He Bombed His PhD Defense.
The Man in the Room
Believed in Him Anyway.

The Arthur Brooks Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"Arthur Brooks fumbled his dissertation defense in front of the greatest social scientist alive. Everyone in the room moved on. James Q. Wilson walked up afterward and said: you've got something special here. What followed was a decades-long act of belief that built a life Arthur couldn't yet imagine for himself."

- David Begnaud

The Worst Dissertation Defense. The Best Audience Member.

Arthur Brooks was 34 years old, finishing his PhD at the Rand Graduate School in Southern California, and in what he describes as a bit of a panic. He had spent years going in intellectual circles, feeling the presence of a calling he couldn't quite name. His dissertation topic was dry - the economics of symphony orchestras - and his defense reflected it. He was nervous. He talked at a technical level. He did not make a good case. It passed, but it was not impressive.

In the room that day were several distinguished scholars, including Nobel Prize winners in economics. And James Q. Wilson - the most famous social scientist of the 20th century, a Harvard political scientist who had later moved to UCLA because he liked the sunshine, a Congressional Medal of Freedom recipient, a member of the Rand Corporation's board. Wilson was Arthur's intellectual idol. Arthur was terrified of him.

After the defense ended, Wilson came up to him. He didn't comment on the performance. He said: "You know, you got something special here. If I can ever help you, just let me know." Arthur had no idea what to do with that. He didn't know how to cash that check. Wilson was the Pope. Arthur was nobody. So he graduated, took a teaching job at Georgia State University, and filed the comment away.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The dissertation defense and Wilson's words - ~3:48

The Email from the Top of the World

At Georgia State, Arthur was teaching economics and public policy and quietly working on his first book. He wanted to write the way Wilson wrote - books grounded in data and science but profoundly human, expressions of love for humanity rather than expressions of ego. He was reading Wilson's work constantly and thinking: I wonder if I'll ever meet him again. He decided he wouldn't bother the man. Wilson was famous. Wilson was busy.

Then Wilson emailed him. Out of nowhere. He had heard Arthur was writing a book. He wrote: that sounds really interesting - can I read what you're working on? Arthur's reaction: "How is this possible? This is like the Pope reaching out to you." He sent Wilson a couple of chapters, as nervous as he'd ever been. Wilson wrote back: I like it. Want me to write the foreword for your book?

Wilson wrote the foreword. The book came out. President George W. Bush read it, and Arthur's world shifted - not all in ways he expected, and not all comfortably, as he became more public and more polarizing. But it was the beginning of the intellectual life he had always sensed was waiting for him. "It was the beginning of the life I knew I wanted but couldn't articulate," he says. "Because he was the one who believed it could actually be true."

▶ Watch on YouTube: Wilson emails about the book - ~6:10

On Faith, Imperfect People, and Why You Can Only Love Right Now

Arthur is openly Catholic, practices his faith at Harvard without apology, and has grown more convinced over time - not less. He explains why with a distinction that runs through everything he teaches: the difference between complicated and complex. Complicated things can be solved. Complex things can only be lived. Faith isn't a problem to solve. It's a mystery to inhabit. And by the time you're in your 40s and 50s, he says, you've lived enough to understand that nothing you actually care about can be solved anyway.

David shared something personal on camera: a Catholic priest had once told him he shouldn't come onto a school campus because the priest didn't want children to see him living openly as a gay man. He said he had to decide in that moment whether to let that drive him from the faith or not. He chose not to. Arthur didn't flinch. He said: we are all imperfect vessels. God's people fail us. We are called to love God even when they do. Then he added what he once said to Wilson himself, when Wilson confessed that he envied Arthur's faith: Jim, I struggle too.

Arthur explains that the human brain is built for time travel - the prefrontal cortex is constantly pulling us into the past or the future. Most people marginalize now. But you cannot love in the past and you cannot love in the future. You can only love right now. Which means every time you look past the person in front of you, you have just missed the opportunity to love them.

▶ Watch on YouTube: David's story and Arthur's response - ~13:12

The French Horn Player Who Needed a Different Dream

Partway through the episode, David asks Arthur where he grew up - and the answer opens into one of the most quietly remarkable backstories. Arthur grew up in Seattle, son of a mathematician father and an artist mother. From childhood, there was only one thing he wanted: to be the world's greatest French horn player. He had photographs of the greats on his bedroom wall. He practiced five hours a day. At 19 he dropped out of college - "dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs," he says with a laugh - and went on the road as a classical musician with no intention of ever going back.

For six years he toured with a chamber music ensemble and collaborated with jazz guitar legend Charlie Byrd. At 25 he moved to Barcelona - ostensibly to join the symphony, but really because he had met a woman at a wine tasting in Burgundy who didn't speak a word of English and he didn't speak a word of Spanish. He quit his job and moved to Spain to close the deal. Thirty-four years, three children, and four grandchildren later, he says simply: so far so good.

But somewhere in his mid-twenties, the love for music ran out. He wasn't going to be the player he had dreamed of being, and more than that, he recognized the drive was gone. He stopped listening to music entirely for a long time after he quit. He and his wife moved back to the United States, where he completed his bachelor's degree by correspondence for $10,000. His wife, Ester, who had grown up poor, told him: I don't care if we're broke. We have each other. Go do the thing. It was, he says, exactly what you want someone to say.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Arthur on leaving music and meeting his wife - ~20:57

Run the Think Tank

Years passed. Arthur's career was going well - teaching at Syracuse, his book drawing attention, his name circulating in the right circles. Wilson was now on the board of the American Enterprise Institute, one of Washington's most prestigious public policy organizations, founded in 1938. AEI was looking for a new president. Wilson called Arthur and said: I think it should be you.

Arthur was in his early 40s. He had never run anything. He had never raised a dollar for a nonprofit. He had never had a single employee. He was, as he puts it, a French horn player turned social scientist. The idea of running a major Washington institution - managing distinguished scholars, working with Congress and heads of state, raising hundreds of millions of dollars - was not in any version of his imagination. "What are you talking about?" was his response.

Wilson said: just interview. Arthur did. He got the job. He ran the American Enterprise Institute for 11 years. Wilson had believed something about Arthur that Arthur genuinely, completely did not believe about himself. Not encouragement - conviction. The belief of a man who had been right about people his entire career.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Wilson calls about AEI - ~39:42

Twice as Productive. Four Times as Nice.

When Wilson died, his widow Roberta told Arthur that Jim had specifically wanted him to speak at the funeral. Arthur spoke at the Harvard Chapel. He said much of what they had covered in this conversation: that Wilson had the uncanny ability to find the good in others. That to do good is to find good. That he helped Arthur be his best self - not by telling him he was great, but by making it possible for Arthur to serve, because Wilson had first chosen to serve him.

Near the end of the episode, Arthur shared something Wilson once told him about navigating opposition - for times when you're in a hostile environment, when the world is pushing back and the instinct is to get defensive or get small. Wilson said there is a formula that always wins. Arthur asked what it was. He said: "You've got to be twice as productive and four times as nice." Work harder. Be nicer. Don't lower yourself. Rise.

David asked Arthur what single idea he'd leave with a stranger on the street who had never read a book or attended a lecture. Arthur didn't hesitate: "Happiness is not a feeling. Happiness is love. And to love is the will to go to the other, not withstanding your feelings." It's a choice, not a circumstance. You can make it right now. It works every time. That, he said - looking directly at David - is what you're doing with this show and your career.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The funeral, Wilson's formula, and happiness is love - ~45:35

Stories like Arthur's are what we do.

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