Welcome to today's Commonwealth Club
program. I'm Ray Suarez,
the host of KQED's On Shifting Ground and happily author of the forthcoming
We Are Home Becoming American in the 21st Century
from Little Brown. And you'll all be expected
to come back for that. And let's get started. David Brooks is one of the country's
leading sociopolitical writers and commentators for the past 20 years, he's been an op
ed columnist for The New York Times. David also writes for The Atlantic
and appears regularly on the PBS NewsHour. I'd like to share a quote from David
that reflects the issues he addresses in his work. America is fractured and living in a quiet
crisis of disconnection. We've lost our trust in each other
and in our institutions. Divided, we face uncertainty, social turmoil and political gridlock. Yet within every community lies an answer. The book is How to Know a Person
The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and being deeply seen in the Commonwealth
Club did a very crafty thing. They invited someone who knows David, but not really well to do the interview. So it's like the perfect sweet
spot of this book and what it really asks you to think about in the relationships
that you manage in your life. And David, early in the book,
you make kind of a bold claim. I'm hoping this book will help you adopt a different posture
toward other people at once, a sort of modest
and at the same time tall order. Can it do that? Is it is it that kind of handbook? It's meant to be helpful to people. It was helpful to me. And I did All Things Considered together
for a number of years. We did the NewsHour together. We grew up in New York at the same time. So Ray actually does know the old me. I'm totally different now. I'm a much better person. And so in the book,
I start the book by saying, if you've watched that movie
Fiddler on the Roof, you know how warm and huggy
Jewish families can be and are always dancing
and filled with music. I come from the other
kind of Jewish family, and so the phrase in our culture
was British think Yiddish. And so we were stiff upper lip
and kind of emotionally reserved. And there was a moment in my life
until that happened, maybe ten years ago, which symbolizes for me a way of being. And so I'm a big baseball fan and I've been to thousands of games and all that time
I've never caught a foul ball. And so I'm at the game in Baltimore with my youngest son
and a batter loses control the bat. It flies into the stands
and it lands on my feet and I'm carrying a bat is a thousand times
better than getting a ball. And so any normal human being would be like jumping up and down,
holding his trophy in the air, getting on the Jumbotron,
hugging everybody. I put the bat at my feet
and I stared straight ahead. I essentially had the emotional reaction of a turtle. And so that symbolizes me
one way of being. And I say that's inadequate. I wonder if I cut myself off from emotion,
if I cut myself off from intimacy. I've cut myself off from like,
really deep friendships. I've cut myself off
from deep relationships. I've cut myself off from life itself. And so I wrote a whole series of books that were trying of a journey
to become a better person. And I wrote a book
called The Social Animal. I wrote a book about emotion
because intellectual I'm not going to experience emotion,
but I'll write a book about them and then I wrote a book called The Road
to Character about character Formation. And I learned that
writing a book on character doesn't give you a good character. And even reading a book on character
doesn't give you a good character. But buying a book on character
does give you a good chance of that. And then I wrote this book on really
how to really be intimately involved with the people and how to see them,
how to understand the people around you. And it sort of worked, and I can prove it
to you, but I have to do name dropping. So I've been interviewed
by Oprah twice in my life. And after the second interview,
she says to me, David, I've never seen
you change in middle age so much before. You were so emotionally blocked before. And so that was a good moment for me. It shows growth. And I'm hoping at the end
an interview, Ray comes up to me and says, I just want to give you a big hug
and a kiss. We got an hour. We got an hour. We're going to work on this. Well, it may be that
you've just never heard the quite often used phrase in our culture, which is think Puerto Rican or that British. The disadvantage being it doesn't rhyme. the quote I read earlier I think gives us a look at part of your diagnosis. This is a book that's responding to things that you're looking at the landscape
and seeing are wrong with the human condition in this country,
in this culture, in this era,
the nature of our shared malady. I want you to flesh out that diagnosis
a little bit more so people understand why you felt called. And I use that word advisedly
to offer this other way. This other wrote for us.
Yeah. I call this a good word. So I just described the personal reason
to write the book, just like we writers
are working at our stuff in public. And I just want to become a better person,
understand the people around me, and that make them feel respected. But there's also a social and,
frankly, a patriotic reason for the book, and that is over the last 20 or 23 years
or so, something crazy and terrible
has happened to American society. And so if you. Rising depression, rising suicide rate, suicide rates up by a third, up
by 60% for teenage girls. The number of Americans
who say no one knows them well is 54%. The number of Americans involved in a
romantic relationship is down by a third. The statistic that gets me
is that the number of Americans who say they have no close personal friends
has gone up by four fold since 2000. And so this is just a lot of loneliness,
a lot of separation, a lot of heartbreak. And when you leave people
feeling invisible, there's nothing crueler than to not see someone to make them feel
you don't see them. And there's a beautiful passage
in the first page of Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man,
where the nameless narrator says, When people look at me,
they see everything but me. They look around. They see my backgrounds. They see their stereotypes of me,
but they don't see me. And I want to show that I exist. So I want to lash out with my fists. And if you feel invisible,
it feels like an injustice, which it is, and you want to lash out. And so the sadness in
our society of aloneness has led to a crisis of meanness, hate crimes, gun violence, all sorts of our politics. And so I'm surrounded by it. And, you know, we do this together
where I find myself surrounded by just an epidemic of blindness,
of people feeling unseen. And it underscores a lot of the problems
that our democracy it's very hard to build a healthy democracy
on top of a rotting society. And so I figure, what's the most aggressive way
to fight this crisis of disconnection? And to me, it's to give people the skills to know how to build connection,
starting from the first second they meet. You meet someone to just hanging out, having really good conversations,
to asking really good questions, to sitting with someone
who's suffering too, confronting someone across political and racial
and other kinds of divides. And so I just try to walk people
through the phases of here's how you build connection,
and maybe we all do that a little more. Society won't be so sad and mean. But one of the things
that I kept coming back to those statistics
you quoted are heartbreaking, really. But these are all things that we used to think happened organically. You didn't need a book to advise you on how to be friends
with your friends, to have romantic relationships in in middle and later life. Just the idea that we have to somehow be rescued in this speaks to something so horrifying. Scary, really? Yeah. And I confess, I don't completely
