How to build a meaningful life

ARTHUR BROOKS: I believe that entrepreneurship is a lifestyle. It’s how you live your life because you are the start-up.

JEFF BERMAN: You are the start-up, or as Reid Hoffman would put it, this is about the start-up of you. If you’re scaling a business right now, that will no doubt ring true, but Arthur Brooks isn’t just talking about people literally building a company. He wants all of us to approach our personal lives as seriously as we approach our professional lives. To help us do that, Arthur just published an absolutely unputdownable, that’s a word, unputdownable new book called The Meaning of Your Life. While we had him, I couldn’t resist digging into some other topics as well, like the state of capitalism in 2026.

BROOKS: I truly believe in capitalism, but I believe we have to have capitalism with a soul. If you elevate it to your religion, look out because you’re ironically going to stop practicing capitalism central to which is competition. Competition is what we love. Competition in markets leads to consumers actually benefiting because they have multiple options. Competition in politics leads to democracy and everybody hates uncontested elections except tyrants.

BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale.

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I’m Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, the one and only Arthur Brooks. A bestselling author, Arthur led a prominent conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute for a decade. Now, he’s a Harvard professor, best known for his work on the science of happiness. His new book is The Meaning of Your Life. The book and our conversation are both packed with actionable advice for living with purpose. Arthur, welcome to Masters of Scale.

BROOKS: Thanks. It’s great to be with you.

Copy LinkWhy so many people feel successful but still empty

BERMAN: It’s terrific to be with you. There’s so much to discuss with you. I’m not sure how we’re going to fit it all in. We’ve been seeing a lot and talking a lot about the loneliness epidemic in America.

BROOKS: Right.

BERMAN: I’m curious if you think that there is a meaning or purpose epidemic in America right now as well.

BROOKS: Yeah, I do. And the reason is because I study happiness and unhappiness. So that’s my stock-in-trade. I teach classes on the science of happiness at the Harvard Business School. And I came back to academia in 2019 after 11 years away running a company. I came back in 2019. It was like a plague had gone through my village. When I left academia, it was happier than the rest of the world. I mean, people in college were falling in love and making friends and goofing around, partying, and also having their minds blown by big ideas. And in 2019, depression had tripled. Anxiety had doubled. The loneliness crisis was upon us. And this was immediately a Sherlock Holmes problem for me as a behavioral scientist. So I use my skills forensically when I see problems. You’re going to look for a blockage to wellbeing. And there’s three channels of wellbeing that you’re going to look at.

One is enjoyment, which is not pleasure. It’s pleasure plus people plus memory. Pleasure doesn’t lead you to happiness. The pursuit of pleasure leads you to rehab. But when you actually add people and memory to it, you transfer the experience of the pleasure into the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive center of the brain where pleasures can be managed, and they don’t manage you. The second is satisfaction. And satisfaction is the joy from an accomplishment after struggle. The whole audience to this show is super high in satisfaction. They struggle and struggle and accomplish a lot. And they want to accomplish even more, which is why they’re listening to the show, is what it comes down to. And that’s really, really important. And I talk about that an awful lot. The last channel is meaning. And meaning is this idea that life has a coherence to it, that things happen for a reason, that you do things for a reason, which is your purpose, and that your life is significant, that your life matters.

And so when I see a huge depression, anxiety epidemic, a psychogenic epidemic of misery, basically, psychogenic just means lots of misery, no biological origin. I know one of those channels is blocked. So I go to the research and I’m doing the research because that’s what I do. And I find that enjoyment. Young people enjoy their lives every bit as much as people my age. Satisfaction, especially the Harvard Business School where I teach is through the roof, man. They’re struggling for big things, tons of satisfaction. But meaning is cratered. Meaning has cratered since about 2008. As a matter of fact, the best predictor of depression and anxiety for young adults is the answer yes to the question, does your life feel meaningless? That’s the best predictor. So now, the plot thickens because they have to figure out what’s meaning mean. Where do you find meaning? And how do you fix the problem?

BERMAN: What have you learned about what are the biggest contributing factors to this decline in meaning?

