Arthur Brooks

Well, thank you.

I can't wait to talk to your audience.

I mean, this is a huge show.

Congratulations on your unbelievable success.

Are you happy?

Well, I'm trained as a social scientist.

Human behavior is what really, really interests me.

And I've looked at a lot of different things.

I've looked at beauty, why people think things are beautiful, why people love art.

Later, I looked at philanthropy and charitable giving, why people give to things that are really important to them, and kind of the taproot of both beauty and giving.

charitable behavior and generosity is happiness.

People want to be happier.

And so, you know, a couple of decades ago, I thought, well, why am I not actually going to the root of this thing?

And frankly, why am I not studying the thing that I care about the most?

We could all be happier.

The truth of the matter is that I could be a lot happier.

So I decided I was going to turn my toolkit, the statistical power that I had acquired over the course of suffering through a PhD.

I mean, for Pete's sake, I might as well use it for something really useful.

And experiments and all the ways that are in social science and

And now, which is also merging with the field of neuroscience, using it for the things that people actually care about the most.