David Brooks Interview: How To Live A Meaningful Life

thank you thank you david so talk about what you mean when you describe the american social fabric my favorite definition of the american social fabric comes from jane jacobs she was living in the west village in new york and she was she had a second floor apartment and she looked down onto the street this is in the early 60s and she saw a dad pulling on the arm of a nine-year-old girl and she didn't know if it was a kidnapping or just a father disciplining his child and so she thought i should go down there and and check this out and as she was about to go down she looks out the on her street and she sees that a butcher has come out of the butcher shop and noticed the commotion the guy the owner of the fruit stand has come out the locksmith has come out so she writes that guy didn't realize it but he was surrounded and so the social fabric is eyes on the street it's people looking out for each other and just sort of extending care when it's needed danger love it's just the network of care and seeing each other and talk about how the american social fabric has been ripped apart yeah so we used to live in a society where we were deeply planted and deeply connected to get through the depression world war ii americans had to adopt a culture we're all in this together so it was very collective very communal if you grew up in chicago in the 1950s you didn't say i'm from chicago you said i'm from 59th and pulaski because your block was the place you were and you knew everybody on the block there was no tv there was no air conditioning so in the summertime the kids were running through the homes and that was had really rich community we rebelled against that culture because it was too anti-semitic too racist too sexist too conformist too boring the food was really bad and so in the 60s we adopted a much more i'm free to be myself i want to get rid of restraint and have an individual life where i can live the way i want to live and that was the right move but we've sort of overdone over the last 60 years and so we've got to a place where we're too different from each other we're too distant from each other we're too buffered from each other and so you get the rise of loneliness you get the rise of alienation you have a 30 rise in suicide a 70 rise in teenage suicide over the last eight or nine years you get to a society where we are alone alienated bitter and divided and not really seeing each other very well you you briefly mentioned the close communities in the 50s can can we go into that a little detail of so if you grew up in the 50s in chicago you didn't say i'm from chicago you said i'm from 59th and pulaski because your neighborhood and the immediate 4 5 or ten block area was your home and your base and if you grew up there and you were a guy you probably went to work at the nabisco plant where your dad worked and your grandfather worked you probably joined the union where your dad was a member and your grandfather was a member you probably went to the parochial school where you were terrified of father o'shaughnessy or whatever it was and so your life was bounded by that neighborhood you didn't have mobility but you had deep roots and deep connections and in the summertime there was no air conditioning and the tvs really hadn't penetrated very far everybody hung outside they had coffee clutches they had volleyball games you had to work really hard to be alone and they did not have a conception of privacy the way we do today in my neighborhood right now if i knocked on somebody's door at 8 30 at night it would be like the grossest violation of privacy but in chicago and in lots of american society communities in the 1950s that's what they did they knocked in each other's door and they just hung out and so it was a densely connected communities with limitations and with some conformity and a lot of social pressure but they had rich relationships with one with another then the downsides there was racism anti-semitism women were trapped you've just talked about the ying i talk about so the great fear in the 50s that a lot of writers wrote about was conformity a soul-crushing conformity people felt they were living out their social roles but they were dead inside and that was particularly true for women betty friedan talked about the anxiety that has no name where women were trapped in the home and felt their their great purpose in life was unfulfilled and they were just bored out of their minds basically and so you had a culture that had tight boundaries but was intolerant of racial difference was intolerant a much lifestyle difference was intolerant of women exploring their full potential and so it was a culture with great deal of boundaries holding people down and finally people said enough and we're just going to have a rebellion and we had the 1960s individual new loneliness came out can you talk about that yeah so we had a cultural revolution in the 1960s and to me it's symbolized by one of the great events of my childhood which was super bowl three and in super bowl three on one side of the team was baltimore colts and there was a quarterback named johnny unitas who was a classic 1950s guy crew cut kind of boring just did his job like a plumber completely unflashy an organization man on the other side of the field for the new york jets there was a quarterback named joe namath who grew up just miles from where johnny united grew up but 10 years younger and he had an entirely different culture he was flamboyant long hair swinger partying all night before the games joe namath wrote a memoir called i can't wait until tomorrow because i get better looking every day and johnny united would not have written that memoir so in these two individuals you see how the culture shifted in the 50s it was cool to be old by the 60s it was cool to be young in the 50s it was cool to be institutional by the 60s it was cool to be a rebel and so you see a whole shift in values from one thing people admired in the 50s to another thing people admired in the 60s and people growing up in the 60s 70s and 80s had very different attitudes toward authority very different attitudes about their personal space very different attitudes about freedom i want absence of restraint i want to do what i want to do i want to do what myself wants to do and that was great in some ways it created a very creative culture we could not have had silicon valley without that rebel ethos and the love of disruption but we took it to an extreme and so we got to a place where we were too separate from each other but but talk about how a culture changes yeah a culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy them so in the 1960s for example a small group of people founded communes they went to woodstock they lived in washington square park with long hair and free love and rock music and everybody else said yeah that's pretty cool and so more and more people began to copy them and then they started singing songs about rebellion i'm a rambling man i'm born to run i'm free bird and through that music really through rock music a whole different culture and a different way of picturing your life and imagining your life seeped slowly into the culture first with a small group of beatniks then with hippies and then with college students on campus and eventually throughout the whole culture so why do americans have less faith in the nation's institutions if you go back to the 50s and you ask people do you trust the institutions of your society 70 or 80 said yeah the institutions my society are working well now if you ask people that question it's 22 percent people have lost faith uh and they've lost faith in each other and the loss of faith in institutions happened all at once it was uh vietnam it was watergate uh it was the the sort of stagnation of the 1970s and so people decided the government's not working anymore the more disturbing thing is loss of faith in each other if you ask people in the 50s do you trust your neighbors 60 said yeah my neighbors are trustworthy now if you ask people that question 33 say yes my neighbors are trustworthy and only 19 of millennials and so the younger you go the more distrust of other people there is and so that has happened by generation each generation is more distrustful of the other and the reason they're distrustful is not perceptions reality it's because people are not as trustworthy and so whether it's in their dating lives their personal relationships their business relationships there's more betrayal and when i go around the country and i talk to young people they assume that the adults in their lives are going to walk out on them so last night i met a woman who teaches at a school and she was telling one of her students that she was going to go on vacation to visit her best friend and the kid started weeping and she said what's wrong what's wrong and he said to her you're going to leave forever and you're never coming back and he said that because a lot of adults in his life have left forever and never came back and so she tried to reassure him and said no i'm coming back i'm just going to go visit my friend and she took off her watch and she handed it to the kid i said hold my watch till i get back i'm going to come back and get my watch and somebody coming back was a new experience for that kid but she came back and did giving him the watch satisfy his fear i think it did i think he he uh felt well maybe she is coming back i i have a friend who um has a uh runs a program in baltimore named sarah