BROOKS: There’s lots of things that have actually led to a general decline in wellbeing. I mean, there’s kind of these climate problems. I don’t mean literally climate problems, the climate of happiness. And that has to do with faith and family and friendship and work that serves other people. The orientation toward all those things has declined. Then there’s these big storms that we see, kind of the weather of happiness, which is number one, sure. In 2007, the first iPhone was delivered. It became utterly ubiquitous very quickly. In 2008, 2009, apps started to go on the iPhone. By 2012, people were dating on apps on the iPhone, et cetera, et cetera. It became a central part of our life experience. And we know, by the way, that this has pulled people apart from each other.

The second big storm was this increase in political polarization, which really was coming around by about 2012, 2013, like we see it today. And the last, of course, was the coronavirus epidemic. The problem wasn’t the coronavirus. The problem is what we did about the coronavirus, which pulled people apart, left people in a very, very lonely state. It actually reoriented them toward the way that they self-soothe. People really started using their smartphones to self-soothe during the coronavirus epidemic and lost skills, among other things. A mediation of relationships through tech. That’s what actually did it. That led to a sense of meaninglessness. Now, the investigation has to ask why.

Copy LinkHow screen time drained meaning from daily life

BERMAN: So what’s the why?

BROOKS: The why is that we started using our brains differently to do big survey work. And that was really what tipped me off on the meaning part because people kept saying, “I’m doing everything right, but I don’t know what I’m meant to do. And I’m following all the rules, but my life feels empty. It feels meaningless.” They kept using the meaning word, which is really how I got hot on that case. But there’s a second part to it, which is when I asked people about the way that they live their lives, especially young people and most especially highly educated young people. They talk about achievement. They talk about solving problems. Great. I ask them how they spend their day, and it’s kind of like this. I wake up because my phone wakes me up because it’s my alarm clock. I look at my messages, and I look at my phone a little bit.

Then I’m looking at my phone while I’m eating my breakfast and drinking my coffee. And then I go to work, which is a lot of the time it’s on the Zoom screen. And I talk to my friends. Well, I don’t talk to my friends. They’re on social media and I date. Well, kind of. I mean, I date on the apps. And do you game? Yeah, I game a lot. It’s kind of how I have a lot of friends with gaming and I get a sense of satisfaction from that. And the bottom line is there’s nothing wrong with any one of those channels. The problem is that it adds up to 12 hours a day. And this is where it got interesting. I was talking to a young guy about this and he’s kind of flat in his affect because, man, he’s been anesthetized by all this. And he said, “I feel like I’m living in a simulation,” because he is. You and I are old enough to remember the matrix, which I’m going to shock you and sadden you. That was 27 years ago.

BERMAN: I don’t want to hear that.

BROOKS: That movie was super fantastic, far out science fiction about an artificial intelligence, a mechanical artificial intelligence, which was subjugating humanity for an energy source, which was their attention that was sucking out their attention, their energy, keeping them in suspended animation by feeding them kind of a pleasant simulacrum for real life. Dude, we’re in the simulation. We’re literally in the plot of that movie is what it comes down to. And the reason that the rebels fight against the matrix in that movie, Neo, Keanu Reeves, the coolest dude ever, is because he wanted his life to have meaning. And the only way he could have meaning is to have a real life, not a simulated life. Now, here’s where the plot thickens on all of this. There’s a new cutting edge theory in neuroscience called the Theory of Hemispheric Lateralization. When we were kids, we thought that you had analytical people and artsy people that was largely abandoned.

BERMAN: Right. You’re a left brain person. You’re a right brain person.

Copy LinkWhy meaning is a complex problem, not a productivity problem

BROOKS: Right. Right. Right. But the new research on this, which has largely been spearheaded by Iain McGilchrist, the Oxford neuroscientist, is that there is a hemispheric lateralization that distinguishes, and this is important for everybody listening to us, between complicated problems and complex problems. The left hemisphere of the brain solves complicated problems, which is problems that are, they’re hard to solve, but with how to and what knowledge, you can solve them once and for all.

BERMAN: What’s an example of a complicated problem?

BROOKS: Creating a piece of software that will find the closest pizza to you at 10:00 PM. Building a toaster, figuring out how to get from the San Fernando Valley to Orange County. These are complicated problems.

BERMAN: Especially at the wrong time of day.

BROOKS: I know. I know. These are complicated problems. And our life is full of them, and we need to be able to do that. The right side of the brain deals with complex problems. Complex problems are why questions that don’t always have answers. They’re easy to understand unlike complicated problems and impossible to solve.

