David Brooks at 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay Wow so how many people here are from the Washington area how many from outside of Washington how many have never been to the Book Festival four how many have been to all 19 of them Wow okay well we're gonna have a very interesting conversation today with one of the country's leading I'd say intellectuals and columnist and TV commentators and authors his new book is the second mountain how many people have read this book yet okay how many people gonna read it after this is over okay all right how many people are gonna get an autographed copy from David Brooks today okay so David thanks for doing this so let's go before we go into this book the second mountain which I've read and I think it's a very good book we'll go through it I'd like to go through a little bit about your background so you grew up in New York I grew up in the Lower East Side of New York my parents were somewhat left-wing and so the story I tell about my childhood is when I was five they took me this was in the late 60s to a be in where hippies would go just to be and one of the things they did was they threw there they said the garbage can on fire and they threw their wallets into it to demonstrate how little they cared about money and material things and I was five and I saw a five dollar bill on fire in the garbage can so I broke from the crowd reaching the fire grabbed the money and ran away and that was my first step over to the right and then the other significant event in my childhood was at age 8 I read a book called Paddington the bear and decided at that moment I want to become a writer and I've been writing pretty much every day since and it's been the center of my life in high school I wanted to date a woman named Bernice and she didn't want to date me she one date some other guy and I remember thinking what is she thinking I write way better than that guy and so that was my value system so what did your parents do were they other than being hippies or yeah they were say there were 1950s progressives but my father was teaching at NYU and he was a scholar of Victorian literature and my mother was a scholar of Victorian history there was sort of a Jewish tradition so the way you've assimilated to America is you became really Anglo philic the the phrase was thinking Ishaq British and so what the Jews did was they gave all their kids names super English names like Norman Irving Milton Sidney thinking no one would ever think they were Jewish but within five years they were Jewish names so it didn't work okay so your last name was is that a Jewish name Brooks Brooks was changed from during World War one because my original name was Probst which sounded too German okay so you did well in high school I presume wrong I I got a I was a I was a b-minus student I graduate in the lower half of my high school class how'd you get in the univers Chicago in those days the Chicago admitted 70 percent of applicants and I got in Chicago I went to Chicago because the admissions officers at Columbia Wesleyan Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago you didn't get in okay I didn't get it alright so you get the universe Chicago and what did you want to study I really want to study political theory and Chicago is in retrospect Chicago was really the turning point for me because the great culture of that place the best thing about Chicago is it's a Baptist school or atheist professors teach Jewish students st. Thomas Aquinas and so I took the common core so I wrote 16 papers on Thucydides I probably were 20 on Hobbes and we had in those days still the professors that were refugees from Germany and they when they taught you these books they taught you as if they were so the keys to the kingdom that you were gonna discover how to live if you studied these books well and read them seriously there's a saying if you burned with enthusiasm people will come from miles to watch you burn and these professors had that enthusiasm and so they really introduced us to the great moral ecologies they took that taught us it takes reading really seriously and then they taught us how to see which seeing seems obvious but if you live in Washington year-round politics you know seeing the world most of us see the world in a distorted way and there's a quote from John Ruskin there he says the older I get the more important the more I think the most essential thing in life is to see something and say what you saw clearly in a short passage millions can talk for those who can think and millions can think for one who can see and there's just some authors like Tolstoy Orwell or CS Lewis who just see the world clearly and I think they discipline us to try to do that how did you do with the universe Chicago I did better there there's a certain point where you learn to work like I learned to work so how did you decide what your career was gonna be did you know you wanted to be a writer when you graduated yeah I do I wanna become a writer and I sort of knew I want to be a popular writer I didn't want to be an academic because I'm not good at abstract thinking so you didn't want to go into Investment Banking or private equity higher calling is then writing that is a higher calling but I I would have had to been able to do addition and multiplication as I understand right so you when you were an undergraduate you met William F Buckley how did that change your life so I was a school columnist for the school paper and Buckley came to campus and I wrote a vicious parody of him for being a name-dropping blowhard it was like while at Yale Buckley formed two magazines one called the National Buckley one called the Buckley review which he merged to form the Buckley Buckley and so was it like a bunch of jokes about that and he came to campus and he gave it speech the student body and at the end of it he said David Brooks if you're in the audience I want to give you a job and that was the big break of my life sadly he gave me a job he said I want to give you a job and sadly I was not in the audience so I I was literally out I had been hired by PBS to interview to debate Milton Friedman on on national TV and you can go on YouTube and if you type in in YouTube David Brooks Milton Friedman you'll see a 21 year old got me with big jew-fro and these gigantic 1980s glasses that were apparently on loan from the Mount Palomar lunar Observatory and basically the show is I was then a socialist I argue a point that I'd regurgitate it from some textbook he destroys it in about six words and then the camera lingers on my faces I try to think of something to say but that was a joke all right so what did you do when you graduated I worked as