heminger and she she takes kids who are underperforming in the baltimore schools and she creates relationships with them and when an adult tries to create a relationship with a lot of these kids the first thing they do is they reject them because they said if you get close to me you're going to betray me you're going to leave me and so i'm going to reject you first and sarah says it's identity changing for a kid when somebody keeps showing up after you've rejected them and suddenly these people have someone in their life who they reject but the person keeps showing up and she says it's identity changing also to be the one rejected and then you have to keep coming back to that kid but when you're dealing with relationships with a lot of young people in american society you have to overcome waves of fear and distrust and that's just the reality of the world we live in why is it critical that we look inward first at the core of our problem it is a problem we don't see each other very well we generalize about each other we stereotype each other we ignore each other and so the core problem in american societies a lot of people feel unseen and disrespected where blacks feel that whites don't understand their daily experience where rural people feel looked down upon by urban people where teenagers who are depressed feel that no one knows them at all where husbands and wives are trapped in bad marriages and feel that the person who should know them best actually has no clue and so this is not just a big economic thing this is the intimate act of knowing other people and whether we're good at it or not and we've gotten to a place where we're just not that good at it and in order to behold others you have to be willing to be beheld you have to be willing to be vulnerable and then the other person will hold your vulnerability and give it back to you we ourselves have to become better people more open people more vulnerable people more expert at building relationships and that's the sort of thing that is not just a thing you do it's a way of being it's a process of transforming who you are so you're able to be vulnerable so you're able to trust so you're able to walk on alongside someone you're able to harmonize with someone and that's why it's not enough just to think of external fixes for our problem it's an internal transformation a moral transformation a cultural transformation a psychological transformation that dissolves each of us in all of our relationships one of the things you find when you have cultural change is that people realize that personal transformation and social transformation have to happen at the same time in order to have a better society we have to be better people we have a different set of values not the values of the ego not the values of competition but the values of solidarity and bonding and so it involves shedding some of the ego desires and it involves seizing some of the others and i think most of us become better people in one of two ways sometimes we get loved into it someone extends such love and care that our heart opens up and we become the kind of people who are capable of bonding with others for other people and for most of us probably it's a moment of suffering you go through a valley in your life and what suffering does as the theologian paul tillich said suffering carves through what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul and reveals a cavity below that and it carves through that floor and reveals another cavity you just see deeper into yourself than you'd ever seen before and when you see that deep into yourself in these moments of suffering you realize that only spiritual and relational food will fill that gap and you realize you have to live at a different register you have to have a wider consciousness and when you do that then you become the sort of person who is able to make connections because you've exposed the the soft parts of yourself and opened up the crusty topsoil above and you become the kind of person who's capable of being adhesive capable of offering love capable of offering vulnerability you become a different person and after enough people have become that and extended care to each other then you begin to see cultural shift you begin to see social change one thing that's throughout all your three books is losing ego is there a strategy to losing ego right you know the losing ego is something you never entirely do we all want to think about ourselves we won't want to think the world really likes me and i wrote a book about how important it is to get deeper than ego but when i'm on my book tour i'm checking my amazon ranking every hour so like it's a constant battle but i think you do see people who uh have done it you see them all the time i i get to work with a very famous cellist named omar and he lives his life as a gift for others every time he runs into a human being it's like he never met a human being before it's like these things are so amazing there's another human being they're so amazing and so he lives in a way that expresses delight every time he meets a person and he's not struggling to be the most famous one in the room anymore he's just delighted by others and i have i certainly about once a month i'd say i run across somebody who just radiates a sort of joy and they genuinely care about others they take delight in other people's good and they're not competitive they're not like how does this person thinking about me they genuinely are thinking about another person i knew a guy when i was young named wes wubenhorst and he was sort of a holy child really he he talked in whistles and pops and he was exuberant and he just was a man for others he had seen hard things in his life he worked in honduras he worked with battered women in annapolis maryland and so it's seen the worst that life can offer people and yet his life was pure service it was what can i do for those women what can i do for the people in honduras and i never saw him particularly talk about himself he he lived as gift and very few of us are going to achieve that but we can all shed a little of our acute self-consciousness some of the time and just say well how am i going to serve others and i think most of us achieve that um in parenthood when my oldest kid was when he was born he's he had a low apgar squared bad health it was a tough delivery and when you uh and they whisked them off to the intensive care uh and i remember thinking that night suppose he only lives 30 minutes will his life be worth a lifetime of suffering for his mother and myself and if you ask me that question before he was born i would have said no that's ridiculous a lifetime of grief for 30 seconds of a creature that doesn't even know it's alive and after he was born i came became aware of a level of love and devotion that i did not know existed before having children and so by that very act most of us get transformed and we want to serve our kids we want to make promises to our kids we want to be there for them and so out of that transformation comes a different way of being in the world and for most of us parenthood is the big shock that opens up the heart to that sort of uh way of living so you were just talking about the joy of when your eldest was child was born describe that moment you held them for the first time a friend of mine when her daughter was born she said i found that i loved her more than evolution required and i've always loved that sentiment because some things we do to pass down our genes some things we do in life to pay the rent but there's an extra level of enchantment in life if we're willing to tap into it that is our limitable ability to care for one another penguins are really loyal to each other but they don't have the kind of love that uh we have for the ones we love and with that when you live in that realm you're living in an enchanted realm i remember one time i was i drove home from work and it was a summer and i got home and i pulled into my driveway and i looked in the backyard and my kids were then like 12 9 and 4 were playing with a ball and they were kicking it up in the air and chasing each other across the yard and they were giggling and rolling all over each other self each other and having the greatest time and so i pull up and i'm just looking at them through the windshield of my car and like the summer sun was coming through the trees and my lawn for some reason looked perfect and i became aware of a level of joy that's greater than anything you ever feel at work it's just a picture of family happiness and it's realized it's a level of joy that you couldn't possibly earn but that reality sort of slips outside its boundaries and that is something mystical in human relationships that it doesn't quite make sense it's super abundant but it is there is something deep inside ourselves capable of that kind of um gracious care you describe yourself as a teacher can you talk about your job as a journalist and your vocation that has taken you on a pilgrimage when i was seven i read a book called paddington the bear and i discovered at that moment i want to be a writer and i've been writing for 50 years since almost every day maybe i've missed 200 days in the course of my whole lifetime and i have decent communication skills i say i'm an average person with above average communication skills and when you have decent communication skills you can get by on glibness you can get by on the fact that you can be charming in print you can be charming in your speech you can glide superficially through life