Aspire with Emma Grede

Arthur C. Brooks believes we are living through an age of emptiness—a time when more people feel distracted, disconnected, and unsure of what will actually make their lives meaningful. In his latest book, The Meaning of Your Life, the Harvard professor and New York Times bestselling author examines why so many of the things we chase in pursuit of happiness can leave us feeling unsatisfied once we get them.

In this episode, Emma Grede sits down with Brooks to unpack what is driving our unhappiness and what science actually says about building a meaningful life. Brooks reveals the two questions he gives his Harvard students to diagnose whether they’re experiencing a meaning crisis, why our brains struggle in a world of constant comfort, and how to use social media without letting it drain you.
You’ll learn:
Why achievement rarely satisfies us for as long as we expect
What money can—and cannot—do for your happiness
The five-year exercise that reveals whether your priorities match how you spend your time
What to do in the first and last hour of the day to protect your attention
The step most people skip that makes new practices stick
How to pursue a big goal without becoming emotionally attached to the outcome
The simple ritual to shift your baseline happiness by 15 percent in 12 weeks

Jennifer Garner is an award-winning actor, producer, longtime Save the Children ambassador, and co-founder of Once Upon a Farm, an organic children’s food brand. After rising to fame on Alias, she built a career spanning more than three decades before entering entrepreneurship at 45 and helping grow Once Upon a Farm into a $724 million publicly traded company.
Jennifer joins Emma to talk about the side of success people rarely see: losing years of her life when Alias made her famous, disappearing from friendships, and how the constant presence of paparazzi warped her confidence.
Jennifer shares:
What Jennifer is only now realizing about approval and earning her place
How years of rejection and several failed ideas prepared her for entrepreneurship
What she’s learned about holding anger without burying it
How to recognize the value you bring without conventional qualifications
When fame and visibility can help a business, and where they cannot
What it actually looks like to protect a company’s mission
Why your biggest chapter doesn’t come with an age limit

In this solo episode, Emma shares how she thinks about money, from the lessons she learned growing up in East London to the principles she uses today. She gets into her personal financial priorities, why your earning power can matter more than your savings, how to negotiate from a position of strength, and why no woman should ever outsource the understanding of her own finances.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
What your financial priorities should be in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s
Why your ability to earn can be more valuable than your savings early in your career
How your beliefs about money can influence what you earn, ask for, and keep
How to negotiate salary, equity, and other forms of compensation more effectively
The difference between earning money, building wealth, and protecting what you’ve built
Why investing early matters—and what can happen when you wait
How to think about financial independence as freedom, security, and choice

Emma sits down with Krissy Cela, founder and creative director of Oner Active, for an honest conversation about building a bootstrapped business on track to generate close to $300 million this year. Before Oner, Krissy spent a decade building a fitness audience and business from a student laptop, long before either was considered a conventional career path. Today, she owns 50 percent of one of the fastest-growing brands in the category.
But what happens when your life asks you to become someone you don’t yet feel qualified to be, and people still look for reasons not to credit your success to you? This episode is about starting before you feel ready, letting go of the need to prove yourself, and growing into the leader your business requires.
In this episode, Krissy shares:
Why feeling underqualified should not stop you from building something big
How she turned an online audience into a loyal customer community
The early legal and partnership mistakes that shapes how she operates today
How people-pleasing weakened her leadership, and what changed since she stopped
Why the ones who doubt you are rarely the ones who end up mattering
For more, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at emmagrede.com.

Erin and Sara Foster have spent more than 15 years working across television, fashion, media and investing. Today, they are behind the hit Netflix series Nobody Wants This, the fashion brand Favorite Daughter, a production company, a venture fund and a growing slate of projects—but their success did not arrive according to a master plan.
In this episode, they join Emma to unpack the failures, pivots and unlikely opportunities that eventually brought everything together. It is a conversation about staying in motion when the path is unclear, discovering your strengths later than expected, and refusing to treat someone else’s success as evidence that you are falling behind.
In this episode, Erin and Sara share:
What nobody tells you about the years before anything works
The power of saying yes before the path is clear
How they built Favorite Daughter without being traditional “fashion girls”
The different ways scarcity and abundance shape their relationship with money
What Erin learned from seven years of IVF and 20 rounds of treatment
Why it’s never too late to find your lane and how failure can redirect you toward the career you were meant for