a bartender for a year that's job I ever had and then I covered Chicago politics for something called the Sydney News Bureau and the Chicago Journal so that was Harold Washington the first black mayor of Chicago just come in and he was in what they called the council wars with a guy named Eddie Byrd olia hey then did you get a job with Buckley eventually so I covered poverty on the south and west side and I thought I was seeing a lot of bad social policy that had the unintended consequences of making poverty worse and that maybe a little more conservative so I called Buckley up and said is it job still there and he said yes so I said in New York so you moved to New York and you worked for the National Review yeah and it was a total shock you forget how Buckley was he led a lifestyle that was unimaginable like you you're a kid covering crime in Chicago and then suddenly Ernest pietà tear on Park Avenue and they put a finger bowl in front of you and you have like why is the supercell watery I mean it's like so but you had you been a conservative and how did you give him the night by that time I remember being happy when fetcher won but mostly at Chicago they assigned me a book called the reflections on the revolution in France by Edmund Burke and at the time I hated it I loathed that book and here was a guy I want to have a revolution I wanted to create new ideas for myself and here was a guy says distrust your reason so but Burke's conservatism is based on epistemological modesty epistemology is what we can know and modesty is modesty its though the world is a really complicated place be careful how you think you can change it do it gradually incrementally and as Burke says as if you were operating on your own father okay and so when I saw in Chicago was social change done badly and seemed to confirm in me what Burke was saying and so I wasn't a conservative the way National Review was but I was suddenly not as well sometimes when you get close to people you idle as you see their faults did you see any faults in William F Buckley or did you still idolize him I have immense admiration for him I mean we were talking backstage about his son Chris Buckley wrote a book and it showed some of the dark side of his father which was there the a D D is his father couldn't sit still when Christopher graduated from Yale at the commencement so he left and so Christopher had to have lunch after his own commencement alone and that side of Buckley I saw the he couldn't spilled it slow down eats he simply could not slow down on the other hand he asked me questions about everything he took me to Bach concerts he took me Godding he was a surrogate father for 18 months and what I saw is was his awesome capacity for friendship one of his biographers estimated that he wrote more letters than anybody else in the 20th century and the other American because constantly staying in touch with his friends and endeared to his friends and the great thing is the conversations at his home were almost never about politics they were about ideas and literature he was not primarily a political creature how long did you stay at the National Review I did that for 18 months and I said 18 months that was short it seemed long at the time okay and what did you do next then I came down here and I began one of two stints of movie critics first for the Washington Times then for The Wall Street Journal have any background and being a movie critic I had died because my social life was so rich in college I went to the movies every night and so I had seen a lot of movies and I will say the being a movie critic was fun first in those days I got to meet Katharine Hepburn Kirk Douglas Burt Lancaster I had the best interview of my life with Jackie Gleason I flew down to Florida and I was sitting in hotel room and his wife walks in and plays The Tonight Show music and instead that that that and then Jackie Gleason walks in and goes like this and it's just me and him in a room lion so he tells me just one hilarious story after another though the one I remember is he's telling me he's out drinking with Joe DiMaggio at 2:00 chores this bar in New York and he bets DiMaggio a thousand bucks that he can race him around the block and beat him for those who are younger than 40 DiMaggio was a profession athlete jackie gleason weighed approximately 2,000 pounds and so they take off and they run around and as DiMaggio's turning the corner he sees Gleason huffing and puffing up to the front door they can't believe Gleason beat him so Gleason says okay double enough that hurts the odds I'm gonna beat you twice they take off they run around they turn and once again Gleason is huffing and puffing up to the front door so we owe them 2,000 bucks and then about half an hour later they're back in the bar DiMaggio says you know we raced around the block we never crossed on the bottom side and so Gleason had hired a car to drive around the block okay so alright so your movie Curtiss criticisms were well-received or not I think well enough I will say being a movie critic ruin firmament permanently my love of the movies okay because you know it a notebook the 20 or self in the screen and you know can't get lost in the movie anymore and then when you meet that people are making the movies you realize how many financial decisions are going into each scene and all you see is through the mind of the producer so what did you do next well by then I was at The Wall Street Journal and I was I became a foreign correspondent so they sent me in the early 90s to cover they tell me this is the part of the world you're gonna cover from Iceland to Vladivostok from Scotland to Cape Town and so but in those days I covered nothing but good things I covered the fall Soviet Union best story I recovered I covered the independence of Ukraine the Berlin reunification German reunification mendelian coming out of prison in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the Middle East it was all good news of ends you ever go to Greenland or no I know but I but I put in a bid for it but I snip dates now were you skip how are you if gates so okay so you did that for a while you're a foreign policy expert then what did you do next well I I should say I'm remind that I had the best interview of my life in Russia if you recall that there was a coup against the Yeltsin regime and he stood up on a tank in front of the White Russian parliament building and I ran into a ninety some odd year old woman handing out sandwiches the democracy protesters and she had grown up in the Czar's household her first husband had been killed in the civil war after the Revolution her second husband and boys were killed in the Battle of Stalingrad