Arthur Brooks — Finding The Meaning of Your Life, The Poet’s Protocol, The Holy Half-Hour, and Why Your Suffering is Sacred (#841)

Arthur Brooks (@arthurbrooks) is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also the host of the weekly podcast Office Hours with Arthur Brooks and a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular weekly “How to Build a Life” column.

Brooks is the author of 15 books, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers, Build the Life You Want, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, and From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. His next book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, will be released on March 31, 2026.

Please enjoy!

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Transcripts

• This episode
• All episodes

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Arthur Brooks:

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok

Arthur’s Previous Appearance

• Arthur Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #692

Featured Resources

• Arthur’s Six-Step Morning Routine
• Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) Profile Quiz
• Meaning in Life Questionnaire

Books

• The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness by Arthur C. Brooks
• From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life by Arthur C. Brooks
• Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey
• A Collaboration with Nature by Andy Goldsworthy
• Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner
• The Bhagavad Gita translated by Eknath Easwaran
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist
• Meditations: A New Translation by Marcus Aurelius, translated by Gregory Hays

Concepts

• Affect Profiles (Mad Scientist, Cheerleader, Poet, Judge)
• Alcohol and Sleep
• Anhedonia
• Awe
• APOE and Health
• Brahma Muhurta
• Bill Ackman’s Approach to Meeting Women
• Caffeine Half Life
• Chuck Palahniuk’s Take on Big Brother
• Cyclical Ketogenic Diet (CKD)
• Dark Triad
• David Foster Wallace on Worship
• El Arroyo Sign
• Flow State
• “The Glory of God is Man Fully Alive”
• Hemingway’s Writing Routine
• Hemispheric Lateralization
• High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
• Holy Hour
• Macronutrients of Meaning (Coherence, Purpose, Significance)
• Pilgrimage
• Proyecto Amor Conyugal
• Pslam 121
• Psychogenic Epidemic
• Push, Pull, Legs (PPL)
• Rumbo
• Self-Transcendence vs. Self-Actualization (via Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs)
• Sleep Architecture
• Sousa March
• Suffering is Sacred
• Talk Test
• Transcendence: Vertical and Horizontal
• Turing Test
• William James on the “I” and “Me”
• Zone 2 Cardio

Supplements

• Creatine Monohydrate
• Whey Protein
• AG1

Tools & Devices

• The Way Meditation App
• Morpheus Device (Heart Rate Training)
• Oura Ring
• WHOOP

People

• Bill Ackman
• Peter Attia
• Marcus Aurelius
• Johann Sebastian Bach
• Raymond Babbitt
• Dave Baszucki
• Tom Brady
• The Buddha
• Dale Carnegie
• Santa Claus
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Anthony de Mello
• Rhett Diessner
• Mauro Di Pasquale
• Dan Duchaine
• E.T.
• Andy Galpin
• Henry VIII
• Ernest Hemingway
• Scott Barry Kaufman
• Napoleon Hill
• Ryan Holiday
• Sherlock Holmes
• Andrew Huberman
• Saint Irenaeus
• William James
• Dacher Keltner
• Jack Kornfield
• Lord Krishna
• Abraham Maslow
• Iain McGilchrist
• Lisa Miller
• BJ Miller
• Ester Munt-Brooks
• Pablo Neruda
• Chuck Palahniuk
• Chris Palmer
• Rhonda Patrick
• Jalal al-Din Rumi
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Henry Shukman
• John Philip Sousa
• Nassim Taleb
• James Turrell
• David Foster Wallace
• Brad Wilcox
• Jocko Willink
• Rainn Wilson
• Oprah Winfrey

Films & Television Shows

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
• Gilligan’s Island
• Rain Man
• The Matrix

TIMESTAMPS

• [00:00:00] Start.
• [00:02:33] The vascular Arthur Brooks returns.
• [00:03:07] Brahmamuhurta and why Arthur studies happiness.
• [00:06:20] Arthur’s morning workout protocol.
• [00:09:58] Why Arthur does Zone 2 cardio without headphones.
• [00:10:38] Quantifying progress as the secret to happiness.
• [00:20:50] Post-workout holy half-hour.
• [00:22:25] Creatine, caffeine strategy, and 60-70 grams of protein for breakfast.
• [00:29:50] Four hours of distraction-free deep work and Hemingway’s protocol.
• [00:32:21] Alcohol kills sleep to borrow happiness from tomorrow.
• [00:34:36] My ketosis, intermittent fasting, and morning protocol.
• [00:39:34] Experimentation is king.
• [00:46:29] David Baszucki, metabolic psychiatry, and ketosis: the poet’s protocol.
• [00:48:20] Four affect profiles: mad scientists, cheerleaders, judges, and poets.
• [00:54:13] Why Arthur was moved to write The Meaning of Your Life.
• [00:55:52] Psychogenic epidemic: technology isn’t the problem, it’s what we’re not getting.
• [00:59:33] Macronutrients of meaning: coherence, purpose, significance.
• [01:03:38] Search vs. presence and the trap for seekers.
• [01:07:53] Marine rule: get to 80 percent and choose.
• [01:12:07] Significance at micro, not macro level; cult of activism as substitute religion.
• [01:17:22] Transcendence: from me self to I self; Harvard’s Astronomy 101.
• [01:19:35] Two dimensions of transcendence: upward (worship) and outward (service).
• [01:21:48] Maslow revised: training awareness so the mundane becomes miraculous.
• [01:28:45] Flow state as self-forgetting; beauty as transcendence.
• [01:32:12] Living in the simulation: complicated vs. complex problems.
• [01:37:55] Left hemisphere vs. right hemisphere.
• [01:42:18] Your suffering is sacred: pain times resistance.
• [01:46:30] Pilgrimage as metaphor.
• [01:55:42] AI as left-brain adjunct.
• [01:57:18] Arthur’s evening protocol: Psalms and Neruda.
• [02:00:13] The oxytocin protocol for marriage, break glass plan.
• [02:04:31] Happiness is love and other parting thoughts.

ARTHUR BROOKS QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“I’m a specialist in human happiness because it’s hard for me.”
— Arthur Brooks

“If you’re getting up when the sun is warm, you’ve lost the first battle for mood management and productivity is what it comes down to.”
— Arthur Brooks

“You never arrive. Arrival gives you almost nothing, but it’s progress toward the goal.”
— Arthur Brooks

“I’m basically the equivalent of a freaked-out hippie who went to India and got converted and practiced an exotic religion for the rest of my life. But my exotic religion is Catholicism.”
— Arthur Brooks

“You can’t simulate the meaning of your life. You can only live the meaning of your life.”
— Arthur Brooks

“If you don’t know what to do today and meaning feels out of reach, turn off your device and go love somebody. And it doesn’t really matter how you feel because love is an act. It’s a commitment. It’s a decision. And you’ll lift up yourself and that person and a little bit of the whole world. Happiness is love.”
— Arthur Brooks

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Want to hear the last time Arthur was on the show? Listen to our conversation here, in which we discussed reverse bucket lists, the four false idols (money, power, fame, and pleasure), Buddhist and Stoic practices for managing negative affect, death meditation, how physical fitness buys less unhappiness, finding meaning and purpose, the three macronutrients of happiness, and much more.