BERMAN: Such as?

BROOKS: Such as my marriage, such as my cat, such as a football game. I watch NFL football. I’m a big Seahawks fan. I grew up in Seattle.

BERMAN: Oh, we were going to be friends. Look at this.

BROOKS: We can still be friends across our differences.

BERMAN: Okay. All right. Fair enough.

BROOKS: I love NFL football because I can’t simulate it with the most powerful computers in the world, with the computing horsepower beyond our wildest imaginations. There are too many permutations. The complexity of it defies that. That’s why I feel like I’m on the field. That’s why I’m excited when I’m watching. My marriage will never be solved. I’ve been married 34 years, and it’s still as complex as it ever was. I’ll have an argument with my wife today because we always do. And I can’t solve it. I couldn’t put into ChatGPT. How do I never have an argument with my wife again? I would get garbage back.

BERMAN: You’d end up with more arguments with your wife.

BROOKS: It would screw up my marriage even worse because it’s a complex problem. See, the thing is, we have a lot of complicated solutions in the technologized world, and especially that in which we inhabit a simulation, and which we’re living in tech all the time. But the things we care about are complex, which are the love problems, the mystery problems. And there’s one thing you can’t actually simulate, and that’s the meaning of your life. What’s happening in modern life with the hustle culture, the engineered culture that we live in, where the tip of the spear is the way and amount that we’re using tech in our lives is pushing us to the left hemispheres of our brain where we don’t deal with, we can’t even conceive of right hemispheric questions. Not only do we not know the meaning of our lives, we’re not even asking the questions.

Copy LinkHow boredom and blank space help your brain find purpose

BERMAN: So two questions from that. One, what are the right questions? And two, is the meaning of your life, the name of the book, a complicated question, a complex question?

BROOKS: The meaning of your life is a complex question. And I’m trying to avoid in the book coming up with a complicated answer to it. And the answer to it basically is using your brain the way it was supposed to be used. And there’s a lot of examples in here about to convince people that their brains are being used in the wrong way. I talk an awful lot about boredom, for example. And the fact that boredom is incredibly important for the human brain. Today, people who have eradicated boredom largely through their use of technology, they’re never bored minute to minute, but their life is unbelievably boring. That is an example of our brains working in an inadequate way to meet our needs. And that’s because we’re sitting on the left side where we’re eradicated moment to moment boredom, but we’ve never illuminated the right side, which is actually what cosmically, what metaphysically makes our life feel interesting to us.

BERMAN: So what does boredom do for us?

BROOKS: What boredom does is literally when we’re not doing anything, our brain will start working on cycles, on complex questions that don’t have easy answers, that don’t have obvious answers, that don’t have answers that we can state. What happens is when you’re being distracted, you’re being distracted by complicated things. When you’re not being distracted, your mind ranges to complex things.

BERMAN: I’m curious if it’s actually boredom or if it is blank space.

BROOKS: It is the latter. The boredom is what people experience typically. That’s a negative experience largely. And we know this as a negative experience because people, when they have blank space, then they feel bored and then they try to eradicate it. I mean, Dan Gilbert, my colleague at Harvard, who’s a visionary social psychologist, he’s done boredom experiments where he puts people in a room in a chair for 15 minutes with nothing to do and nothing to look at, nothing to listen to. And the only choice they have besides sitting there quietly is pushing a key fob with a button that will shock them. Self-administers, painful electric shocks. In 15 minutes, a quarter of the women shock themselves and two-thirds of the dudes, which is all you need to know about dudes. And the way that we use technology to distract ourselves such that we don’t experience boredom in response to the natural parts of life where there’s nothing else has led to a catastrophic lack of meaning because of the way it makes our brains work.

Copy LinkProtecting creativity with intentional solitude

BERMAN: If you were counseling a group of entrepreneurs, of aspiring business leaders, what would you be saying to them about how to use boredom, downtime, blank space to grow in their professional lives?