and i remember in my 30s there was a time i thought i'm so glad i'm superficial because i look at all these deep people and they're suffering and i'm just cruising and it seemed plausible at the time but eventually the wages of sin are sin if you live a life on a superficial level you'll find that you're living a dispassionate life and you'll find a shallow life and you'll find parts of your heart and soul are stuck buried down deep inside unable to get out unable to express themselves unable to be touched and so most of my writing has been an attempt to work on my own problems and get a little deeper i wrote a book about emotion that was at a time when i wasn't feeling that much emotion because i want to understand emotion then i wrote a book about moral development because i needed moral development then i wrote a book about spiritual life and relational intimacy because i need to get better at all those things so at least my kind of writing and i think for a lot of people you're just working your out in public you're just trying to become the best form of yourself you can be and the way i ended up doing that was just through writing trying to write myself into being a better person and what do you mean by being you're a middleman so some people are geniuses and they come up with brilliant thoughts and that's their writing i don't have that kind of mind so what i do is i do a lot of reading and i try to take the parts that meant something to me and i try to share it with the readers and somebody said what writers are we're beggars who tell other beggars where we found bread and so if i read dostoevsky or irie tolstoy or george elliott and i find a passage that's meaningful to me then i put in my books and because i want to pass it along these are jewels of insight that um are just deep guides to of wisdom and how to live so you're reading a book you find a quote you like what do you do uh when i read books i i mark i write in books i write a lot and then i get a stack of books that i've read and marked up and i go over to fedex office and i xerox off every page and that i've marked on and then i have stacks and stacks in my office and then the way i write my books is not by typing in a keyboard i make piles on the floor on the carpet of my living room or of my office and each pile is a section of my book or even a paragraph and so to me the act of writing is not typing into a keyboard the active writing is crawling around the floor of my living room and organizing my piles and there are moments when i'm organizing my piles i'm taking all these xerox pages and i'm moving them here moving there see what goes together see what the structure is and thoughts are coming out i'm scribbling on post-it notes and it's it's like the best part of my job it's those moments when creativity actually happens when i'm crawling around writing on post-it notes and organizing my piles and writing is about structure and traffic management it's not about the pros and that system seems to work for you but have you tried just typing into microsoft word you know i tell my students and they don't listen that by the time you start typing into the keyboard your paper should be 80 done you have to get the structure right if you don't get the structure right nothing else will follow and so i spent a lot of time on structure and for some reason i just have a geographic mentality i have to see it laid out on the floor in a landscape some people i've known everybody has a system some people write on the walls in pencil each book and they structure it so they can see it on the walls and then they finish the book and they paint over the wall and they write on the next layer of the paint but every writer i know has some sort of way to to create a structure around the vast amount of information you're going to put in any piece so you've written and talked about that you had a happy childhood why was that important yeah i had a completely untroubled childhood i grew up in new york city um i went to a wonderful school called grace church school i joke i was part of the all-jewish boy's dominating choir at grace where we would sing the hymns and to square it with our religion we wouldn't sing the lord jesus so the volume would drop down in the church and i had loving parents who offered love but not really talking about it we were in the kind of family that was not expressive about love we showed love we were aware of love but we were not expressive and i think in my case that created a blockage where i had the advantage of having a secure childhood but i didn't always have the capacity to express with my mouth the feelings that were in my heart and so like one of the worst moments for me and most shameful moments of my life was toward the end of my grandfather's life and my grandfather really raised me gave that me that immigrant mentality that we're going to try to make it in america he was at a um in the hospital and he just been diagnosed with the cancer that was going to kill him and i visited him i was by then in my early twenties and he i walked into the hospital room it was stiflingly hot and he says i'm a dead duck i'm gonna go soon and when i sat with him for a couple hours and we talked and talked and as i was walking out he he with a gulp and with a cry said i love you so very much which is the first time he had ever said that to me and i was 22 and i felt the moment but i didn't know how to say that back to him just because it was not the way we talked in my family we were so reticent and so i didn't say it back to him and he died without ever hearing those words for me and that's a moment that haunts you because it's a moment where um you realize your deficiencies and openly expressing and communicating your emotions even to the people who you love the most and so that's the sort of thing you um you try to recover from and you try not to let that happen to you again you try to become a different sort of person and was it ego or you just didn't have the vocabulary or why couldn't you say i love you some people are emotionally open and expressive and emotionally transparent and i'm now drawn to those people because they pull something out of you some people are just emotionally closed and i think it's true of a lot of guys we have a certain front we put up before the world and there's a there's a a feminist scholar named naobi wei who thinks people are very open when they're eight when they're seven eight nine the friendships kids have are so deep and so emotionally open but then they learn to cover themselves over and guys do it because they think in order to be a man i have to hide my emotions and girls often do it because they think in order for people to like me i have to hide my emotions and so we get better at hiding our emotions and we get worse at expressing worse at being open worse at even feeling and i think that that was the the lower points of my life was not misery it was nothing it was unfeeling and the way you recover from that is being around people who are emotionally transparent who beam love at you and demand you beam it back at them and that means putting yourself in circumstances where you feel completely uncomfortable i was at a conference a couple weeks ago and the person organizing that session gave us all pages with lyrics to a song and they said find a stranger next to you look into their eyes and i want you both to sing the lyrics to each other and if you had told me to do that 20 years ago i would have completely freaked out because that emotional intimacy was not something i would have killed me but slowly if you open yourself up to these experiences you get a little better at being open and openness and vulnerability are a skill just like any other thing and so i could get back through that barely i could get through that back when you were a kid you got your freedom by going to camp can you talk about the camp and how it was important to shaping who you are uh so starting in at a very early age six or seven i spent two months every summer at a camp in central connecticut called camp the incarnation and i was there for 15 years it was my childhood and it was in part the only successfully racially integrated institution i've ever been a part of we're just we were removed from the other parts of the world and we had kids from the projects in the bronx and in brooklyn we had kids from upscale schools in manhattan and nobody had any nobody knew where their background was so we we bonded we slept in tents by teenage years you had to cook fires and we learned a couple things first courage one of the things that being out in nature does when you're young is it teaches you courage how to go canoeing down rapids how to jump off a cliff into the lake how to do things that scare you and so that's a level of moral development you don't get at school but the second thing it does is it puts you in a tent with seven other kids and you live there for a month or two and so you're you're so up close to each other and you create a sense of belonging and care for each other that you can't really get in a classroom and often you can't get in your neighborhood because you're going back to your separate homes at camp for me there was a level of intimate bonding and community that maybe i'd never experienced before and now it's been 40 years later and the people i knew at age 12 are still some of my best friends my camp friends are the core of who i trust and treasure and it reminds me just socially there was a moment in the 18th century when you had the european