understand what's caused all this. I can I can tell you a lot of stories
that I think each have some validity. There's a social media story, which is we don't connect
because we're on our phones all the time. There's a sociology story,
which is we're not as involved in civic organizations as we used to be, so we're not learning relationships
across class and racial differences. I have a weird theory that I can't
I have no evidence for. I think more people used to grow up
in extended families and you had to deal with your crazy and
so-and-so and your crazy uncle so-and-so, and you just learn those skills because you were just surrounded
by a lot of people. There's also an economic story. Economic inequality has widened,
but the one story that I focus on is what you might call
the moral formation story that we used to have a number of morally formative institutions,
whether it was churches, synagogues, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts,
and they taught people moral formation, which is a pompous way of saying
three things. One, how to restrain your natural selfishness to how to find a purpose in life. So you know what your life is all about. And three, how to be considerate toward others
in the concrete circumstances of life. And so these are very concrete
social skills. How to argue well, how to ask for and offer forgiveness,
how to end a conversation gracefully, how to break up with somebody without crushing their heart,
how to host a dinner party so everybody feels included. These are just skills. And for a lot of different reasons,
I find people our age and especially younger
people just don't know it. And, you know, I was talking
to my students the college age. And one of the most troubling statistics
to me is if you ask people to generation to generation ago,
do you trust your neighbors? 60% of Americans said, Yeah,
my neighbors are trustworthy. Now it's 30%
and 19% of millennials and Gen Z. And so the younger you go,
the more distrusting you are. And so I would tell my class, my class is
like, what's going on with you people? And they would point to some of the big things that they've lived through,
which are not great. But one woman came up to me
after class and said, I've had four boyfriends in my life. All four of them ghosted me at the end like they didn't have the consideration
to let you know. I think this isn't working for us.
We need to break up. They just vanished. And so, of course, she thinks the fifth
boyfriend is going to go see her again. And somehow that the inability to have
these social skills to do the basic social things of life. And, you know, we're so old. I bet, you know, we asked people
out on dates in high school and you sort of had to work up your courage
and do the thing and then in my case, crawl
my tail between my legs when she said no. But but there are studies. So in the last couple of weeks
was the number of guys who've never asked anybody out on a date
ever is super high and they wanted to know why. And they lack the skills. They stink at flirting,
they just don't have a clue. And so now, as you say, we have to teach the stuff
that somehow is in the air before there are,
it seems to me, levels, gradations. You know, you talk about being known
and how important that is to people. I grew up I grew up on the other
side of a river from David. And the weird
thing about it is it's not really a river. It's an estuary. But that's for another day. That's true. Yeah. These rivers are river. Wow. They. And life is so on my side of the river. In a dense, polyglot,
crowded neighborhood. One of the most confirming
and terrifying things that people could say to you was when we were kidding around,
when we were being pains in the ass, they could say, I know where you live. Yeah. And suddenly you are an actual person. That's in a context of all this string of relationships or I know your mother. Yeah. And you are not some strange person who comes from nowhere
and knows no one and doesn't belong here. But you are a person with a place
and a name and a string of relationships. The ladies
who would lean out their windows in the apartment
buildings and say that to me. We never talked about being seen and feeling seen, but I did feel known because that was
a different gradation on the I don't know if
whether it's concentric circles or what. That gives you context, too, doesn't it? Yeah. First, I want to clear up any notion
that I grew up in some privileged Manhattan life. I grew up in a place
called Stuyvesant Town, and we had Irish. I got in there because my grandfather
was a lawyer for corrupt city officials who got us an apartment and and and so we had two sets of people. We were the rare Jew, but everyone else
was Irish Catholic or Puerto Rican. Puerto Rican Catholic. So that was the world I knew. Irish Catholic, Puerto Rican. There was one Jew.
It was like the Supreme Court. Now. But we had the same. We were I mean, it
was that sense of being rooted in a social atmosphere
where people were going to know, you was probably not as strong as where
you were growing up, but it was there. And it's a there's a great book I recommend about Chicago neighborhoods
in Chicago, and it's called The Lost City. And so in all the different
ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago, 1950s, and they didn't have TVs, they didn't have
air conditioning back then. So the doors were all open
and kids were running to everybody's houses
and reading each other's refrigerator. And it was tight and it was tight in part because of discrimination,
because if you had a certain ethnic accent,
you couldn't get a job downtown Chicago. And so we as a society became more fair. A lot of the density
of those neighborhoods dispersed because you now had people have greater
movement, greater opportunity. So I would not want to go back to Chicago in the fifties,
but we have definitely lost something. And so I go around the country
traveling around and I ask people, I would say one of the problems
with America is we don't our eight closest neighbors anymore. And in most places I go, people nod. I said that at a dinner with folks from
New Orleans, and they looked at me oddly. They were like,
What are you talking about? We all know our neighbors. And so there are places in this country
where that still exists. And I would say further
there are places where it can be built. And so I have a friend who says, I practice aggressive friendship. I'm the person in the neighborhood
who invites everybody over. And I started this little nonprofit
years ago called Weave the Social Fabric, which was honoring people who do that
sort of thing. And we met a lady in Florida who when we met her,
she was in the process of helping the kids leave the elementary school after school
just across the street. And we asked her, do you have time
to volunteer in your neighborhood? And she said, No,
I have no time to do that. And we said,
Are you getting paid for this? And she says, Now
I just tell the kids across the street. And I said, What are you doing
the rest of the day? And she says, One Thursdays I take food to the hospital so the people
there will have some nice food. We said, Do you have time to volunteer? She says, No, I have no time to volunteer. And to her, this was not volunteering. This is just what neighbors do. And so the norm of
what a neighbor is in the neighborhood, you probably grew up in
was probably different than it is today. And the one norm
that I think is a crucial one. Tell me if this is true
in your neighborhood, was that other adults could discipline you
when your parents weren't there? You bet. That was part of the context in which they would remind me
that they knew my mother. Yes, absolutely. It was not only considered the done thing,
