination that we can reach to begin with.

Happiness is a direction that we're trying to bring to ourselves and to others all the time.

And it's especially relevant when there are these sources of suffering that we see so salient in the news and around us.

One of the pieces of advice that I give people and that Oprah and I have been talking about

as we've been talking about this book.

I mean it's worth pointing out that when the book came out in in early September it was in the wake of the Maui fires, the wildfires that had killed and displaced hundreds or thousands of people and Oprah lived there. She saw it right in front of her and one of is that when you feel hopeless and helpless because of the suffering in the world and there's really nothing that you can directly do that the solution is not to be hopeless and helpless the solution is not to be miserable.

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