colonists and the native american culture side by side and all the europeans or many of them would go and live with the natives and none of the natives would go live with europeans and this really bugged people like benjamin franklin it's like we're the superior civilization how come people are leaving our culture to go to them but nobody's leaving them to come to us and the reason is that people in the native communities had real community they had deep connection deep tribal relationships with each other and we in the european were more separate from each other when you think about that story sometimes you think our whole civilization is kind of screwed up uh and there are moments in each of our lives when we find real community and we find out what it feels like uh and those are life-altering moments and they haunt you for the rest of your life and for me it was camp and i go back to those people and we just know each other at all we've seen each other in the worst circumstances and in the best circumstances a lot of the bonding of friendship a lot of the sort of sexual adventures you have when you're a teenager it all happened at camp uh and so it's it was living in an enclosed community surrounded by the beauty of nature tell me about the letters that your grandfather wrote you yeah my grandfather um used to take me to pancake shops and teach me how to pour how much syrup you should pour on the pancakes now you could it was free so you could pour all you wanted he also taught me about his experience his it was his father who really came over uh to this country and he had immigrant experiences and i remember one letter where he described the map of his neighborhood who lived in each building one was a finnish building one was a swedish building one was an italian building a czech a bohemian and so he introduced me to the world of new york which was sort of my historical roots we all want to have a sense that we're connected through time to some sort of ancestral history and my grandfather connected me backwards to time but he also projected forward into what we were doing here and we jews were somewhat outsiders but there was this place we called this city that we wanted to grow up into and the city was uh north of 59th street it was the upper east side it was basically where the protestants lived and that seemed to be a world of glamour and ease and comfort and neatness and nobody was screaming at each other the way they were down in our neighborhood and so it's the immigrant dream you get to this country i don't care if you're an immigrant from mexico or russia or china wherever it's a sense that we're kind of outsiders here but we are a little superior in a few ways and so my grandfather raised me with that ethos and it's an ethos of of ambition and achievement and try to get inside try to get inside and you do it through learning and so that that ethos of education of writing uh is the way you get there and why did he have an immigrant mentality so my grandfather's uh father who came when he was a young man had a butcher shop on the lower east side kosher butcher shop he sent my grandfather to city college of new york which then is now is almost 100 immigrants it's the it's the school it's free it was free in those days and it's a school for strivers and education was the way you made it into america and our family um i think typical for jewish families had an image of what america was being that was this ideal promised land we were living out exodus we'd left oppression in russia and ukraine we crossed the wilderness and come to the promised land and this was the promised land i had a great uncle named irving browning who was a movie director back when they made silent pictures in atlantic city and he made westerns and if you went to his apartment in washington heights in new york it looks like you're going to wyoming in 1860 he had powder horns he had lassos he had chaps it was all western stuff and irving browning himself never went west of the hudson river he was just imagining what the west was like and out of that imagination the west was created the imaginary ideal of america was created by these immigrant kids who just had a picture in their heads of what this country was and so i was raised with that inflamed love of america that i think so many immigrants have to this day i remember once i was walking around the metropolitan museum of art with a friend who was actually related to george washington not directly but indirectly and we looked at a picture of george washington on the wall in the museum and my friend innocently asked what's it like for you because for me he is the father of my country but you're not related to him and i remember thinking that thought has never occurred to me that i assume of course he's my father figure this is my country and it didn't matter that i didn't have any relatives here when when he was alive he's still the father and i think that's that's what um a country is that's what america is and back when you were younger what was your sense of the american dream i i when i was in college this is a sign of shallowness when i was in college i um there was a magazine called w which was a fashion magazine and they had ads from the stores on madison avenue and i remember i had them on the wall and i like somehow that was the dream of making it in the city making it in new york and now i walk up and down that avenue and my career is far surpassed anything in my imagination and it doesn't seem like much anymore so they were bad ambitions but uh you know when you're young you want to be recognized you want there's an the greeks had a word for it the thymotic urge the thumos you want people to recognize you and if you're a young writer and you feel like you're an outsider because you come from a strange group that's a minority you want to do something to make people notice and i remember in those days i um i used to think if i was completely unknown in life and was a failure but 100 years later somebody found my book and it became influential that in immortal glory would be totally worth it and now i think that's crazy like i want to experience the richness of life while i'm here and the future can take care of itself and can you talk about going to college and what did you study so i was a poor student high school not on the top third of my class maybe not even the top half and i say that when i was 19 the admissions officers at columbia wesleyan brown decided i should go to the university of chicago because i got rejected at the three schools i applied to but i got accepted at one and chicago was then not that selective they accepted 70 of applicants and i got there and i found these professors some of them refugees from europe and world war ii who took the great book so seriously they felt if you read hobbs and shakespeare and milton and george eliot the right way the keys to the kingdom the keys to how to lead a good life were kept in these books there's a saying that if um you catch fire with enthusiasm people will come for miles to watch you burn and these my professors had that enthusiasm and i don't remember a lot of what they taught me but i remember their deep commitment to living the noblest life and i think they wanted to make it clear that if we were going to lead mediocre lives it was not because we had an inadequate standard they were going to hold up a standard of how you should live a life of the mind a life of commitment to nobility a life of commitment to excellence there's a spartan educator who said i make honorable things pleasant to children and so you hold up they this is what you can do with your life and after you've tasted the heights it's hard to settle for the cheap wine and so i think they they taught us new things to love and they taught us um ways to see the world you think seeing the world is like obvious you just look out and see it but i work in politics and the people i deal with every day see the world they want to see they see the world that flatters their prejudices and a lot of us are like that but the real scholars if you read george orwell you read c.s lewis they saw the pleasant truths and they saw the unpleasant truths and seeing the world is such an essential skill uh one of my heroes this guy john ruskin say the more the longer i live the more i think the most important thing in life is to see the world clearly and to say what you saw in a clear way that thousands can talk for one who can think but millions can think for one who can see and so you you have to study from the masters you have to study from tolstoy who saw the world with such crystalline purity and that becomes a lifelong skill and the other thing they did was they educated our emotions when you hear mozart's a great symphony when you read it a sylvia plath poem you haven't gained new knowledge but you've gained a new experience and you've educated your emotions and you've you've widened your repertoire of what you can feel and knowing what to feel is such a crucial skill in life knowing to feel properly enraged by injustice knowing to feel grief in the presence of loss knowing to feel just humble admiration in the presence greatness these are things that we were taught at school and they're not part of the normal curricula but i i do think um when i left chicago i was like happy to go but like a lot of people the further i get away from that formative institution the more i treasure what it was what it gave a lot of us but you studied history not journalism can you bring that up make that point