it was considered the necessary thing
to sort of keep order in in crazy, crazy streets. Again and again, you come back to the proposition that,
as you put it, the ability to understand what another person is going
through is an important skill. Again, are there gradations? Do you always have to fully understand
an inhabited or is just the willingness to understand
a good opening gambit on that? Yeah, so I have this dualism, but once a decade
I give myself permission to do a dualism. And so in the book I have this dualism
between Illuminators and the ministers. And the ministers are people
who make you feel small. They're not curious about you, they stereotype
and they ignore you and they diminish. And I've come to I sometimes leave a party
and I think, you know, that whole time nobody asked me a single question. And I've come to believe that only about
30% of humans are question massacres. The rest are nice,
but they're just not curious. They're not question answers. And so that's diminishing behavior. Illuminating behavior
is the ability to really make somebody feel respected,
seen and understood. Like that person
gets a little of my point of view and so one of the I have lots of stories
about Illuminators. One of them
I like telling is about Jennie Jerome, who would later go on to become Winston
Churchill's mom. But when she was a young woman,
she was seated right at night in Victorian England at a dinner, and she was sitting next
to William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, and she left that dinner thinking that Gladstone
was the cleverest person in England. Then a couple of weeks later
she settled on another dinner and she happened to be seated
next to Benjamin Disraeli,
who was Gladstone's great political rival. And she left that dinner thinking
that she was the cleverest person. And so it's good to be Gladstone,
better to be Disraeli. And that's the process of asking people
where they're from. Like asking big questions and making them feel you see the world,
that person sees the world. They know how I see the world. And none of us are as good at this
as we think we are. And so there's this guy
at University of Texas who studies people, and when we meet a stranger,
we accurately understand what that other person is thinking. Only about 20% of the time. And some people are 50%. Very good and some people are not. And the sad statistic that I'm not sure
I believe this from his research is that for some couples, the longer they're married,
the more they misunderstand each other because they form a model of who this
other person is early in the marriage. And then the other person changes
and they have an update of their model. And my experience has been
you're never going to fully understand another human being. Every but every person you meet is a mystery
you'll never get to the bottom of. But even if you show
a little bit of understanding, just a little bit,
it really makes a big impact. And so I had a buddy who he told me his his seven year
old daughter was struggling in school. And the teacher says to her one day, you know, you're really good at thinking
before you speak. And that one comment
turned the whole girl's whole year around because she thought the thing I think is a weakness, my awkwardness
she sees as my strength. And so she just felt seen by her. And when I heard that story, I reminded
I was reminded my 11th grade teacher, English teacher, Mrs. Du Snow, who
once I made some smartass comment in class and she says, David, you're
trying to get by on glibness, Stop it. And the other hand, I
was humiliated in front of the whole class on the other hand,
I said, Wow, she really gets me so honored. And so my point is by it's a living. It's been a living for me. And so I my experience is you don't have to really know somebody
the way Robert Caro knows Lyndon Johnson. You not get that deep. But any bit people,
people are so grateful. But still it demands a kind of openness, openness of the self,
but also openness to others that in the context of your earlier diagnosis can feel risky. Yeah, once you're out of the habit,
once it's no longer that organic thing that it seems like
we used to know how to do. Expecting that empathy is a lot to ask if you're not willing to extend
the same, isn't it? Yeah. And so, you know, first there's
a great quote from Frederick Baker. I can't remember if I put it in the book, which is the thing we want
is to be understood in our soul. Being the thing we fear most
is to be understood in our full being. And so that's in normal times. Now we live in times of brutality
where if you reveal vulnerability, there's a great chance
that somebody will exploit it. And so trust is the ability to my ability
to reveal vulnerability. You and you withhold the
you do not exploit it. That's what trust is. And so but and so people say,
and I'm not going to do that. And so in some cases I wouldn't
counsel you to be vulnerable like Twitter. Don't go on Twitter and be vulnerable. That would be bad. But my argument is
that it's still worth it to lead with trust, to lead with curiosity,
to lead with vulnerability. And some people are going to betray you. But most of the time you will call forth
a version of that person that is better and different than that you would have had
if you'd led with distrust. And most of the time, if you fall on people and trust them,
they will hold you up And then just a joy. And to be a decent human
being is to have that kind of empathy. And I heard a story from this guy,
Rabbi Elliot KUKLA, who had a patient who's who had a brain injury,
and she sometimes fell to the floor and she said, when I fall to the floor, people immediately
want to grab me and pull me up because people are so uncomfortable
with seeing an adult on the floor. And she said, What I really need at
that moment is for somebody to get down on the floor
with me and just sit there. And so to be a decent human being,
you, it's not like not doing
what would make me feel comfortable. It's doing what would make
the other person feel comfortable. So it's getting down on the floor. And I think that's just an ideal
we should all live through, even in hard times. And just finally, I was at a bar late
at night while I was traveling around talking about this book,
and I'm doomscrolling through Twitter. I'm looking at all
these images from the Middle East. It's just one heartless,
horrible thing after another. And I come across a video
that James Baldwin gave an interview and Baldwin says, you know, there's not as much humanity
as one would like, but there's more than you would
think and there's enough. And he says every time you walk down the street and look at people,
just remember that could be you. You could be that person
and that little video. And Baldwin had to face a lot of stuff in his life
because of injustice of this world. But he was still a defiant humanist
even in the face of it all. And so to me,
that's a model to be a defined humanist is to insist on empathy,
to lead with respect. We lead with curiosity, even though you're
going to get blowback some of the time. Well, I would have loved to see what he
would have said about today's snarly time. Yeah, because that's that's the word
I keep coming back to. We talk to each other
with a snarl with that. And as a result,
a lot of people are always on defense. You know, it's hard to achieve
this openness that you're trying to remind us the value of
because everybody's in a defensive crouch. But let me ask you. So we get the same we get a lot of public
reaction to stuff we've done. And so when I first got the Times job,
which is 20 years ago, they used to put the email
on the bottom of the column. And so after six months on the job, I looked at my email folder
and there are 290,000 emails. And the core message
was, Paul Krugman is great, you suck. And that was the core message. And the memo is where