her third husband was sent away to the gulag and disappeared she was a comic people in the 50s and was sent away with her people by Khrushchev and then she ended her life handing out sandwiches in front of the Russian parliament building and so she had personally experienced every single event of Soviet history and it was one of those burning moments where you see history right in front of him so what happened next so I came home and I saw that American culture had changed I grew up in I went to high school in place called Wayne Pennsylvania and when I left it was a waspy town where people were green pants and duct ties and when I came back it had the first Anthropology the store anthropology like I never thought a store named after an academic discipline would come to Wayne Pennsylvania and so a new culture had come into being which became the subject of my first book Bobo's in paradise alright so when did you write that that came out in 2000 and the theme of that book was well Bobo's are people who are half which want half bohemian there are people with sixties values and 90s money and so basically I came home I looked at the New York Times wedding page what they called the mergers and acquisitions page it was like Stanford marrying Yale Goldman marrying McKinsey I was thinking you know they you couldn't have a summa laude a Magnum couple loud because the tensions would be too great in that marriage and so I'd seen the meritocracy come into being but they wanted to prove they were not money hungry so they had a code of consumption to prove that they were still authentic progressives and so for example one of the code was you can spend money on it as much money as you want on any room formerly used by the servants so the kitchens you could spend a lot of money on kitchens and so you had these nuclear reactors these August stoves started shoving up these nubby fabrics you had a whole code that I basically made fun of so when did you begin writing for the New York Times so I went to work at the Weekly Standard where our job was to make the Republican Party moderate and reasonable and that worked and how many years were your doing that I I was at the standard for nine years where I really began to figure out what I actually thought and then around 2003 I got a call from Gail Collins who was editing the editorial page and I sort of knew she was gonna ask me to write a column so I took the train up and all the way I was on the way up I said no no no because my best length is three thousand five thousand words 850 words are not my best length and so she and Arthur Sulzberger asked the question and before I was gonna say no I said has anybody ever said no to the question do you want to become a New York Times columnist and they said no no one's ever said no to this and I had a failure of courage and I said yes okay all right so you what year was that that you began 2003 our 2003 and so yeah you've been writing how off 15 years and how many columns and you write I write two a week so that's a hundred a year and it's a lot that they're saying my chief joke about being a conservative columnist of The Times is it's like being the chief rabbi at Mecca not a lot of company there so how long does it take you to write a column it can be two and a half hours and it can be twenty hours you know the length of time I spend working on it has an inverse correlation how good the column is but do you ever get writer's block and just call him up and say I just don't have anything today no that's not allowed that is something way it works like this your famous joke is probably write something that's 820 words you need 30 more to you where do you get the extra 30 you always have to fill up exactly 850 I throw in some village about character and you know so were you surprised at the readership that you produced with those columns how many people now read them and I assume you're pretty well-known as a result of those columns I don't know well I will say it the joke columnist tell about their job is it's it's like being married to a nymphomaniac it seems good for the first two weeks but then you got to keep producing and but I I actually the first month six months on the job were the hardest professional you ever actually spend time with the other columnist for people in the New York Times or you just write in my home and send them in weirdly we we're always on the road so I'm here in the DC bureau and the two other columnist here three other now are Maureen Dowd Tom Friedman and David Leonhart and we're just on the road so much that we I'd like them all we would go along we just we just don't see but you ever have trouble coming up an idea for a column or you always have plenty of those I have desperate trouble so I like I used to think like it's just sheer desperation I used to think well if I got hit by a bus and I lived I could get a column out of that and so that my only desire is now is four column ideas so like I remember I remember fantasizing about winning the lottery but it was not the money it was oh I could get a column out of that and so it's the thing uppermost on my mind of all that when did the PBS series start when Newshour the NewsHour started in 2001 okay and with so how frequently do you do that that's every Friday and with Mark shields who's most mark shields of men Jim Lehrer two of the most wonderful men I know but every Friday you have to show up in Washington you can't be anywhere else in Washington all right and so it does pin me down because I'm here every Friday we want to call it if the segment is called shields and Brooks we wanted to call it Brooke Shields that would have been better but I didn't go for that and the one are my great observation about the NewsHour it's something I'm intensely proud to be a part of but we have a certain demographic who is our core demographic which we call seasoned youth and so if a 98 year old lady comes up to me in the airport I know what she's gonna say I don't watch your show but my mother loves it so you're supposed to be the conservative on that and is that a fair column characterization that's I'm supposed to be but frankly over the years I it's been a struggle do I still call myself a conservative and I think now I just call myself as a moderate I have not left Edmund Burke but the way the political worlds have shifted I it's more accurate to say I'm a moderate and a someone who's politically homey now that you're well-known for your TV show and also the column to your high school friends call you up and now say you know I really knew you were going to be successful or people calling you who didn't call you before I dated a lot of people's sisters and in all cases these were women