BROOKS: Oh, for them, don’t let tech steal your boredom. Don’t let tech steal your blank space. And that means you have to do it on purpose. And so, one of the things that I strongly recommend, remember that your best ideas come in the shower, that’s because your phone isn’t in there. So I have a set of protocols of tech-free times and zones that I recommend, especially to entrepreneurs that need the default mode network more than they understand. I recommend the Brahmamuhurta, which in Sanskrit means the creator’s time. I recommend a walk before dawn, and I do this a lot. Get up at least a half an hour before dawn and an hour long walk without devices. It’s a good protocol to reprogram your brain for 30 days. It’s a really good thing to do. And for entrepreneurs, if you’re finding that your creativity is taking a nose dive and you don’t know why, this is your reboot. That’s where the reboot starts. That’s important.

BERMAN: Still ahead, Arthur Brooks, on why it’s hard for CEOs to make friends.

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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and much more on our YouTube channel. And be sure to check out the link in our show notes to subscribe to our newsletter. Arthur says a lack of meaning can fester when your life doesn’t involve taking risks, and the most important risk to take, falling in love.

BROOKS: Your life is an adventure. Your life should be exciting. And there’s more excitement and there’s more reward when you learn how to manage risk and you take it. And that really leads into one of the great truths about how to find the meaning of your life, which is to calculate and take more risk. And the most important risk that you can actually take is by falling in love, is actually falling in love with a real person and having the real risk of having your heart broken. And that’s what it comes down to because a life where you understand and you’re willing to take risks is an exciting and a wonderful life. And some people, they have more tolerance for it. Some people have less, but everybody can have a greater entrepreneurial orientation toward life. And a lot of what I teach my students is how to treat their life more effectively like a start-up.

It’s funny because a lot of people don’t think of themselves as business entrepreneurs, but then you teach them how to manage risk and how to be better at it and how to look at it, how to reframe it, not as danger, but as excitement, and they start doing it. They’re like, “Oh, why has this been my whole life?” So my goal in life is actually to help them live that way as opposed to just starting businesses. And so when we think about it, the algebra of meaning really is about understanding so you can have control. It’s about having purpose so you can make progress. And it’s about significance so that you can love and be loved. And that really kind of sums up the meaning of life.

Copy LinkWhy real friendship matters more than transactional connection

BERMAN: You’ve referenced friendship a couple of times here, and one of the things that you talk about are these three different classes, and it’s not going to be perfect, but of friends. There are friends who are utilitarian, friends who bring you joy, and then there are the real friends. Could you just share a little bit about that framework?

BROOKS: This is important for people who listen to this show. So this is Aristotelian. Aristotle was everything you want to know about friendship. Aristotle wrote about this because he felt that friendship was deeply divine. These are not kin-based relationships. They might be in your kin group, your place to see a band of 30 to 50 individuals. But by the time Ancient Greece was rolling around, I mean, it was people that you just connect to in a particular way. And he noted that true love is actually going to come from a particular type of friendship, but that these aren’t the only friendships that we have. At the lowest level, and he doesn’t mean this, he’s not casting aspersions. He’s just talking about the farthest away from these real friendships are the transactional friendships. These are useful people to you. And everybody listening to us has lots of useful friends. They help you with your business. They’re your distributors. They’re the people that have the office next door, et cetera, et cetera. You don’t know their kids’ birthdays, maybe not even their kids’ names.

And once you stop doing business with each other, you’re not friends anymore. I mean, you don’t have anything against them, but you just don’t pursue it. Slightly higher is friendships of beauty. And these are friendships based on admiration. There’s something you admire about a person. They’re funny, they’re beautiful. But if that characteristic were to disappear, so with a friendship. And the highest level are those in which we have a mutual love. Mutual love, usually for a third thing, that’s called a virtuous friendship. The virtuous friendship is that in which we’re looking at something that we really care about. Maybe it’s NFL football, maybe it’s faith. The strongest marriages are virtuous friendships around a love of the children, right? Which is a beautiful thing. We have this mutual love of the children, which cements us together. There should be more to a good marriage than that, but that’s the basis of it. And it’s really important to keep in mind that in life, if you want to achieve a sense of meaning through love, you got to have more than deal friends. You got to have real friends.

Copy LinkWhy CEOs are lonely

And a lot of people, the loneliest people I ever meet are CEOs, the loneliest people I meet. And the reason is because it’s all deal, no real.

BERMAN: Why?

BROOKS: Because real friends take time and you’re not compensated for it.