I would like feel obligated to read them. And they were so effectively vicious
they would really hurt me. And but and so I stopped reading them. I made my assistant read them,
and then he got depressed. And so and but I have found that if
somebody writes you, no matter how nasty and you write them back
something respectfully, showing you're a human being at the other end
90% of the time, immediate change of tone. They are utterly disarmed by that act. Yeah, but I always wonder
in the first instance about what it took. Now your email was right
at the bottom of the column. So if it's an impulse buy, in effect,
they can right away dash you off their thoughts,
which can be a problem. But I sometimes used to think this person found out where to write me, a thought about what they wanted to say and said, This is like who would bother? I tried to get inside the head of someone who would actually take the time to be
this mean, you know, and
and that actually helped me deal with it. I think sometimes people would find my heel that didn't get dropped. It dipped in the river
Lethe and they get me. But most of the times I think what a not mean one person. When I was working at the NewsHour,
by the time I was in the middle of my years at the NewsHour,
I'd been in the business for 25, covered stories all over the world and everywhere in the country. And somebody wrote to me that I was
nothing but an affirmative action hire. And that was one of those moments
I thought, How many years? 35, 45. Will I deserve to be in this newsroom
in the eyes of a guy like this? And when I probably realize there is
no number, there is no number of years that will make him see me
as someone who's earned his bones, then I didn't bother so much
that was on him. No longer on me. Yeah. So let me let me ask you another question
about our profession. But I think this
this applies to everybody in this room. So I interviewed
for this book a guy named Dan McAdams, who teaches at Northwestern
and one of the things he does is he studies
how people narrate their life stories. And so he calls people in the office
research subjects and he asks them over 4 hours,
tell me about your high points, your low points, your turning points,
And half the people cry. And then he handsome. At the end of the 4 hours, he hands them
a check to compensate them for their time. And a chunk of those people push back the check and say,
I'm not taking money for this afternoon. This has been
one of the best afternoons of my life. And the point is, I have a quote
in the book from Studs Terkel. Nobody has ever asked them
about their life story. And they need
they love expressing themselves. If anybody in this room
asked people about their life story, who were you in high school
and how was that changed? Like, where'd you grow up
and what was your childhood like? People love to tell you and my experience
and I'll see if it jibes of yours. How often if I respectfully ask
somebody about their life story, how often do they say,
None of your damn business? Zero zero times in my life. People are dying to tell you their story. So at the time time there's this hostility
which is out there. There's also, in my experience,
a longing to connect. And so I try to convert all political conversations
into storytelling conversations. So I don't ask people, What do you believe? I ask people,
How did you come to believe this? And then they're telling me about their
values or somebody who influenced them. And so getting people in story
narrative mode is like a way to diffuse
all that political hostility. One final story in there
as I read about this from a in a book called You're Not Listening
by a woman named, Kate Murphy, and she describes a focus group leader who was hired by grocery stores to try to understand why people go
to the grocery store late at night. And she could have asked the focus group
why they go to the grocery store late at night. Instead,
she said, Tell me about the last time you went to the
grocery store after 11 p.m. and there's woman in the focus group,
and she hadn't spoken the whole time. And she said, Well, I smoked a joint and I needed a manager
trois with me, Ben and Jerry. And and so that was a story, an insight into her life, like a little story there. And so is your experience like mine
that when you give them a chance to tell their life story, they will. They're delighted to do that. Well, my my next book consists of talking to people
about how they came to this country and the beautiful, revelatory, sometimes shocking stories
they tell and the number of times they say, you know,
nobody ever talks to me about this. You know,
we're all, you know, mind blowing. Yeah. People become them them selves fully when you ask them
to explain themselves in a non-adversarial, receptive, soaking it all in kind of way. And you can tell
because the energy gins up as they're getting to this part
and you're going to like this. And now, you know, you can see them
amping up as they are getting to the parts that still,
even after years, delight them, surprise
them, excite them to tell another person. So, yeah, I mean,
one of the great gifts of being a reporter is getting to experience that at all. And never mind to do it hundreds
and hundreds of times over and over again. It's great. Yeah, and anybody can do that. I mean, what another person I met writing
this book is named Nick Epley, who's a social psychologist
at the University of Chicago. And he knows
because he's a social psychologist, that people more than anything else
love to connect. That's the thing that produces happiness
and joy. And so he's running this commuter
train up to Chicago to work. And he looks around the computer
car, the commuter car, and there's nobody talking to each other. They're all on their screens
with their earbuds in. And so he's a social psychologist. So he next several months, he pays people to talk to strangers
on the commuter train. And then he interviews them
after they get off. And they all say
this was a fantastic ride. This was more fun than anything I have my normal commute, and this is true
of introverts and extroverts. And so we underestimate the
how much people want to talk. We underestimate how fun it will be. We underestimate
how people want to go deep. And so one of the ways writing
this book has changed my life is I still will occasionally put in headphones
when I'm tired or really want to work. There's a trick when I feel taught me
that you don't have to listen to music. Just put in the headphones and and but. But now I talk to people on planes
and trains a lot more. I wouldn't do it on New York subway. There are limits, but. But. But like,
I flew two days ago from Miami to L.A., and I met a guy who used to be a rock star
and emo band. Then he was in the cast of Spider-Man
on Broadway, and then he was he got into tech
and now he was an interior designer. He comes out of the plane
carrying all this stuff and it like he'd gotten from the Salvation
Army store in Key West, Florida. He had a boat in his life that he was
going to put in a pub somewhere. And it was a great conversation. If it not been for this book, I would have just had some tattooed
hipster sitting next to me. But instead I write
It's I'll remember that I don't know whatever book I was reading,
but way better to talk to strangers. Earlier
on in the conversation, you referred to Transformation Change a journey in your own life, and people
who think I know you better than I do, which say to me, Hey, you know, David Brooks,
what's going on with David Brooks? And I'd say, I don't know. But it's interesting, isn't it? Because because of the life you lead,
it happens in public, which also makes it more complicated. I would think. Yeah, it's it's America. My wife is somewhere in the room, I think