who would have had nothing to do with me but I would say no I my core childhood experience was I went to the same summer camp for 15 years from and so that was my childhood and I have relatively few friends from high schools but I have about sixty friends from this camp and they treat me Jewish maybe the same as they always as a Jewish day camp in somewhere well it was called Church of the Incarnation so it was unlikely to be a Jewish camp okay so let's talk about your second book what was your second book that was called on Paradise Drive and that was a post 9-11 book an attempt to write a book capturing the spirit of America and how it showed out in everyday life and in the middle of that book I saw a quote from Jacques barson that said every book is possible to write except the book about the spirit of America and I was like damn he's right but basically I was I wanted I went out to the exurbs for people who live in the DC area I spent a lot of time in Germantown or in Springfield or in Loudoun County and I I thought this these were the fast-growing places at that time and I wanted to show how the spirit of America of energy and movement and bigness and excess and really a utopian longing for some paradise right was behind a lot of the moves and so I wrote about big-box malls and you know the okay and you know they they would all have the suburban themed restaurants on the highway that which if they merge would be called Chili's Olive Garden or Hard Rock Outback Cantina all these restaurants and I was sort of obsessed with this part of America that nobody else is writing about so some of your columnist in New York Times Co columnist they take time off to write a book do you take time off to write a book or how do you do that I've done that twice and both times I've learned and Gail Collins probably this it did not accelerate the writing of the book but it made you spend a lot more time with your garden and anything other than writing so how long does it take you to write a book I'm on a four-year cycle I'm doing other stuff but books to me are that's more or less the core of what I am proud of and it takes forever to structure both my books are always somewhat personal somewhat public and to get that structure it takes me forever to do it to figure out what the book is about and the other thing is you get these complex book structures and then after four years you get down to the simple structure and you think why didn't I get a simple structure first but it takes you four years to get to the simplicity on the other side of complexity right your third book was social animal yeah and what was that about nominally a book about neuroscience but it was really a book about emotion and me trying to understand emotion because it's not something I'm I always say Washington is the most emotionally avoidant city on the face of the earth and I might have been the most emotionally avoidant person in that city my friends joke that me writing a book about emotion was like Gandhi writing a book about gluttony but is what the neuroscience was showing a great scientist named Antonio Damasio had patients who had lesions in their brains and they could not actually experience emotion and so you would think they would be super-smart mr. Spock's but in fact they couldn't function in life because emotion is not the opposite of reason emotion is the valuing device that tells us what we want it's the foundation of reason and so people who are emotionally intelligent are also intellectually intelligent the two go together and so DiMaggio's book is called descartes sara Descartes thought reason and emotion were separate but in fact they're not and so I really wanted to write about how we educate the emotions through art and literature and how we refine our emotional life through relationship with one another in the course of writing that book and this is years ago now Taylor Swift was on 60 minutes and she was asked you read a lot of sad songs and she said well actually there are 23 different kinds of sadness as your husband dumped or your boyfriend dumps you sadness and she plays a tune there's you lose your dog sadness a different tune your mom's matter you say and it's different tune and to be aware of 23 different kinds of sadness or 25 different kinds of joy is just a better way to live and a better way it gives you the capacity to see others deeply and know what's going on in their own emotional lives and so that book was an attempt to write myself into some capacity for that and you wrote a fourth book before you wrote this one that was a road to character what was that about well what I learned from that book was that books a friend of mine had said this but I didn't appreciated a magazine article can be about many things books have to be about one thing that people immediately can grasp and so I had a throwaway passage in that book saying there are two sets of virtues there's the resume virtues which is the things that make us good at our job and then there's the eulogy virtues the things they say about us after we're dead where there were a courageous honest honorable capable of great love and we spent a lot of time preparing people the resume virtues but we all know the eulogy virtues are more so how do you develop those so it was really and so that one phrase resume eulogy virtues sort of carried the book and we can I think it's apt into a sense that I think a lot of people share that our culture is over politicized and over professionalized and under moralized that we render ourselves morally inarticulate but I are not really talking about how do we become better people and that book was sort of watching ten people ten of my heroes how they became how they went from being sort of human disasters at age 20 to really magnificent people by age so when you write a book do you write it in longhand redo it in computer or how do you do that so I have a really bad memory so I usually have these notebooks in my pocket I've got one right here now anyway paper I've always writing my ideas and then I see rocks out a lot of stuff and so as I research a book I'll have collected thousands of pages of notes and what I do is I can only get them straight geographically so I put create piles on the floor with the notes in the write pile and when I read a column it's only 850 words but there'll be 14 piles on the floor because a pile is a paragraph and I pick up the pile write the paragraph throughout the notes pick up the next pile and so writing to me is not sitting at a keyboard tapping it's crawling around on the floor of my living room organizing my piles oh but you actually you do write on a computer well I tell my students by the time you sit and