BERMAN: But most of these CEOs didn’t start as CEOs. If you’ve been 20 years into your career before you’re a CEO, is it cause and effect like you think people are in the CEO chair because they’ve been so driven and they haven’t invested in these real friendships?

BROOKS: No.

BERMAN: Or why is that?

BROOKS: What happens is the cost benefit analysis of time leads people away from relationships that are not compensatory in any sort of worldly form. So executives, CEOs, entrepreneurs are the busiest people in the world. They’re just super busy, is what it comes down to. And who’s got an hour for an idle conversation about the old days? So most CEOs, I know they had real friends in college, real friends in their 20s, and they had less and less and less and less.

BERMAN: I got to tell you, this sounds like an excuse to me. This sounds like BS to me. It’s a little bit of put your own oxygen mask on first. And if you are uncomfortable with intimacy, if it is hard to maintain friendships over time and distance and having kids and the complications of sandwich generationing and all of that, okay. And I’ll speak from my personal, I mean, my real friendships, that third category of friendships, they fill my bucket. I mean, I’m overflowing with joy and love when I spend time with Andrew or Cass or Adam or… These are my people. And so it strikes me that it’s actually counterproductive for both meaning and how I think you and I would define success.

BROOKS: I completely agree with you, but that’s a common mistake that people make. It’s bad habits, by the way. It’s like it’s bad. It’s funny because people will say, who are my age, they’ll be like, “I got so out of shape.” One day at a time, man, you got out of shape by eating that thing and not eating that thing and sitting on the couch as opposed to going to the gym. You don’t suddenly get out of shape. You don’t suddenly get lonely either. It’s bad hygiene. It’s bad emotional hygiene is what it comes down to. It’s also just a bunch of dumb excuses to say, “I was too busy to go to the gym.” It’s just excuse-making on another dimension. It’s interesting because the wonderful prefrontal cortex, the super computer of the human brain, it gives us two choices all the time, animal impulse and moral aspiration.

BERMAN: I’m not hearing that these are mutually exclusive.

BROOKS: They’re quite certainly not. But the truth of the matter is that when you’re not thinking deeply about it, you’ll go toward the worldly rewards. And we know this. We know this. This is what Thomas Aquinas in 1265 called the idols, what you really want is God, is what he said. What you really want is meaning. What you really want is happiness, but you’ll take the easier route that feels a little divine and yet always leads you astray. Those idols are money, power, pleasure, and fame. Money, power, pleasure, and fame. I have a game I play with my students. What’s my idol? And this is very good behavioral science. It turns out that the neuroscience and behavioral science that are my stock-in-trade follow these four idols. Everybody has one of these idols, as a matter of fact, that distracts them from the thing that’s greater to themselves and will betray them, beguile them, distract them from actually pursuing what they really should pursue. That’s a market failure in the human head, as it were. I mean, you have an idol. We all do. Do you want to play what’s my idol?

BERMAN: Sure.

Copy LinkFinding the hidden idol that quietly drives your decisions

BROOKS: So let’s find out your idol.

BERMAN: Let’s do it.

BROOKS: The supposition is that when you know what it is, you have power over it. Not that you won’t be beguiled by it, but when you know what your particular idol is, then you’re less likely because you’ll see something that will not later lead you to regret because almost everything that you regret is like, I cut a corner on that. I was a little less honest than I should have been. A little less kind, a little less generous because I was going after that thing. But frequently my students and many people even my age don’t know what their idol is. They can assume what it is. So here’s how we figure it out. You eliminate what it’s not. That’s a very robust cognitive technique for honing in on what we really care about. So thinking of the four, money or wealth, power, which is simply not bad.

We’re talking about having persuasive capacity over other people. People do what you want. Pleasure, which is either feeling good or seeking comfort. And last is honor, which is the admiration of others, is the opinion of others. One of those beguiles you more than others. So let’s start with what you don’t care about. Now, even which you’d want to get rid of, money, power, pleasure, or fame, which one do you kick out first? And that means, by the way, not that you don’t have it at all, it just means you have the population average.

BERMAN: I’m going to answer the question, Arthur. I’m going to also be candid. This is where my lawyer brain kicks in and I start really parsing what these words mean-

BROOKS: Yeah, I know. I know, of course.

BERMAN: … and what they are, but I’m not going to fight it. Money, pleasure, power.