somewhere so she can we'll pull her up. She can tell this story. I, I found like I decided at some point it's
going to be in public. And frankly, I wrote a book called
The Second Mountain came out four years ago, and it was going to be
about how to make big commitments in life. And I wasn't in the first draft. There was no autobiography amendment. My readers
said, No, you have to be in this book. And so I described what had been a hard season in my life and the various ways that had changed me. And, you know,
I went through just a hard time with the loss of a marriage
and lots of kids. And I mean, my kids didn't
I wouldn't lose them. They went away to college, but and so I came across a saying from Paul Tillich that moments of suffering interrupt your life and remind you that you're not the person
you thought you were, that they carved through what you thought was the floor
of the basement of your soul. And they revealed a cavity below
in the car through that floor,
and they reveal a cavity below. So you just see into the depths
of yourself you didn't know. And when you see those depths,
you realize only spiritual and emotional food will fill those debts. And so I had to go on a journey to
figure out how do you fill those depths? And a lot of it was messy
and a lot of it happened because. I read a column out in public
or in the book, and it was a process
and it's still a process, But I decided that maybe just because I'm material, but I also thought for the good of readers
that I was going to do this in public. I was not going to hide from this. And the advantage
that I hoped would arise out of it was that it would, you know, show that,
you know, you can you can be open and vulnerable about the
things you're going through in this life and people will hold you and you will come out the other side
and you will have deeper friendships. And I will say when that book came out
four years ago, most of my books, the readership reflects
the audience of books, which is 60% women, 40% guys. With that book, I would be on a signing
line and I'd look down the line. I'd see nine guys
and a woman, eight guys and a woman. And there were a lot of guys. I realized in that time
I could become a second career as a CEO whisperer because there were a lot of guys
who had nobody to talk to, and they would say, Hey,
can we have a phone relationship? I want I have some things I want. I'm trying to work through. And because I had been open
and vulnerable, then they felt permission to like,
be open and vulnerable with me. And so I think it's
particularly true of guys in this case that the willingness
to like, be who you are in public. I think that it was a it was like, yeah,
we can all do that. And so you're right. It was that I would get that from people,
What the heck are you going through? Because it's ugly. But, but it was part of the process
of becoming a little more fully human. Well, along with reading you periodically, I read about and I got to tell you,
I saw some crazy stuff in the pages of newspapers
and magazines in my crazy stuff. I mean, not not that David was crazy, but that these articles seemed intrusive, speculative, odd. I couldn't imagine them a
I couldn't imagine them being written about somebody else. And I also said, Man, I hope I never have
an article like this written about me. Does it go with the territory that you open yourself
for this kind of punishment when you decide
you're going to show yourself? I think so. And in this time, in this climate,
when I first got my job at The Times, Gail Collins, who was the editorial page
editor at that point who hired me, said, You think you have a lot of friends
in media, You're about to learn. You don't have many friends in media because frankly, being a Times
columnist is the kind of puts you in a posture
that people want to take shots at. And so I my skin had thickened in the first six months of that job
and so it was what it is. That doesn't mean it's pleasant
to have those articles written about you, but at the end of the day,
you know they're not true and it makes you sympathize for like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, like whoever
these really public figures are who have mountains of nonsense
written about them, which most of which
is completely speculative, untrue. And I've had the chance
to interview these guys. And so when you do real reporting,
you get a sense of what's actually going on in there
in the White House or in their lives. And then when you read some of the stuff that's written,
you think it's just pure imagination and sometimes I look at whenever I really
know, have direct knowledge of somebody, and then I read about that person
in the media. I think to myself, sometimes we just stink because we are not telling the truth
about what that person is going through. And so in my own experience,
which is like 1/1000 of their experience, it helps, it hurt. It was traumatic to like have bad things
written about you, but at the end of the day,
I knew it was not true and and if the root fact is,
for every one nasty piece, I had many lots and lots of people saying
supportive things and being nice to and and buying my books and reading the stuff
and watching the NewsHour. And so it was
it was more or less easy to marginalize the haters as Taylor and I would say Taylor Swift as a reference. But writing about the balance of payments with China or the price of energy is, at the end of the day,
a lot easier than writing about yourself because we know the steps
to that dance and. There is a way to do it
that meets people's expectations and doesn't get you in that kind of trouble,
doesn't get you intrusive, speculative meanness in, you know. Yeah, but what what's the problem
in our society, With all due respect to the people at the APEC
summit over here in San Francisco, it's probably not the balance of payments
in China. That's a real problem in our society. The real problem in our society
is the lack of connection. The real problem in our society
is estrangement from each other. It's the depersonalization
of life in general. And so if I'm going to write about what
I think is the real problem in our society, it's
very hard to write about personal ism in a way that's impersonal. And so I was more or less dragged into it, into writing to the extent
I mean, the book's the last. The Second Mountain had way
more personal stuff than this does. But I was I had to show how I was living through the crisis
the country was going through. And so I was not writing about it
from some abstract, detached foreign
correspondent perspective. I was saying,
we're going through this crisis of of disconnection where we just don't know
how to deal with each other well. And I happen to be
a guy who grew up in this, as I described earlier,
a relatively aloof manner. And so I was like, I was a perfect I was like everybody else. And I often say that my whole career
is based on the fact that I'm a pretty average guy
with above average communication skills. And so if I'm going through some is
probable that lots of people in America are going through it. And sure enough, when you look
at the statistics around the country and you meet people, what you just said
earlier, nobody's ever asked me a story. And so I want to go through life
a little more as an illuminator. And so, you know, there's a and some of these illumination
stories are very mundane, like the guy,
the girl whose teacher told her that she thought before she spoke. But when you see the apex of life, the most beautiful things in life, there are moments of deep seeing. And so there's this book
I read about a year or two ago by Lost and found by a woman
named Catherine Schultz, and she had this dead guy named Isaac
who had survived the Holocaust. And he sounds like the wonderful guy
who was like voluble, warm, friendly, great dad, had opinions about everything