yeah and and you know did that background in history history help your career or do you in hindsight should you've studied journalism yeah my joke is i double majored in history and celibacy while i was at chicago and i don't believe in majoring in journalism i don't even believe in journalism schools you can pick up the craft of journalism by doing it but a good piece of advice that was offered to me young was know something about something when you go into the world have some body of knowledge you can bring it to the world if i had to do it all over again i'd probably do genetics because i think if you're living now and living for the next 50 years genetics will be really important and if you have that body of knowledge you can figure out the craft of journalism later the other thing about studying history is our own lifetime is not big enough to develop a broad understanding of how human beings behave and the study of history allows you go back centuries and see how human beings behave and so i wrote like 16 papers on thucydides uh and the peloponnesian wars and one of the lessons of that which i've carried through life is that in politics the lows are lower than the highs are high meaning then when a politician screws up it is a big disaster when they do something really good you get a modest uptick and so it teaches you to be really careful when you do political life uh and so these are lessons that sort of lodge in you when you're 18 19 20. and then later life happens to you one of the um one of the things that's teacher sacrificed for us is a lot of professors pour into us things that we're not yet ready to receive we're like 20. but then when life happens and you go through a bad thing or you go through a good thing suddenly that point that the professor lodged in your brain blooms it was just a seed that was planted and you think oh yeah that's what he was talking about i'm a big believer in the the saying that you can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge but you can't be wise with other men's wisdom you have to go through life yourself to become wise and the knowledge the really important knowledge you get is learned through experience not out of a book but when you have the experience if you've got the book in the background then you have a name for what you've experienced and you think oh that's what that guy was talking about well speaking of knowledgeable men who was bill buckley and how was he important to your life and in and tell me the story of him hiring you yeah so i was a humor columnist at the school paper the chicago maroon and william f buckley was coming to campus and i wrote a parody of him for being a name-dropping blowhard and it was like buckley spends his afternoons uh making everyone else feel inferior he ideally founded two magazines the one called the national buckley one called the buckley review which emerged from the buckley buckley it was jokes kind of like that and he comes to campus he gives a speech and at the end he says david brooks if you're in the audience i want to give you a job and that was the big break in my life and now sadly i was not in the audience but three years later i called him up and i said is that offer still open uh and he said yeah and so he flew me out to new york and i had lunch with him and he hired me for this 18-month internship and for that time i became not quite a surrogate son but he he took me to bock concerts he took me yachting he introduced me to lifestyle i never could have imagined he taught me to write he was a pretty hard editor and i think that's what we want from our mentors we want hardness in the context of love and his great capacity was friendship and he asked me my opinions about things and then he sent me on my way and so it was that relationship that really introduced me to the world of ideas the world of opinion journalism and it's the flow of how the american debate happens and i look back on him as with great admiration just for what a good friend he could be to really thousands and thousands of people and who was he but william f buckley was for in the 50s and 60s the most famous conservative commentator in america uh maybe the most famous commentator in america he founded a magazine called national review which was really the beginning of the modern conservative movement he had a tv show on pbs called firing line which was intellectual conversation at a very high level which no tv show does today and so he became a big celebrity he was on the tonight show all the time if you have the movie aladdin robin williams who's playing the genie does a william f buckley impersonation in the middle of that and so he was a figure on the cultural landscape and a gigantic celebrity uh he was rich he introduced me to a lifestyle that i'd never seen before big long limos back in those days the days when that was unusual a park avenue pierre-terre a house in connecticut it was the old grand style of living and yet instead of hanging out with the glamorous people that frankly his wife hung out with he hung out with a bunch of writers and he loved ideas and the people he brought to his home were not political people he loved people who wrote for the new yorker he loved literary critics he put literature and art and culture above politics and that was an important lesson to learn as well i was watching you on c-span and they showed clips of buckley and it was terrific from the firing line oh yeah though when you go back to tv in those days there's a famous episode of buckley with dome chomsky and a big left-wing philosopher and they are talking at such a high level i have no idea what they're saying but they said we're going to have a serious conversation here and that was tv in those days can you tell us your first your first job then what came next what came next yeah my first job out of college was bartender which was one of my best jobs ever i was trying to be a freelance writer and every week i sent off an article to a magazine and every week it got rejected so that was my first time and then i got a job as a police reporter for a legendary outfit called the city news bureau of chicago and the saying of that institution was if your mom says she loves you check it out and so that's that was journalism 101 and it was police reporting and it was you know covering rapes murders fires on the south and west side of chicago and i loved it because um i came home every day with a story and i covered a lot of incredibly stupid people a lot of bad criminals there there was a bunch of guys who broke out of a prison got hungry ate at the restaurant across the street in the window and got caught a guy was wanting to hold up a fast food restaurant so he held up the one where he worked they all said john we sort of know you're here so every day i came home with some absurd story and so i did that for a two brief period and then i called up buckley and i worked at national review and then someone said saying yes to everything so whenever somebody offered me something i just said yes and so i became a movie critic and then i became a writer about economics i became a foreign correspondent and it was a pretty boring linear climb upward a great facility if you're going to be a journalist the most important quality your pieces can have is the quality of doneness getting it done on time and so i understood that pretty quickly that i just as long as i was a reliable writer who could get things done on time people would want you and so i went to work at the washington times for a period as a movie critic as an editorial writer then i went off to stanford for a little fellowship then i went to work at the wall street journal and i was the book review editor when i was about 25 26 pretty young and i i loved the job but i realized it's an old man's job i want to be out in the world i want to be experiencing things firsthand so when i was 30 the wall street journal asked me to go to brussels with my wife and be a foreign correspondent for the opinion pages and they gave me a section of the world to cover which was from wales to vladivostok from scotland to cape town so it's like half the world and it was the early 90s and i covered nothing but great news for for about four years the end of the soviet union the independence movement in ukraine nelson mandela coming out of prison in south africa the oslo peace process german reunification the maastricht treaty european unification and i just traveled around covering these big events the end of the soviet union was the biggest story i've ever covered in my life and i would just travel around and see the most amazing things there was one day when there was a coup against boris yeltsin who was the first independent russian president and tanks rolled into into moscow to sort of depose his government or an attempt and yeltsin came out with his people with the democrats and gave a very brave speech on a tank uh sort of pushing back at the at the attempted coup the military uh and i met a woman there who was in her 90s and she was handing out sandwiches to the protesters and defense holding up the democrats and i asked her about her life and she'd grown up in the tsar's household so she knew the royal family before the russian revolution her first husband died in the civil war that followed the revolution her sons were killed in the battles of stalingrad in world war ii another husband was sent off to siberia and disappeared she was part of a people called the comic people who were moved by khrushchev and exiled away from moscow and so i'm