put it on the computer your paper should be 80% done because writing is about traffic management about structure and organization and if you don't get the structure right it won't flow and so getting that structure right and then the process of organizing the files is the process of creativity spark start coming some people who are writers they like to say I'll write a certain amount of day if I get that done I do something else do you do that way or do you write until you get tired not as crazy as some writers like trollop is a very depressing writer to read about because he wrote 250 words every 15 minutes 2500 words every day and if you finish the novel before his 2,500 words he just started another and that's just what machine like and but I I do have to write everyday like my wife thought when we got married that we would have these nice breakfast conversations but I cannot talk to other people until I've written my eight hundred or thousand words so I we all have our routines have two routines I really like I think was Toni Morrison she had a hotel room in her or a hotel room in her town where she kept a typewriter a desk brandy and a Bible and she went there every day did her thing Cheever John Cheever had an apartment in New York and he would get up put on his only suit and tie ride the elevator down to the basement of his building where he had an office he would take off a suit in the tie he was right in his boxers until 12:30 then he put on the suit and tie ride back up and make himself lunch and so the rule is the more creative the endeavor the more discipline the work structure has to be hey let's talk about your fifth book the second mountain so presumably there's a first mountain what's the first mountain the narrative device in this book is we get out of college and we we think we want to establish identity we want to establish a career we want to play the game of the meritocracy and so we we start launch off and sometimes we succeed and find that unsatisfying sometimes we fail sometimes a bad thing happens that wasn't part of the original plan a cancer scare or the loss of a child or something terrible and suddenly you're in the valley and when you're in the valley you realize that the desires of the ego which propelled you up the first mountain were pretty unsatisfying and then you're ready for a bigger larger life which is not about building up the ego but descending into yourself into your heart and soul and then you're not acquiring you're contributing and it's really a shift from one consciousness which is from the consciousness our culture requires to a countercultural you were racing up the first mountain for a part of your life and you would say yeah and I achieved so far beyond my dreams that I never it was crazy but I remember I think four of my books have been bestsellers and each time I get the call I'm surprised by how flat it is it's a nothing and I I'm the poster child for career success doesn't make you happy and so there there were part of the meritocracy that tells us lies the first lie is the career success that makes you happy the second says lie is that you can make yourself happy if you just get better it's you know yoga or you know a little thinner but when you talk people and then end of their lives it's not the time they were self-sufficient that they were happy it's the time they were utterly unselfish and completely dependent upon others another lie the meritocracy is that you can life is an individual journey we give our kids these books oh the places you'll go there's dr. Seuss book and it's about a kid graduating school all alone going on a path to success no friends no family and I ran to a sociologist who said she gives this kit this book to her kids who are immigrants here and they hate the book because it doesn't reflect life as they know it which was studied with relationships and then another lie of our culture is and this is really a pernicious lie if you really want to screw up your society is that people who've achieved more are some house worth a little more than everybody else and we pretend we don't tell this lie but we really do in the webinar actions okay so you the second mountain is the concern about community and other kinds of things like that it's more a fault like I tell it in my own way in my own life so around 2013 my life sort of crashed in on myself not the column but my kids will had left home or we're leaving home my marriage had ended I had most of my friendships in the conservative movement and I wasn't a conservative anymore so I lost a lot of that and so all of a sudden I'm living in an apartment on Wisconsin Avenue in Newark Street and I'm all alone and I had weekday friends I'd guys I could when women I could take to lunch and talk politics but I didn't have weekend friends and my weekends were these vast expanses of silence where I would go and runs and I go on the best shape of my life but the way the symbol of that period for me is in my kitchen I wasn't entertaining nobody was coming over when you opened the drawer where there should have been my kitchen where there should have been fork since silverware there was just post-it notes because I was working all the time and where there should there in plates it was just stationary and like any idiot I try to evolve avoid an emotional and spiritual crisis by working through it and work all ism is a very effective distraction from any deep problem but eventually it crashes and so I went through this period where you the pain crashes you into yourself and the Paul Tillich has a line is that in 1950s theologian the line he says suffering is an interruption of life and reminds you you're not the person you thought you were it forces you to crash through the floor of what you thought was the basement of your soul and it reveals the cavity below that and it carves through that and reveals the cavity below that and so in those moments of suffering we see deeper into ourselves than we ever thought imaginable and we realize that only spiritual and emotional food can fill those places so the difference between the first and second mountain it's not just selfishness versus community it's having one of those experiences that causes you to crash into yourself and to come deeply into contact with your soul and I say this I'm not a religious writer either I don't care if you believe in God or not believe in God but I do ask you to believe that you have a soul that there's some piece of you that has no shape size color or weight but gives you infinite value and dignity and that rich people don't more of this than poor people old more than young our soul is where our equality comes from we don't have equal brain