about the infield fly rule in baseball, whether apple cobbler
is better than apple crisp. And so it just sounds like
a wonderful guy. And then toward the end of his life, he he just starts talking and nobody could. So he just stopped talking. And so on the final night of his life,
he's in a hospice or hotel room or hospital room,
and the family is around him and they all decide they're going to say the things
they don't want to leave unsaid. And so they go around the room and each say what he meant to them. And Catherine Schultz,
who writes this book, says, I seldom saw my father cry, but For once. I was glad I did. And he was weeping
as they were talking to him because he knew at that second
and maybe for the most important and the final time of his life,
he knew where he stood in his family, the center of the circle,
the source and object of our abiding love. And so that is just a guy who died beautifully scene. And so that is what humanity is at its most beautiful and so to try to describe that strikes me and try to hold it up for us all to see strikes me as a worthwhile thing to do
because it gives us something to shoot for a way of being in the world that's
to shoot for, to aim for and to aspire to. And that's the kind of thing
I needed to read. And I hope that that's the kind of story
that a lot of people say, Yeah, I resonate with that. I would like to be like that,
or I have had experiences like that and that's the profoundest essence
of being human. And so it seemed like a fitting subject
to be writing about, even if it does involve like writing
sometimes in a moralistic way. Is there a terrible paradox between this lack of communication, this loneliness, this nation, strangers increasingly, and the belief on the part of many people that they've got
you all figured out? And by you I mean the big you. Yeah. I can't tell you how many times
people have said, Well, you are. And they list a set of attributes. And I think, well,
no, that's nothing like me, but they think they've sized me up
because of one or two data points. And they
then they built a whole me around me and I think, well, no, but there's this sort of brusk, confident assertion that these people walk through life with. That's almost is a barrier to that knowing and real seeing
that you describe for us in the book. Yeah. And so that's called stacking. When you learn one fact about a person,
then you make a whole series of assumptions based on that one fact. NPR know about NPR. I know all those NPR people. They're a bunch of crunchy granola people. That's fair, I guess. I know now, if you or you're a Trump supporter. I know you must be a private pickup truck.
You do this, you hunt. Yeah. You know, and I heard about a lady
who was at a Trump rally, and if I can remember this correctly,
she was a lesbian biker who converted to Sufi Islam
after surviving a plane crash. So, like as one does. Yeah, like what stereotype
is she fitting into here? And so the book,
the subtitle of the book is Seeing others deeply and being deeply seen. But if I want to be more accurate, it would have been hearing others deeply
and being deeply heard. Because in getting to know somebody,
you have to ask them questions. And so you start out with a, you know, simple questions that won't be too invasive, like,
I'll start with where did you grow up? Because I travel a lot,
so I've probably been there. Or how did you get your name? And you learn about people's heritage
and stuff like that. Once I asked a group of people, tell me about your favorite
unimportant thing about yourself. And so in the conversation I learned that
this theologian who I really admire, watches an enormous amount of trashy TV. and so that was interesting
to learn that about him. And it came from that question. And then when you get to know somebody,
you can ask some bigger questions. If this five years is a chapter
in your life, what's the chapter about? And then you get to talking. I was at a dinner
with a political scientist who was 80, and he said, I probably got
one last project in my life. What should it be? That was just a big question. And so we talked about his interests. We talked about dying,
We talked about how to handle old age. And the conversation went on
for like 2 hours because he threw in a big conversation
topic on the conversation. And, you know, one of the top topics
I like is how do your ancestors show up in your life? Because we've all been influenced
by our heritage. And so if you ask people,
then they think, Well, I've got 5000 years of Jewish history
or I've got centuries of African-American history in my background,
and it's caused me to be like this. And it's a fun conversation. And it's those moments of taking
what could be an average conversation and turning it into a memorable
conversation that is just important. And then the final thing
I've been thinking about this last couple of days
is the power of small moments. Just as a cash register
at the supermarket. I'm Really. I've been reflecting like I'm
now in airports, so I buy coffee at the airport or something like that,
and how much it really influences me. If the person hustling to at Starbucks
smiles at me and looks at me or doesn't and it seems like this trivial thing
and it probably matters a little, I hope to him or her
whether I smile and look. But even those
little moments of interaction can be surprisingly powerful
in affecting your mood. And so being warm and open in those in those just those little greetings has a weird power I found,
but I don't know how to explain that yet. The power of Minor Moments. We have some terrific questions
from the audience. How has reality-TV affected relationships
in the 21st century? But why don't you broaden it out to media
in a in a in a broader sense? Certainly we can kick off from reality. Unlike my theologian friend,
I don't watch a lot of reality TV, but from what I
see, some of it is horrible, horrific self-absorbed, performative, and I guess I'd say, how has media hurt relationships? I do think it has made will A
we spend less time with each other? I definitely think it's
her conversational skills. And so and I think it's caused a lot of younger people
to give up on marriage. And I often tell my students they're basically disillusioned with it. I tell my students, you know,
your career will make you somewhat happy. But the thing that will really
that's social science shows is four times
more powerful in determining your life. Happiness is not your career. It's going to be your marriage
and your intimate friendships, whether you're married or not, or whether
you have an intimate set of friends. So while you're here in school, you should really be spending
a lot of time thinking, How do I build a solid core
of intimate friendships and how do I build a great marriage? And some of that is just basic skills. I ran into a blog of a woman who's like,
How to keep your marriage healthy? And I like some of the
advice she gave. It was like a sometimes
you they tell you never go to bed mad, sometimes just go to bed. you wake up in the morning,
you'll feel better and you can make waffles
and it'll all it'll be better. Another is boast about your spouse
and have them overhear you boasting. Another was if you're going to
about your spouse, to his mom and not to yours because. Because his mom will forgive him. Yours never will. So and I think the basic
so I guess the sexist way to say this is old wives wisdom. I think now that it's become
as performative it's people may not have that kind of wisdom that you were probably
existing in your neighborhood. And the other thing that's happened
is that especially in the dating relationship,
there's just too much choice. There's thousands and thousands of choices
you can swipe on. And I think it damages the ability
to really connect with one or two people. And I will be