BROOKS: Fame.

BERMAN: Fame. I think fame is probably the least important to me.

BROOKS: Yeah. What people think of you, what other people saying about you, the admiration that other people have of your accomplishments.

BERMAN: Yeah. It’s not that I don’t appreciate and enjoy it, but if it doesn’t feel true to me, then it doesn’t really…

BROOKS: Yeah, not being recognized doesn’t bother you at all.

BERMAN: Well, I won’t say not at all. It’s nice that we get recognized, but that really isn’t what drives any of this for me.

BROOKS: Right. Right. Now, one of the ways that you can actually sort of stress test this is the people you admire. And if you admire people because they’re famous, that usually means that’s… right?

BERMAN: Yeah. Yeah.

BROOKS: And probably the people you admire, not famous, right?

BERMAN: Yeah. Or the ones who have done really meaningful work in the world, and yeah.

BROOKS: So you’ve got three left, money, power, and pleasure. Which one do you get rid of next?

BERMAN: Well, I mean, and so this is where I’m going to do this just because I can imagine there are other folks listening and watching who will do this. I said to Reid Hoffman once, “I don’t need to be a billionaire.” And then he smiled and said, “Then you won’t be.” And I was like, “Yeah, and I’m good with that.” So there’s a level of money that is important to me to have so I can provide for my kids and have the minimum life with my partner that we would like to have. There’s a little money beyond that that would be really nice to have. Beyond that, it just isn’t a motivator for me.

BROOKS: Well, you’ve figured out, you have the privilege of figuring out in your life that it doesn’t get you stuff that’s that awesome.

BERMAN: Right. Right.

BROOKS: It can buy you huge headaches. If you’ve got a yacht, you got to worry about the yacht.

BERMAN: Right. Right. To quote one of our great poets, more money, more problems, so yes.

BROOKS: I believe you.

BERMAN: If that framing is right, then probably money goes next, but that’s with the caveat that there’s a certain amount that I’d like to have to be able to do…

BROOKS: Yeah, but I bet you can imagine. I believe you. And here’s why I could imagine the following. Your kids grow up and move out and you and your partner move into a two bedroom apartment. You’re like, “Good.”

BERMAN: Yeah. Great.

BROOKS: Awesome.

BERMAN: And by the way, not necessarily in New York or Los Angeles. Like Charlottesville, Virginia, here we come.

BROOKS: Great. It’s simple. Sure. Simple. You like simple things.

BERMAN: Yeah. Yeah.

BROOKS: Good. Okay. Now, it’s getting hotter because these are things that you care about. More power, which is influence over the people, which is, by the way, not unvirtuous. I mean, it can be unvirtuous, but it isn’t necessarily, but I’m talking about it beguiling you, and pleasure, comfort, security, feeling good. Which one do you get rid of next? I know you like them both because they’re your top two.

BERMAN: I really do. They’re tough. I mean, I think if I’m forced to trade, I will trade out power before I trade out pleasure. And again…

BROOKS: And by the way, you have power.

BERMAN: Yeah, I do. And also, I care much like your son who wins the Marines, and I imagine like the rest of your family, I care deeply about this country. I’m a very passionate, patriotic American. I want to have more power to do more good for my country and for my family. And so it’s an imperfect framing I know it’s meant to be, but again, with that caveat, I’ll trade out the power for the pleasure.

BROOKS: That information is really important, because in your weak moments, that’s what will make you buckle. That’s what’ll make you buckle. That’s what will make you turn away from the higher order things of your faith, your family, your friendships. It’ll make you compromise the things that are really, really important to you. And when you look back on it, you’ll see that’s the case. But more importantly, now you have the power if you’re thinking about it in this way to say, “Ha-ha, no.” Moral aspiration. Animal impulse for you is going to be in the pleasure space. Moral aspiration is when you stand up for yourself. Now, it’s very, very different for a lot of other people. For me, number one is I hate power. I was a CEO for a long time. Bummed me out when people call me boss. I don’t like it.

Copy LinkHow leaders can choose ethics over short term advantage

BERMAN: I’d like to just ask you to imagine that a CEO calls you and says, “I’m really struggling right now because the leadership in our country is really good for my business short term. We’re going to hit record numbers. Stock price is going to go through the roof. But that leader is threatening rule of law, which threatens stability in the country, which long term really threatens not just our company, but the economy. And I’m struggling with maximizing near term shareholder returns with the long term value of the company and value for shareholders.” What are you advising that CEO to do?