power we don't have equal muscle power but the level of souls is is equals and infinite and and so so what this soul does is it it yearns for goodness we all want to lead good lives so you're in this period of time and how did you get to the second Mountain what did you do that got you up the second Mountain well I learned a few things first thing I learned is that freedom sucks I had total freedom I had the income of a 52 year old and the open options of a 22 year old and all my married friends were projecting their fantasies onto me he's got swinging yeah great and I learnt freedom sucks and then the second thing I learned is you can't solve your problem on the same level of consciousness at which you created it which is an Einstein teaching and then the third thing I learned was that you can't pull yourself out of the valley somebody has to reach down and pull you out and so I got a very lucky invitation in 2015 to go over to a house of a couple named Cathy and David who live in Crestwood up 17th Street and I was accepting all invitations at this point and so I walk in the door and Cathy and David had a kid in the DC Public Schools and that kid had a friend who had his mom at health and issues and stuff and so James this kid often didn't know a place to eat or stay and so they simple things can stay with us and then James had a friend and that kid had a friend that kid had a friend and so by the time I go to dinner they're at 2015 they have 40 kids around the dinner table and 15 sleeping around the house and so I walk in the door I reach out to shake a kid's hand and he says we really don't shake hands here we just hug here and so I for every Thursday night I've since then I've been with those kids I'm not the Huggies guy in the face of the earth but they've taught me how to do it and so what the kids give us is emotional transparency and they demand it from us and they turn and look at you like they're flowers looking to the Sun for love and I took my daughter there and she came out and she said that's the warmest place I've ever been I took a guy named Bill Milliken who started communities in schools and he's been doing a youth work for 50 years he said I've been doing youth work for 50 years I've never seen a program turnaround a life only relationships turnaround lives and so that's what's happening here and so I'm writing about social isolation and all the fragmentation and hatred on the national level in a Thursday night at dinner I'm seeing the solution and so it was it was through that but that was there were several experiences but one of those experiences was suddenly an outward assistance on how to behave and live better right so part of this one you got married again I got married again which is another good thing yeah and that was I that it having a happy marriage is like winning lottery times a thousand and okay so today you would say you're happier than you've ever been I've had it I mean raising my kids that were a happy period but I am I am blissfully blissfully happy now in your book you write about a new religious experience you had you were born in one religion now you're sort of in another religion or what what is sort of it's complicate the stupid joke I made once now that I have to live with forever is that I'm religiously bisexual but I grew up Jewish and I went to a Bar Mitzvah for most of my adult life kept kosher and I experienced the kind of Jewish holiness and Jewish holiness is not in my line is that every church service I go to is more spiritual than every synagogue service I go to but every Friday night Shabbat meal is more spiritual than every church service I go to at the meal and Shabbat when the family is gathered and the blessings are said it's like there there's a feeling of hesed loving-kindness and it's like 18 people around the table and 18 people are listening to 17 other conversations they're all talking at once and correcting the 17 other wrong things that have just been said and that's sort of the Jewish goodness and but then I I grew up I went to the school in New York called Grace Church school in Episcopal School and I went to this camp in Carnation and there I saw another kind of goodness which was there was a guy there for example in West woman Horst who he had agape he had selfless love he was like a man child a holy child who just radiated joy he spoke in whistles and always always interrupting himself and laughing and he did he saw horrible things in his life he became an Episcopal priest and worked in Honduras and then with women suffering from domestic violence and Annapolis and yet he radiated a sort of holy joy that I that was unaccountable to me Dorothy Day has aligned that Christians should act in a way that doesn't make sense unless God exists and West was like that so I saw these two different kinds of goodness which were inspiring to me but it wasn't a problem cuz I didn't believe in God anyway so it was just like two things but then over the course of a number of years as a friend of mine says reality overflew the categories I had to understand it you have certain moments of transcendence you have certain moments as I described earlier where you you're become aware of other people's souls and if you're a journalist you're writing stories about people it can't just be about a bag of genetic material the only reason we would work hard at journalism is if other people have souls that have some infinite consequence and from there it was just the most boring you know I started reading religious stuff if you start going on a religious journey people send you books so I got about 750 books in the course of three or four months only 400 of which were mere Christianity by CS Lewis different and then so I'm sitting in my apartment and Jesus somehow transmogrifies through the wall no I'm kidding that did not happen I just became aware that I was a person of faith all right so you're now are both religions well my Jewish friends say no that's not allowed and so but I feel more Jewish than I ever did because now when I read Isaiah or Exodus I think the Covenant is real it's not just a wisdom story so I feel more Jewish than ever and yet the Sermon on the Mount is to me a glimpse at a sort of celestial beauty that lingers and I can't on read Matthew okay so why should somebody now that they've seen what you've written about and heard what you've written about why should they buy this book what's a good reason to buy the book now that they've heard about it should they will they learn a lot more by buying this book than you just heard it's it's a really good status item now well the book is partly about the first second Adam but the the second mountain is a life of commitment