I think I describe this book. I'll sit at a bar killing some time and
you would call it sad guy drinking alone. I call it reporting. And and so in New York or Washington,
because the tables are close together, you overhear
all the conversations around you. And there will be commonly guy out
on a first date with a woman. He's blathering on minute
after minute after minute. She's looking at the sky,
hoping she'll spontaneously combust. So she can get out of the state. And I want to take my fork
and ram it into his neck and say, just ask a question once. Just ask her a question. And he no clue. He's like. And so I in all those ways, I'm glad I'm not in this world of dating online
these days. I keep hearing that
the center of the country feels ignored
by the elite intellectuals on the coasts. How can we show them differently
that they matter, that we care? who cares? Well, you can say that. You can say that to this crowd. You know, the world needs
to pay more attention to Palo Alto. That's my room. Yeah. I will say, you know, in
reporting trips of these years to the Midwest, I used to hear the phrase,
You guys think we're flyover country? Maybe once a day now I hear it
nine, ten times a day. And so that sense that you don't see us
is real. And I here I'll do a little media criticism,
which I rarely do. And so when I started my career, as
briefly as the police report in Chicago, some of the other older
reporters had never been to college and they were high school, working class
guys and reporting was, in those days, a bit of a working class profession. And by the fast forward 20 years,
and it's not only that you can't get a job without a college degree, you pretty much
have to have an elite college degree and graduate education
or graduate education. And, you know, when I look around
The New York Times newsroom, Harvard, Crimson, Yale, Daily News,
Harvard, Crimson, you know, Daily News. And I was at a little conversational group
in D.C. about three months ago,
and there were eight of us and we were all talking
and not had the seven of the eight. I went to public school, high school,
but I went to a private elementary school. The seven or eight
had all gone to prep schools. And so I'm like,
Are we really sorting this early? And I you know, I remember once
my first year teaching at Yale, I asked my students
write their political opinions. And so they described invariably described
their high school political opinions. And the first ten papers,
like five that they were schools from Brierley Collegiate, Dalton,
these New York prep schools. And I'm like, this is diversity at Yale. We got some Upper East Side kids,
we got some Upper West Side kids. And and so the sorting of our meritocracy starts super early. And then I'm reading a very good book
by a guy named Paul Tufts right now on the meritocracy. And he says, well, how do firms,
especially the consulting finance firms, how do they hire? Well, if you didn't go to the big three,
Harvard, Yale and Princeton, you're out of luck. And it's not only
that you've got to have played lacrosse. You've got to play at
one of these people sports. And so and so basically, all these jobs, they ask
all these interview questions, They where did you go to school
The really the only thing they're really measuring for is
how much do your parents make? Because these three big schools and all the top 25 schools
basically have more or many of them have more kids from the top
1% of earners than the bottom 60%. And so there's massively sorting. So the rich kids go into these places
and then the financial companies massively support. So the rich kids of the rich kids
go to these countries and it's basically they're sorting for
who had the wealth to be prepared in a certain way
and to fit in in a certain way. And it's the opposite of what we thought
the meritocracy was going to be. Some observers and writers have called it
hoarding opportunity. And I think it's a really apt phrase
because before we even test out in the arena
who's got it and who doesn't, there's been a certain capture
of the good stuff, the goodies. I believe
the transformation in your life grew out of your spiritual transformation
and marriage to your wife. Could you comment on this again? We should bring it down here. But yeah,
then those things happened together. I, I'd grown up in a Jewish
home going to Christian schools, and so I had the Jewish story in my head
and I had the Christian story in my head. And so I say
I was raised religiously bisexual, but it, it didn't matter
because I didn't believe in God. So I didn't, I didn't it was just nice
to have these two stories in my head and with respect
for these two different traditions. And then I think gradually, my conception of the world was inadequate to the world
as I experienced it, which is to say that the world, my conception world
was as a material thing with atoms. And I became more aware that the universe is not neutral, that there is
a force of love in the world. And if anybody knows New York,
you know, one of the ugliest spot in this place of New York
is is Penn Station. And the first ugliest spot is
the subway station next to Penn Station. And I was there
one day about ten years ago, and I have this sense that
all the people in this station have souls, that they have some piece of themselves
that is of of of with no size, weight or shape fit
as of infinite value and dignity. And all around me,
there are souls that are soaring or some souls that are sick,
some that are yearning. But this is
these are just not material atoms. These are souls. And then for me, it was a journey from believing that humans have souls to believing
there's a God who gave them their souls. and to which we will return. and, And that's when Jesus walked into the subway
car and said, Come, follow me. No, that did not happen. But I was on a journey and I learned when you're on a journey, people give you books. And so I got about 700 books
over the course of a couple of months, 350 of which were mere Christianity
by C.S. Lewis. And so it was just like
I was entering a new world, and I had no clue what world
I was entering in. And I knew this Christian woman. So I started emailing. I like, what's what's Grace? And like, how do I earn grace? She's like, No,
it doesn't really work that way. And so we have these emails
and I learn about it and suddenly, without any dramatic moment,
it was like writing a I try to describe is riding on a train and I'm sitting in a
train and everyone is sort of around reading the newspaper, sipping coffee,
and you look out the window and you realize you've crossed a boundary and you've left land of atheism
and you're into the land of belief. And so it was no more dramatic than that. And then I'd figure out
what kind of belief. And, and all that. And so I ran into Saint Augustine. I ran, I read, and not physically
I read about him, I read about Dorothy Day. I read the book called A Severe Mercy
by Sheldon Van Ronk. And I read a lot of C.S. Lewis. and that sort of gave substance to what I was yearning for
in spiritually experiencing. And so I thought the Christian world was
you read C.S. Lewis, you read a guy named Tim Keller,
who was a pastor in New York who died earlier this year. And you enter this world of Saint
Augustine and Dorothy Day. And I told a friend
who's out here in the Bay Area that when I enter the Christian world, this is what I thought
the Christian world was. And he says to me, you thought it was all the shire, You thought it was only the hobbits. But there's
a big Christian world out there and unfortunately I my joke is becoming
Christian in 2013 is like investing in the stock market in 1929. because Christian nationalism
has now swept over large parts of the world
that I didn't know anything about. And, and so I'm, that's,
that's a short version of the journey. and it's, it's still ongoing,