talking to this woman and every important event in soviet history happened to her family and every trauma that the russian people experienced in those years happened to her directly and it was one of the most remarkable interviews of my life because here's living history and she ends up handing out sandwiches to the democrats who are going to create a new russia and it was those moments the early 90s where we really thought history had turned wonderful the end of history era where we thought we've discovered how to live with each other and i remember in the middle east i was covering the peace process there and i had a kid my oldest kid who um only slept when he drove him around so just get him to take a nap you had to drive him and so we were staying in jerusalem and i was driving through the palestinian areas it was safe there were no checkpoints um and because we thought peace was at hand um and it was it was sort of a golden moment to be covering what looked like the the rebirth of a much more better world it's it turned out disappointing since then the last thing i covered which i barely paid attention to was the yugoslav civil war which was when the serbs and the bosnians were fighting each other and atrocities ethnic cleansing and i barely paid attention to that story compared to all the other stories i covered but in retrospect that was the most important story i covered because the last 25 years have been a story of ethnic cleansing of identity politics of strong man rise of authoritarianism and so history took an ugly turn with that with that moment and a lot of the things that we thought were being buried tribal hatreds and such uh have come back with a vengeance so you finish up your time in brussels and then what happened how many how long you there for and then i was in brussels for nearly five years i come back and become the op-ed editor for the wall street journal so i'm getting 100 submissions a week or a day and i had to say no to 99 so i had i learned to say no in those years which is a very hard thing and then in 1995 my best friends were starting a magazine and they were people like bill crystal a guy named andrew ferguson a guy named fred barnes and it was called the weekly standard and it was a conservative magazine the gingrich revolution was just happening and we thought there should be a magazine to guide the republican party or to be a conversation place where the republican party can become a solid reformist party and we had great hopes for the gingrich revolution um and didn't really work out and the republican party has become the opposite of what at least i envisioned in those days my big heroes are edmund burke who's a classic conservative when you do change you should do it constantly but incrementally because life is really complicated and you don't know enough to do dramatic change and my other hero is is alexander hamilton who's a hip-hop puerto rican hip-hop star from the heights no he was he was an immigrant kid and he believed in social mobility and using government to give poor boys and girls like him a chance to rise and succeed and so there was a time a time of abraham lincoln a time of teddy roosevelt a time of a few republicans when there was a moderate republican tradition which hearkened back to alexander hamilton and edmund burke and so i became a moderate republican at the exact moment that was dying and i still sort of am there but there are only six of us left so so after the weekly standard so i worked at the weekly standard for nine years and it was very useful period because i um i came to know what i believed i find that when you're in a group and everyone's believing the same thing you just believe what the group believes you sort of have to strike out on your own and figure out what do i actually believe and throw a process of trial error or sort of on my own in the wilderness i found out yeah these are the important writers for me these are the important ideas this is my world view and it was a process of trial and error like putting on suits in the in the department store in the mall you try it on does it fit no this doesn't really fit i tried on libertarianism i tried on social conservatism and finally i found something that fit which was alexander hamilton and so i was there for nine years and i we tried to create a a a modern conservative party and failed miserably um and then in 2003 i got a call from gail collins who was the editorial pageant of the new york times and she asked me to come up and have lunch and i had an inkling that they were going to offer me a column and i decided i would not do it because i like writing i was writing for the atlantic and the new yorker at that point i like writing these 5 000 word pieces and a column is only 800 words it's not my best length so all the way up i remember on the train going up to new york i was i rehearsed no i'm going to say no to this i'm going to say no to this and when the question finally came would you like to be a columnist for the new york times in my memory i said well has anybody ever said no to that question has anybody turned you down and i think the answer was no no one ever turns down a chance to have the best real estate in journalism so i had a failure of courage and i said yes um and so that is now i'm on like 16 17 years of writing a column and the first six months on the job was miserable because i didn't know how to write a column and i'd never been hated on a mass scale before and so i came in more from the right the times readers were more on the left and they bombarded me with hatred i remember there were i entered i took out i cleaned out my email folder about six months in the job and there were literally hundreds of thousands of emails there and the core message was paul krugman is great you suck and so the people who write the nasty stuff online they're not only critical and cruel they're very effectively critical and cool they pick the things that you're most insecure about and so i would sit there read all the comments on the bottom of my column and just get pummeled and feel depressed and then i said i got to stop reading this and i for i asked my assistant to read them and then he got depressed and so it was wallowing in a level of acrimony that i'd never experienced and you have to go through this to get your skin a little thickened but even today i i don't know anybody who can really look at all the comments and not be um depressed and not be hurt well in addition to writing you you through your pbs show can you talk about your early experiences of working with jim lehrer and discuss his moral ecology and what that means yeah so one of the things i knew early on is i want to write books and to write books you have to have broadcast media in my experience it's very hard to sell books by people who aren't well known so if you want to sell books and you want to reach readers you have to have a platform so i was saying yes to um every tv show that called because i wanted to have a platform so i could write books and there were some where you walked away feeling dirty it was just like a scream fest um and you were on with people who really know anything about what they were talking about they were just on because they were good looking and so i i didn't feel great about that but then uh one day i think it was december 31st about 2000 i got asked to be in on the newshour with jim lehrer and lehrer was the kind of guy who he was very stoic on the air because he didn't want to be the focus of attention but when the camera was not on him he was very expressive his face is very expressive and so when i said something on the air that he liked i would see his eyes crinkle in pleasure and if i said something crass or stupid i would see his mouth downturn in displeasure and so basically for the 10 years i did the show with him i just tried to get the eye crinkle and avoid the mouth downturn and that way he taught me how to do the job he never said anything he just had these subtle reactions that i tried to pick up on the jim lehrer way of doing things and jim lehrer created a moral ecology around that show and he's been retired for six or seven years now but it's still that moral ecology that newshour way of doing things is still the lair away uh and so it was a great pleasure and a great honor to work with him and a great honor to work with uh my buddy mark shields we've been doing the show for 17 years now and we've never had a crossword each with each other he's like a boston irish kid now and is older but he's just a beautiful hearted man and having the chance to work with mark all these years has been one of the great friendships and the great joys of my life it's really a lesson and if you can find somebody who's just a noble human being and funny uh hang around that person and we we have a a really good friendship so was jim lehrer then a mentor you know mentor lara taught me how to do the broadcast journalist he also taught me um about loyalty i think the thing lara was proudest of and mark shields is also proudest of is the marine corps they're both marines and i saw their attachment to the core as the proudest thing uh in their life and i've noticed this before there a great secretary of state named george schultz if you go to his office at stanford where he's now retired to you can sort of see some documentation that he was a secretary of state and um you know had all these great jobs but there are posters everywhere for the marine corps and that experience that people have early in life of being part