The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg · The Dispatch

Finding Meaning in the Matrix | Interview: Arthur Brooks

April 8, 2026·1 hr 10 min·5 clips

Arthur Brooks claims we're living in 'The Matrix,' a simulation that shuts down the part of your brain that finds meaning.

Jonah starts with a note from the past. Recorded around Christmas and saved for later, the conversation brings Arthur Brooks back as an old friend and former boss at the American Enterprise Institute, with a new spring book on the way. The argument is anti-simulation, but not in a cranky way. Brooks treats the matrix less as a gadget problem than a human one, because technology can copy the shape of relationships while still leaving people unknown. He is not scolding dating apps. That concession matters: he says some apps are getting better when they create spaces where people can actually meet in real life. Then the claim gets harder. People can simulate relationships, Brooks argues, but they cannot simulate the meaning of life because they cannot simulate love. College becomes his test case. He ties the old college experience to big questions, the opened right hemisphere, and the ordinary drama of falling in love. The comparison is bleak. Brooks says the likelihood of being in love in your twenties is a third lower than when he was young in the 1980s. Friendship has thinned too. More people now say no one knows them well, and Brooks gives the dry answer that largely virtual friends literally do not know them well. In the excerpt, he carries the point through a long philosophical turn. Romantic love is the deepest example. Brooks calls it mysterious and reaches back to Socrates, Plato, Diotima, and the ladder of love to frame attraction as an early stage in finding meaning. The target is not convenience. The target is a life where simulation replaces presence, and the simulated version of connection quietly pushes out the real thing. The warning is grave without getting hysterical: meaning depends on embodied love, friendship, and being known, which are exactly what simulation cannot finally give.

As heard by us

A reflective culture conversation about technology, loneliness, and why simulated connection cannot substitute for real love.

Jonah Goldberg's conversation with Arthur Brooks takes a familiar worry about life online and pushes it toward a larger argument about meaning.

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Why you'd press play

If the matrix is dulling real love and friendship, this is the conversation to hear.

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