and so there's it's hurt as a class it's actually the book started I was single and I was dating so it was first gonna be called the marriage decision how do you decide who to marry so I spend a lot of time thinking about that and then I was teaching and I figured my college students were gonna make four big commitments over the course of the next 20 years of their lives most of them to a spouse and family to a community to a vocation into a philosophy and faith and in my view the second mountain life is the life where you make maximal commitments to those things you don't just have a career you have a vocation you don't just have a contract marriage where you're trying to be happy you have a covenant Allah marriage where you try to surrender yourself to your spouse's joy and so I tried to describe and I do describe in the book what it looks like to live a life of maximal commitments we live in a hyper individualistic society and we're not going back to the 19th fifties but we can join our society together by making promises to each other and then trying to stay faithful to the promises and a lot of it is just the practical nuts and bolts of how do you choose a vocation how do you choose a marriage partner how do you choose a community that's it in other words you'll live a happier life if you buy this book is that what you're saying actually that's right Swee I was I was teaching a kid a wonderful kid who was became a Rhodes Scholar a really smart kid and he took my course and at the end of it he said you know professor Brookes your class has made me a lot sadder and I was like that's a win so you it's better to be a sad spiritual person than a happy Achieva Tron yeah now recently you've taken on new project the Aspen Institute what is that yeah it's called weave the social fabric project and it starts with I was writing these columns and these are a little symbol here on on social isolation fragmentation suicide this was in 30% since 1999 teenage suicide has risen 70% since 2012 we're just seeing rise of distrust and that seems to me the underlying problem behind a lot of problems but it's a problem it's a problem that's being solved at the local level by people we call weavers who are building community and so we thought we'd go out learn from their example and try to nationalize their effect and so I do this now every week I go around somewhere in the country and I meet people who are really living for relationships not for self and building communities and a lot of them are second Mountain lives there's a woman I met a while ago in New Orleans called Lisa Fitzpatrick she was healthcare executive she was driving one day and she saw two kids 10 and 11 and they looked terrified and they had something their hands and they held it up and it was a gun and they shot her in the face and it was a they had to do a gang initiation killing to get into this gang and so she recovers from this and she realizes I wasn't the victim here I was collateral damage those two little boys were the victims because they had to kill somebody I have a family and so she now devotes herself to gang work in New Orleans and Schwartz for the city and so a lot of our Weaver's have had something negative happened in their life and they try to fix what happened to us so you were doing this at the aspen weekly you're writing two columns a week you're on PBS Friday nights you're writing one book a year and you're teaching at Yale and you're married and your three kids so you have any free time for anything I actually this is a sad element of my life people ask me what's my hobby right and I say well you say well I oh I'm always going out to dinner now with my friends or my kids but now I'm trying to take up tennis I want to have a hobby because some pleasure in your life so you spend a lot of time on television talking about politics and when you were writing your column and you are writing and still you were fairly critical of I think it was candidate Trump maybe it's President Trump I can't remember you were critical maybe both so what is your view on the likelihood of President Trump will get reelected I I am I have actually a cheerier view than a lot of my Democratic friends I think the guys at 40 percent and he's offended 60 percent I mean I take it stupidly that's not good and so I I'm more I'm more optimistic that he will lose than a lot of the Democrats I hang around with but is when you write any critical articles of him you ever hear from him does he ever call you and say yeah I don't like that article or no he's the tweet about me but I've never had any contact with I'm very happy not to I really don't want to be the same room with a guy okay and so what is your view on the likelihood the Democrats will retain control the house or get control of the Senate as I say well I'm I do you think the Democrats you know when we see that what I think is a pretty big advantage for the Democrats of course knowing the party of the main question is I wonder how they're gonna find a way to screw this up and and so I you know I if I were advising the Democrats which I'm sure his advice they'd love to get I would say just go with the bland like the number one job is to get Trump out of office and your view is the likely Democratic nominee is going to be who if I had I was my earlier answer that question was Kamala Harris I think she has she is a force of a force and if you're thinking about who can stand up to Trump I think she has personal character force a forcefulness to her that I thought would be a good match I'm now looking at the race and I'm thinking it could well be Elizabeth Warren and I must say I've I don't know where well uh but I've spent some time with her and I've never got the likability charge I find her very warm I mean I like law professors granted but but I've and if you looked at what she's done over the last three or four months she steadily climbed up the ranks and she's now got a higher favorability rating than any other Democrat and she's taking 45,000 selfies so that's like retail politics and so I I'm sort of I'm very you know when you when you're covering a campaign like this if you're like a scout scouting a baseball pitcher who's got good stuff and I would say in substance I don't agree with it but just as a candidate I think she's a strong candidate I have to say I've known Biden for a long time and I I love that I think he's a very lovely very lovely man but you don't think he will get the nomination or you know I mean I'm very impressed by his strength his strength I thought it made fade but there's a he has a real strength of support and so those are the three that I think are most like okay and so as you look back on what