and it's had its moments of joyous, spiritual connection
with God long periods of absence of God. And one of the things that helped me
was this guy I've quoted before tonight was a guy named Frederick Buechner,
and he was a writer, a novelist who became a Christian in the mid life
or at some point in his life. And he says, You wake up in the morning
and ask yourself, Can I believe that all over again? And then he says, and then read The New York Times
and ask yourself, Can I believe all that again
in the existence of a God? And he says, If your answer is ten,
ten days out of ten is yes, I believe it,
then you don't experience belief. As I understand it, your answer
five days out of ten should be. I don't really believe it today. But he says, when you on those days,
when you answer yes, you should answer with joy
and great laughter. And so Bergner gave me permission
to live with him, my doubts and to still persist. Sometimes this habit of seeing of others and taking the time is easier for those 70 years old. For one thing, there's less to lose. Can the elderly teach the young? And how? That's a very good question. And I think in general we get out of our own way
as we get older. And the studies,
if you want to do it scientific terms, people become more agreeable. The personality trait of agreeableness and agreeableness is just being kind. I think people become
a little kinder on average. They're still our cranky old men,
I'm sure. But, you know, I was my wife and I got to teach a course
in Chicago this spring for people between age 50 and 70 and had to think
about the last third of your life. Not that we know the answer to that, but hopefully we'll have some thoughts. And so I've been interviewing
people who take courses, it looks similar to this of how to think
about the last third of their life. And one of the the first course
that really prominent course that taught this was here at
Stanford and I met a woman, I interviewed a woman who went, who attended that course called the
just the Distinguished Careers Institute, and her name is and Kenner and,
and had been a federal prosecutor, first in New York
and then in San Francisco. And she took this course and she decided, I'm going to do things in the last third of my life
that are that I know completely nothing about. and so she started now she's a playwright and she wrote a play about Anne Boleyn,
Henry Henry the Wives. And it was being read. Don't tell me how it ends. So they live happily ever after. and she, you know, she updated the story, and but so she it was being read
by a San Francisco theater company, and she tells me I'm 65. It can fail. Who gives a crap? And so, that's liberation is I think, part of wisdom. The second thing that I learned from
people who've been that through that class,
I have this efficiency clock in my head. And so if I'm going through a gas station,
I'm I'm going to pump my texel gas. I think to myself, I've got 90 seconds
here. I can get two emails done. That's horrible. That's horrible
for getting to know someone. But the final and so a lot of the people who have over 70
have gotten through that rush, rush, rush. But the final thing I learned,
interviewing people in these classes, so people come to Stanford or they come to Chicago or Notre Dame,
wherever they spend a year on campus, and they take some courses, mostly
with people like themselves in their age group, and to have 30 new friends at age
65 is an awesome experience for them. But then as equally awesome is they take a lot of classes
spread throughout the university and so they're taking classes
with 20 year olds and the friendships that develop between a
65 year old or seven year old and a 20 year old are,
as they describe it, amazing friendships. And there's there's just something
about that cross-generational colonization
that is just super powerful. And I think the kids,
we all need grandparents. And if you can have a grandparent
who is not related to you, but it's like a wise older person
just can sit with you and talk without being pompous,
then it's just a powerful relationship. And one of the things we need to I'm
I know a guy named Mark Freedman who who works on these relationships. He takes money, money from AmeriCorps,
which is young people volunteering and senior corps,
which is older people volunteering. And he merges the budgets
and he merges the two populations. And it's just a tremendously powerful thing
that our society does not do enough, if not a question. But thank you so much for your column
about your best friend's mental health struggles and suicide. It was your best column ever,
and I urge you to seek it out and in a chapter
in the book, it's in the book. And let's end kind of where we would begin when first meeting someone
you haven't met before. What's the best question to ask them? Well, first, when you meet someone
you haven't met before, the most important thing to do
is look at them with generous eyes, because it's that the first gaze
is going to tell them, I value you. You're a priority me
if you're a person to me. And so those those assertions are made by your eyes
before any words come out of your mouth. And Iris Murdoch, who's a hero of mine,
was a philosopher, a novelist. She she said our goal should be to cast a just
and loving attention on others. That attention is fundamentally
the more or less. And so it's what we attend to
and the way we attend to the world's determines
our way of being in the world. So if you look at the world
with critical eyes, you will find flaws. And if you look at the world
with fearful eyes, you'll see danger. But if you look at the world with generous eyes,
you'll see people doing the best they can. And so it's that the verb,
the emotional connection with the eye is the most important thing. And then as for getting to know someone, like I said before,
I'm not shy about asking about childhoods. I'm not shy about asking about names. I want their family,
their ethnic heritage. And then another thing you can do
is find out what they're proud of. And people love to talk
about what they're proud of. So if a guy's wearing a shirt
with his kids, travel soccer team, ask about the team. And it's and so what you're doing in those
first moments of conversation, every conversation exists on levels
is what we're putatively talking about. And then there's the undercurrent of emotion that's flowing
between us as we're speaking. And so in those first moments, just demonstrate curiosity and respect. And there's a great book
called Crucial Conversations, and the authors write in any conversation,
respect is like air when it's present. Nobody thinks about it. When it's absent,
it's all anybody can think about. And so if I'm showing you the respect of curiosity,
it almost doesn't what I ask you. You'll feel, this person is curious
about me and I'm a person of this person. And then it'll flow. And I have friends in DC who say we like
our friends to be linger rebel. We like them to be
the kind of good company you just want to hang around
with after dinner. And so that that's a beautiful way
of being in the world. And so it, it's people, people are lonely and loneliness is such a paradox
because nobody wants to be lonely. And when there's a crowd of lonely people,
you think we'll just get together. But I think there's nervousness. People are afraid
and people just don't know how to do it. And so my little piece of
this is the social skills. Here's how you do it. David Brooks, the author of How to Know a Person
the Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, Please thank David Brooks. If you would like to support the club's efforts
in making virtual and in-person programing possible, please visit
the website at Commonwealth Club dot org. I'm Ray Suarez. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks. It's