BROOKS: I have gotten those calls, and not just now, not just in the current environment with the current president. I’ve gotten that in previous administrations. And I especially got that during the rise of progressive social consciousness where CEOs would ask me, “I feel like I need to take a stand on this particular issue.” And I said, “Don’t, don’t.” Now, don’t violate your own conscience. Don’t curry favor with somebody that you think is morally reprehensible. Don’t hang out in a bad neighborhood morally. Don’t do that. Don’t look for favors where the favors are being dispensed by people that you think are acting in a way that’s contrary to the country that you actually want to live in. Don’t do that because then your party to it is what it comes down to. You don’t need to, as a CEO of this company, which is a fiduciary and as a representative of this company, actually be talking about politics.

You don’t need to go outside of that. Now, if something is affecting your firm, yes. But the truth of the matter is, and I think about this in the case of universities. One of the things that screwed up universities in this country is that they had to weigh in on everything. And once you start doing that, you are going to get lobbied by every single thing coming down the street that you need to make a statement about something that doesn’t represent your business. You need to live in an upright manner and represent your business in an ethical way, is what it comes down to. Now, a lot of people disagree with me. A lot of people think that’s wrong.

BERMAN: Well, I just want to push on it for a second because what I’m not talking about is speaking out specifically on one policy question or another, what have you. It’s more a structural matter where what is happening, and it doesn’t have to be in the context of the United States today.

BROOKS: Right. Any country any time.

BERMAN: Any number of countries have experienced this, we can go back to Hungary as Orbán came back into office, where you’re sitting there as a thoughtful business leader who understands history and saying, “Short-term, this is great for us. But long-term, this is bad. And it’s not this policy, that’s policy. It is the undermining of rule of law, which is critical for the stability of the business environment.”

BROOKS: Right. Don’t take opportunities that are contrary to your sense of propriety. Don’t profit from things that are wrong. I mean, that’s always the case. People ask, “If you ever have to ask, should I take the money?” The answer is no. Should I take that money? No. That’s what it comes down to. And that’s true for leadership as well. Will it cost you your job? Maybe. Probably not, actually, because people who conduct themselves with respect to transactional ethics, they’re the ones who ultimately get in trouble because then very, very quickly, their internal decisions become contrary one to the other.

They become inconsistent, and that becomes an irreconcilable problem. If on the other hand, you have a very strong moral code about how you’re going to behave, how you’re going to lead, and you’ll leave your job before you go contrary to that, then you can sleep at night and sleep assured that if you lost your job, you lost your job because you did what was best for you and for your country and what you think is right. I strongly believe that. I try to live according to that. I wish everybody would do that.

Copy LinkWhy competition needs love and capitalism needs a soul

BERMAN: You write and talk about leading with love. If you spend enough time in Silicon Valley, as you and I both have, you know that one of the handful of things that investors are looking for as a motivator is revenge.

BROOKS: Yeah, I know.

BERMAN: It’s a big one. People have got really something to prove and want to just go assassinate the competition.

BROOKS: I know.

BERMAN: How do you maintain that competitive spirit and that edge while leading with love?

BROOKS: Yeah. So I mean, my dad who’s a really funny guy, he was a math professor. He wasn’t an entrepreneur, but he used to say, “It’s not enough to win. Your friends need to lose too.” That shot in the front of that natural tendency. And I get that. I get how competition works. But competition is not mutually exclusive with the gift that you’re actually trying to bring with your career. I do a lot in the competition of ideas because I’m an academic and I ran a think tank. And in the competition of ideas, the goal is persuasion. You win when you persuade. There’s an old Dale Carnegie who wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People. He has a little poem. “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” And I understand vanquishing the competition in a market and so that your company earns more money and their company earns less and maybe they go out of business.