of some some sort of painful and difficult and challenging cause with other people really is it was striking to be to be around marines and what lara would tell me was that i learned from the marine corps that if i got punched in the nose i could come back and so he wasn't afraid of being punched in the nose in those ways you know they say what teachers teach is really themselves and so lehrer was a mentor and that he taught himself and he also in in tv language he was unusual because he didn't want to be the star i was once on a show a cable show early in my career we were doing an outside shot and the host of the show was standing in front of the capitol capitol dome and the dome took up three quarters of the shot and the host said this is my show not the capital show and so she wanted to be the center of the shot and that kind of i'm the star is prevalent in tv but lair was the opposite of that so let's get into your time as a political pundit was it a great time in your life so be the first six months as a political pundit were not great but um the ensuing 17 years were stressful but rewarding so the challenge of being a pundit is you have to have uh two times a week you have to have a new idea and so the joke is it's like being married to an infomaniac it seems fun for the first couple weeks but i used to have all these normal human desires for um for food water now i just have one desire column ideas so i used to think well if i get hit by a bus and i survived i could get a column out of that if i won the lottery i could get a column it's not even the money but oh i could get a column out of that and so you are constantly being pulled forward and the advantage of that is that you have to stretch your mind every week you have to find something new to read somebody new to see somebody new to interview just so you're offering something fresh and so you can't be stuck in your rut if you're going to be a good columnist you have to be always on the move and being forced to be a lifelong learner has been the great gift the second thing about writing a column is you don't really shape how people think you try to provoke them to think you provide a context in which they can think for themselves so the idea that columnists are influential politically influential i think is not true we're just trying to poke people so they think for themselves and i used to think that you know i'd read a column and the president would call me and say you know before reading your column i um i thought this but your column was so brilliant now i think this and but that never happens uh you are just the politicians that they only think did that column support me or hurt me it's all about influence it's not about persuasion and so when you're writing the column you're trying to write for young people you're trying to write for open-minded people you're just trying to pass along the best and most interesting thing that happened to you that week and there's just tremendous sense of satisfaction in having had your say even if um nobody listened even if readers hated it you could say well at least i had my say i didn't i i expressed what i think is true and that's that is the great satisfaction of being abundant but you write meritocracy turns us into a certain type of person can you explain the word meritocracy and how it has an impact on us meritocracy is the system most of us live in it is the system that we get promoted in life through achievement we get good grades in school and we we rise to the top of our class that's meritocracy we get admitted to selective colleges we get to go to prestigious institutions so it's the world in which we swim and in some sense the great struggle in my life is how do you live in that world and still be a decent person because the meritocracy contains lies that are soul destroying if you take them too seriously the first lie is that career success can make you happy and i'm the poster child for that's not true the second lie is that you can make yourself happy and that's the lie of self-sufficiency that if only i get better at yoga lose 15 pounds get better at my job then i'll be happy but if you talk to people at the end of their lives about the times when they were most meaningful it was not when they were self-sufficient it was when they were utterly dependent on other people and so it's the opposite of self-sufficiency but the meritocracy doesn't tell us that and the big lie the meritocracy which we pretend not to tell each other but we do with our actions is that people who've achieved more career success are worth more than other people and if you want to rip apart your society that's a very good lie to spread into it and by who we pay attention to by who we honor we have this logic that the big successful people are worth more and that creates resentments that creates pride that creates deep inequality and it it's an insult to the basic equality of all human beings to me the effect on the meritocracy on me was makes you streamlined like i'm not going to develop messy relationships because i'm on the move uh it gave me i had all these commitments i had deadlines i had to fulfill i had parts of my job i had to do and so i had a clock in my head and the clock was always move on from this conversation because you got more stuff to do and so i became i began to value time over people and relationships are slow you got to sit at dinner for three hours and not check your email and not do your work and so i had this productivity problem and still struggle with it where i've got to do my job and therefore i can't linger with you and therefore if you're a friend going through a hard time uh i can't stop everything to be with you because the demands of the workplace seem so pressing and that's a seduction that i think a lot of us fall into and i certainly still struggle with that uh today yeah but wouldn't one say too though you know you've got three kids that you wanted to send through college you have to be somewhat successful right yeah no i don't renounce the meritocracy i think it it calls for a great achievement but it's like capitalism it only works when you have a another moral system to balance against it so capitalism wants us to work hard make money rise invest produce but you have to have a moral thing that goes against that the logic of capitalism the logic of the meritocracy is direct logic input leads to output practice makes perfect effort leads to reward but moral logic is inverse logic it's you have to lose yourself to find yourself you have to surrender to something greater than yourself to get real power and so the logic of morality is an inverse logic and you have to have both those things in your heads at the same time and and life well-lived to me is is trying to live within that contradiction so in the early 2000s you were on the straight talk express can you talk about that as a communal experience when i first got my job as a columnist an older columnist named robert novak gave me a good piece of advice which was [Music] interview three politicians every day and those days i did it and the problem was most politicians didn't have much of an inner voice then i met this guy john mccain and mccain had an inner voice mccain you could ask him any question and he would actually tell you what he thought and so i loved being with him and so in 2000 he ran for president and he had no money so he had to have journalists around him all the time and we get up in the morning and we get on the van with him and we just start talking to him and i learned early on the way to get mccain to talk was to get him angry so i picked someone he didn't like i'd say did you see what rick santorum said today he'd go that and then he was off and he would talk and talk and talk about every subject under the sun and you talk about things he had done well things he had done badly times he was ashamed the one thing he didn't really talk about was vietnam and his war service i think he was a little bored by that he knew it was part of his biography but he he'd done it to death but we got to go everywhere with him we got to sit with him as he responded to the attacks of george w bush was running against him we got to see the anger that built up in him at those attacks we got to you know he once took me to antoine's this restaurant in new orleans and we had like a 35 000 calorie meal we had nine different kinds of whiskey i remember that at the end they poured off this coffee with brandy in it it was flaming and we were drinking this flaming brandy and coffee and i remember asking the waiter is it decaf and then he once took me to a casino what kind of presidential candidate takes a reporter to a casino and he taught me how to shoot craps [Music] and i remember i went because he taught me how to do it i won um 300 in chips and but there was a line when as we were leaving the casino outside where you go cashing your chips and he had no patience at all so he said let's go and so i left with the chips i never got to collect my 300 and so what i think i saw in mccain was a flawed man but a great man and when the campaign was that it's low i got an email from a friend who had also got to know him and an email said whatever is happening we all know there's only one great man running in this campaign and i reflect on mccain as as truly a great uh man great in spirit and i think because he did he experienced death or cl proximity to death he never could lie to himself that everything that came later was gravy and he was not going to be a self-deceiver and that