Arthur Brooks
speaker
984 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 11 Jul
Arthur Brooks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Now, that's as old as Aristotle, who talked about the things that we think will make us happy that don't.
And really through the lens of Aquinas, who in the 13th century was an unbelievably astute social scientist.
Aquinas talked about in his Summa Theologiae in 1265, he wrote about the idols that beguile us.
And it was ever thus.
the four idols that beguile as he said and each one of us has a particular idol that if we know what it is we have power but if we don't know what it is we'll always in retrospect be the cause of our regret the four idols are money power pleasure and fame
And each one of us.
I mean, they're all nice.
They're all great.
And I teach MBA students at Harvard, and I have a game called What's My Idol?
They don't know.
They don't know.
But if you know you have unbelievable power, why?
Because you know it will beguile you, and it will distract you from what you truly want.
Faith, family, friendship, satisfying, meaningful work, which are kind of the four virtuous things.
parts of the happiness 401k plan, if you want.
But if you know, it's really important.
So I play this game, you know, so that we can uncover their own idol.
And they're usually wrong.
They think it's one thing and it isn't.
And I have a series of questions that I go through to figure out which it is.
Showing 221–240 of 984 · page 12 of 50
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