you've done with your life today how old are you now I turn 58 a couple days ago all right well that's a teenager to me up to 58 years old so at 58 what would you say you're most proud of that you have achieved I mean anybody is gonna say your kids well once you get past that well I I think um what I would I wrote a book on humility so I should talk about how great I am I would say it's continually being on the move and trying to continually learn more I just wrote a book about a book coming out next week by General Jim mattis called chaos and chaos and he's a guy he just keeps going to learn more to be a better marine and he did that to his whole life he's got a great quote germane to this festival where he says if you haven't read hundreds of books you're illiterate because your own private experience is not enough to get you through life and did your parents live to see your success at professional success yeah my father still live my mom died about two and a half years ago and they when my mom died I lost my toughest critic I would send her my book manuscripts and she would she she was like this is garbage on the top of the page thing she my mom was blunt and direct so I missed her for editing this book but my emotional stability is little and and your father's see my father is still alive and doing great and he's right now up in the Botanical Gardens of Bronx in New York and the home your children are they are writers as well no they go their own way my daughter walked into a hockey rink at age five and suddenly fell at home there like I mentioned these that I discovered I want to become a writer at seven I called these the Annunciation moments the moments early in life a prefigure a lot of what's gonna happen and so she walked into a hockey rink up in Rockville and felt at home and she now teaches hockey for the Anaheim Ducks out in California and she re in life and your other children what do they do I youngest is a college student at the new school 200 feet from where I went to elementary school and my oldest was a boy grew up here and then went to college and then served in the Israeli army for nearly three years and now he's back he decided he liked protecting people so he's going to go into law enforcement so the message that you would like to leave all these people with today is what what was the main message you like to convey to people not just about your book but about life what was the message that you would like to convey to this audience yeah the one distinction I found useful and it's in the book is the district's green happiness and joy and that happiness is about self expansion it's we feel happy when we taste a good meal when we win a promotion when our team wins the Super Bowl when we feel bigger joy is when you erase the self when you're involved in some moment so delicious that your sense of your own self fades away and so for example I'll do tell two stories then first as me I'm driving home from the news hour when my kids were little and I driving a home in Bethesda and so I'd pull him to the side a house and I seen in the backyard and my kids were then like twelve nine and four we're playing a little ball and they were kicking up in there and racing across the yard to get it and they were falling all over each other and they were tickling each other and giggling and laughing it was just a scene a perfect family happiness and it was summer Sun coming through the trees for some reason my lawn looked perfect and it was one of those moments where reality just spills outside his boundaries and I just stared at after the through the windshield and just was enveloped by joy that was better than anything I felt at work and which I knew I could never have deserved and we were parents have all had that and there are moments where you just are your overawed by the way the universe has blessed you and that's joy you're not thinking about yourself at all you've dissolved and another I have a friend named Chris Wyman is a poet who teaches with me at Yale and he when you talk about Chris about his early life he's often in different cities because there's a woman there so like what you live in Buffalo there was a woman there and so he was living in Prague because there was a woman there and [Music] he was writing his poetry on the from the kitchen table and a falcon landed on the windowsill and he was turned to it the Falcon was scanning the street and he was just struck by the beauty of the bird and he calls to his girlfriend is taking a shower and he says to her come here come here you got to see this so she runs out of the shower she's standing there dripping wet and they're just looking at this bird and the Falcon turns its head and locks eyes with Wyman and when Wyman says he looked into those birds eyes it was like he felt something crumble inside like looking at the centuries it was like those experiences we feel in nature where we are just lost in it and his girlfriend was note knew the power of the moment and she said make a wish and he wrote a poem about it later and one of the stanzas is and I wish and I wish and I wished and I wished that the moment would not end and just like that'd vanished but those are these elusive moments of joy that we experience and it's not about the self and it's not about the ego it's about surrender and then there are some people we meet I meet them with some regularity who is where joy is not a moment it's just an outlook they just radiate joy all the time I work through weave with yo-yo ma that guy just radiates joy all the time every human being it's like he's this is the first human being he's ever met oh my god these creatures are amazing it's like and here I was at a panel or a luncheon at a think tank and I sat next to the Dalai Lama and that guy just rate I mean he didn't say anything very profound which was a disappointment to me but he just laughed all the time and just radiated a joy that comes from decades of spirit you said in your book that he laughed and you didn't know why but you were laughing just to make him feel good wanted to be polite and but so those that orientation if you point toward happiness that's good I'm all for happiness but if you point toward joy you'll be heading in the right direction I want to thank you for a very interesting and emotional conversation I hope I'm sorry this moment has to end but thank you David and I assume you're signing books somewhere all right thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 5,838

Rating: 4.6226416 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress, #NatBookFest, National Book Festival

Id: t4gNvAtL00U

Length: 62min 29sec (3749 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019