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Hello everyone and welcome to At Bairns.

I'm Andy Serwer and welcome to our guest, Arthur Brooks, social scientist, Harvard professor and bestselling author.

Arthur, great to see you.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, Andy. Great to be with you. So you are kind of an expert on happiness. In fact,

you have a new book out titled The Happiness Files. I have so many questions about happiness.

Most people probably do. First of all, are most people happy, do you think?

Happiness is a relative concept, of course, and the biggest problem is that people answer it

in different ways. The general answer to that question is that most Americans are fairly happy,

but everybody could be happier and everybody wants to be happier.

The problem is that this thing that we most want is utterly mysterious to most folks.

The reason being that most people actually define it incorrectly, most people think that

happiness is a feeling.

Happiness is not a feeling.

Feelings are related to happiness, like the smell of your turkey is related to your Thanksgiving dinner.

It's evidence of your happiness.

And so the first thing I need to talk about in my classes at Harvard on the science of happiness and with business audiences and everybody else I talk to is defining happiness, really defining it in a scientific way such that you can actually start

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