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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

TRIGGERnometry · Why Crazy Activism is Taking Over the West — Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks · 11 Jul 2026 podcast

Tell me about the pleasure idol.

I could have told you this from the moment we started.

Francis, are you a porn addict?

I'm kidding.

That's right.

The last episode of Trigonometry.

And you try to alleviate those tendencies with immediate pleasures, which ultimately make the problem worse.

Yeah, I completely believe you.

And I completely believe that.

And it's interesting because I've actually studied how humor works.

And humor is all based on surprise.

And so you're usually really good at being surprised or you're good at surprising people.

So humor works on a part of the limbic system called the parahippocampal gyrus, and you flick it, and it creates surprise, which you resolve by laughing.

And so, you know, any stupid dad joke does this.

And the reason that little kids laugh, your four-year-old laughs, or when your four-year-old was two and you did this, it flicked the parahippocampal gyrus of your baby.

And so they laugh like crazy.

And now, you know, even now I'll tell you a stupid joke.

My...

I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather.

Not screaming in terror like his passengers.

Showing 341–360 of 984 · page 18 of 50