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If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on?

Who in God's name knows what it's all about.

Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.

And I'm Mark Tiesin.

Welcome to our podcast.

What the hell is going on?

Mark, other than the fact that I can't remember how to do the intro, what the hell is going on? What the hell is going on is it's August. And normally in August, we used to take the month of August off. And last year we decided we're not going to do that. We're not going to leave you guys hanging without a podcast for a month. So we started our summer book series where we invited dear friends and other people we admire to come in and talk about great books that they've written that we think you would enjoy and have a conversation about them. Now, this August, there's a lot going on. So we're not going to just disappear for the whole month and just leave you with books for the whole summer. I'm going to be at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Danny will be watching it from afar. I'm not. Yes. Oh, it's going to be epic. It's going to be epic. But anyway, putting that aside. So we are going to keep doing some political podcasts over August. We're not taking the month off. But we decided we're still going to do the summer book series anyway because people really enjoyed it last year. And so we've got a great opening act.

So we're starting with our former boss, our very good friend, Arthur Brooks, who as many of you,

I think, know since he had a best-selling book, wrote a book with Oprah Winfrey called Build the Life

You Want, the Art and Science of Getting Happier.

Arthur's a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School.

He teaches on leadership and happiness, but he was the President of the American Enterprise Institute for 10 years,

where he held the Beth and Rabinnell Curry Chair in Free Enterprise.

He has written damp, Mark, he has written

13 books. And he writes the, I know, very popular, which we love to read, popular how to build a

life column at the Atlantic. Here's our interview.

Well, Arthur, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you, Mark. Nice to see you, Danny. I miss you both.

I miss you too. And welcome back virtually to AEI for a brief moment. Thank you. Thank you.

You're home of so many years. So since you've left us, you've moved up in the world dramatically because you're written a book with

Oprah Winfrey. That is so awesome. Tell us, first of all, I mean, just tell us how that happened. How did that come about? Since I left at EI, I've sort of started a new operation, which is writing, speaking, and teaching about the science of happiness, which is returning back to what I was doing as a behavioral scientist before I came to AEI. My background is in behaviors about human happiness and the science behind it.

And while I was at AEI, the 11 years that I was president of AEI, the field changed a lot.

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