Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Today's episode is about the morals, yes, morals and meaning of entrepreneurship, of all kinds, from starting a business to building products to changing one's life. It's based on a quick hallway style conversation, recorded in one of our previous Washington, D.C. road trips with Arthur Brooks,

president of the American Enterprise Institute or AEI, a public policy think tank focused on free

enterprise and more. We briefly touch on topics such as automation, jobs, education, immigration,

and other topics in this episode. But first, we begin by quickly touching on his background

and where he began,

since Arthur will be passing on the baton next summer at AEI

after a decade leading it.

How does one go from being a professional horn player

to going Durand, to getting the PhD in economics,

to getting to the AEI?

I'm sorry, at the university to AEI.

Most people, they're listening to us,

have some weird background.

They've tried a bunch of different things, and that's the New America.

When I was 19, I dropped out of college, you know, dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs.

And I went on the road playing music.

I played chamber music for a long time.

I played a couple of years with a jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird.

I wound up in the Barcelona symphony. When I was in Barcelona, I got completely interested in math, in statistics, in political

science, and especially in economics. And so I started taking a lot of economics classes, and I found

it was kind of like a crystal ball. I could describe so much of behavior. I mean, it's not perfect.

But I found that it was sort of changing the way that I saw the world. And so I mean, it's not perfect. But I found that it was sort of changing the way that I saw the world.

...