I get that. But most of the competition that we’re dealing with is one in which we’re going to see each other again. We’re actually going to see each other again. And my goal should be to persuade you of something that’s actually better. Nobody has ever been persuaded by hatred. In the history of humanity, that’s the reason that the most subversive idea in all of civilization that really led to the enlightenment was Matthew 5:44, “Love your enemies.” I mean, Jesus is on the Sermon on the Mount on this. And a lot of people listening to us, you’re not religious at all, but you know this Bible passage where Jesus gets up on the Sermon on the Mount and he says, “You have heard that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but today I give you a new teaching. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” And that sounds like so pie in the sky. Yeah, right, man. You’ve never been to the Valley. Martin Luther King used to preach on that.

And Martin Luther King was a tough hombre. I mean, he was way tougher than people in Silicon Valley. And he had a lot of people who were trying to wipe him out. And he preached on that and he said, there’s a very famous sermon on November 17th, 1957 from the Dexter Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. You can find it on the internet, a tape of it, a recording of it. There was no video in those days where he says, “That is the most practical of all Jesus’ teachings” because if I… He didn’t say to like your enemy because that’s a sentimental something, that’s an emotion. He said to “love your enemies because only then can you redeem and convince your enemies.” Abraham Lincoln said that “I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.” These are the most powerful people as people who lead with love and are still tough as nails and you absolutely can be. And some of the executives that I met that I’m most impressed with are people who their hearts are full of love and they’re just so tough at the same time.

BERMAN: Before we wrap, we’re in a moment where capitalism and democracy are largely being conflated. Neither is working for many Americans, certainly many younger Americans and faith in both is falling. You have talked about capitalism as a force for good. Do you still believe that? And if so, why?

BROOKS: I completely believe that. I believe the free enterprise system is the greatest system for setting people free. Free enterprise is the ultimate AI. It’s the reason that the United States has this insurance mechanism against despotism is because despots don’t stand a chance against markets, that you can put in the dumbest policies in the world and the behemoth of the American free enterprise system will roll over them. You can make it slow down a little bit. You can create some problems on it, but it’s not perfect and it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. I truly believe in capitalism, but I believe we have to have capitalism with a soul. If you elevate it to your religion, look out, because you’re ironically going to stop practicing capitalism, central to which is competition. Competition is what we love. Competition in markets leads to consumers actually benefiting because they have multiple options.

Competition in politics leads to democracy and everybody hates uncontested elections except tyrants. And competition of ideas is what leads to a free society and excellence in education, which we’ve had not enough of in the world of cancel culture and monolithic, politically, ideologically polarized campuses, which has led to all the hell that we actually see over the past 10 years, take it from an academic, it’s not been that pleasant. But again, it’s all kinds of opportunity. So I truly believe in competition. And when you elevate structures of capitalism to a religion per se, when it’s not anchored in morality and love for other people and a responsibility to perhaps even the divine, what you’re going to do is you’re going to cut corners and you’re not going to get the competition that’s supposed to be the central operating code of capitalism itself. Competition is about collaboration. It’s about rules, man. I mean, the Yankees don’t want to blow up the Red Sox bus on the way to the game because that would be the opposite of competition.

BERMAN: Their fans might, but they win.

BROOKS: They want to compete and win.

BERMAN: Yeah.

BROOKS: That’s what it’s really all about. And when you have a sense that… And by the way, this is a deep enlightenment idea. The enlightenment is not about coercion and cheating, it’s about persuasion.

BERMAN: So how do we introduce more soul into our capitalism?

BROOKS: I’m trained as an economist. I moved away from talking about markets and moved into talking about the heart and soul by talking about happiness because that’s the most important thing because that’s the thing that’s actually missing. My vocation, which I feel is a sacred thing, is to talk about what matters the most, not talking about what I was trained in most. And that’s why I completely have re-engineered my career to talk about love and happiness. My mission in life is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas because that’s the source code that I actually want for the society I want to live in.

BERMAN: What a perfect place to wrap. Thank you for being with us.

BROOKS: Thank you.

BERMAN: Thanks again to Arthur Brooks for joining us. We live in a world where at least one prominent VC believes that introspection is worthless and an indulgent product of the 1910s rather than timeless, going back to Socrates, to Plato, and even Jesus Christ himself. I am no biblical scholar, but one of my favorite passages is from Mark 8:36, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” That passage undergirds so much of Arthur’s work. I’m incredibly grateful he’s taking a scientific approach to helping us all live happier, more fulfilling, and more meaningful lives. Arthur’s new book is called The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. I can’t wait to hear what you think of it.

I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.