was a that's a great gift in a politician that's great when we spoke for that film you said that that was the pinnacle of your career as a journalism was working and being this communal area but then you write that you were enclosed in a prison of individualism yet you had a wife and two children at the time but you know how how is that possible that you were enclosed in a prison of individualism yeah and i feel i was just absorbing the culture around which was you know be successful uh make the most of yourself and the people who could crack through that were my kids and the i remember when my oldest was 18 months we were playing early in the morning and i had this thought that i know this person better than i've known anybody and he probably knows me better than anybody's known me and at that age i'm not sure we'd ever said a word to each other because he couldn't speak yet and so i think one of the joys of fatherhood is that even if you're a little emotionally inhibited which i was at that time uh it smashes that all the pieces and so for us playing or for my son's baseball my daughter hockey became the language we spoke to each other i think for most people parenthood is the great opener and you you become aware of a joy and commitment that you were unaware of beforehand and so i think at work i think it's fair to say i was i was not spending as much time on friendships as i should have and not investing in friendships as i should have but i i i love being around my kids because they want to have fun all the time but what is a prison of individualism yeah the person of individualism is to think that um life is an individual journey and so we uh give our kids this book oh the places you'll go by dr seuss and if you go back and look at that book it's a story of a life where he goes to school and then he has a series of individual accomplishments on the way to success and that kid has no friends he has no relationships it's all individual it's like my life is my own individual journey and that is so steeped into our culture if you give that book to immigrant kids they hate that book because that's not how they see life my life is defined by the relationships i have with my kin with my people with my neighborhood and my community my life has lived communally not individually but in america we have always been a highly individualistic people we have this illusion that the west was settled by the lone cowboy we have this illusion of the rags to riches story that i put myself up by my bootstraps we have the illusion that we earn our own success and this is the story we tell about ourselves um but it it's and it's the way the categories we carry in our head but if you actually try to live that way you'll wind up lonely and you'll wind up detached and you'll wind up buffered from other people and you'll think oh the purpose of my life is to be self-actualized to touch this magic part of myself and just be myself but if you live that way you'll you'll wind up unremembered because the person who's not the person who is unattached the person whose personal freedom is uncommitted to anything and that life never adds up to anything and when that person dies everything dies and so it's the great illusion of our culture and american society is a great the individual is good it gives us dynamism but it's our greatest weakness as a culture the idea that it's about me me me me um there they give these tests the call the narcissism test the psychologists do and they give people a bunch of statements and they say they're statements like i love to look at myself in the mirror i find it easy to manipulate people because i'm so extraordinary somebody should write a biography about me americans rank number one in the world of narcissism in these tests the median narcissism score has gone up 30 in the last 20 years if you ask americans are you are if you test americans on math americans rank about 26 in the world in math ability if you ask americans are you really good at math we're number one in the world and thinking we're really good at math and so self-esteem self-promotion uh narcissism have become part of who we are uh and uh i call it the big me living with the big me and uh the thing i've learned through life is that personal freedom sucks that if you are unattached uh and you have this freedom i can do whatever i want i can see whoever i want i can date whoever i want i could befriend whoever i want it sucks because you're not really attached to anything and your life has no sense of closeness no sense of intimacy and no commitment and without commitment you really don't build your character you don't contribute much to the world right you spent your adult life in the conservative movement but that movement has changed can you explain what has changed and where you were left hanging yeah everything about the conservative movement has changed in the course of my career so when i um entered it ronald reagan was still in office and it was the party of free trade and now it's the party of closed trade it was the party of open immigration and now it's the party of closed immigration it was the party of american involvement in the world now it's a party of withdrawal from the world it was the party of desperate for diversity and pluralism we love openness because life is a big adventure and we want to welcome all sorts of people this country who are very different from each other because this is the adventure of being in america and now it has the opposite opposite ethos so it's a great lesson that you can keep a name conservative you can keep a party label republican and almost every single tenet of belief within that system can totally flip and that happened because conservatism was grabbed starting with a guy named pat buchanan but most recently donald trump by a very different ethos a scarcity mindset a tribal ethos the life is conflicts politics is war it's a competition for scarce resources it's our tribe against their tribe and that is a scarcity mindset that was not there under ronald reagan i was not there under george w bush and certainly not george h.w bush and it has crept in and infected as a force of white identity politics and in my view it's it's the receding roar of a white america that's never coming back and in my view the republican party is is got a very bad future in front of it because the american future is not going to be formed by 76 year old white men in florida and um but seeing this community um fall apart has been the story of uh my life so of the people who i knew when i was 25 in the conservative movement some of them have gone lyft some of them have gone trump right some of them most of us are never trumpers which say we still call ourselves sort of right but um we can't stand that guy and what he stands for and so it's been every every uh wednesday i think it was when i was young and in new york in my 20s we would meet at a townhouse and just have a cocktail party with our friends and we were all conservatives together and that group most of them would talk to each other now uh and that's the convulsions of history but was there a moment that you can pinpoint do you remember i i don't want to be affiliated with this yeah i don't even call myself a conservator anymore i call myself a moderate i don't think my basic beliefs have changed but um [Music] i think my basic uh my faith in what the republican study stands for and with the word conservatism has certainly changed and for me it was a slow motion thing but it was it was really capped off by trump uh i liked people in the george w bush administration uh i think they had there was a colonel there which he called compassionate conservatism which was my kind of conservatism a conservatism that measures itself by how you treat the least amongst us and i remember that conservatism lost favor when the tea party rose it lost favor uh when donald trump rose and trump was the break uh trump was the moment where a lot of us really were shocked you know i wrote like 1600 columns in 2015 saying don't worry donald trump will never get the republican nomination and so what i thought the republican party was turned out to be not what the republican party is what i thought conservatives would stand for were not what conservatives would stand for and so when he starts winning primaries saying the racial things that he says and saying the lies that he says i think for us that was the moment and we all came to it those of us who became never trumpers we came to it in about early 2016 late 2015 and we all sort of wrote these columns saying never trump never that guy and some people have gone back and now they're trump uh pulled by the power of team loyalty but uh for me at least it's been liberating because um i i don't quite know where i am i'm politically homeless and so i can think whatever i want explain what you learned about many of your friends particularly your professional friends during this period of time i lost some friends but not so many because most of my close conservative friends those of us who founded the weekly standard um and those of us who worked at the wall street journal we um [Music] we all turned into never trumpers right away there was a period in the 90s when i wrote the social animal and it was a book about emotion and my friends joked that you know me writing a book about emotion was like gandhi writing a book about gluttony it's like what the hell are you doing like people saw me as an emotionally closed person who who was not exactly the warm embracing soul that he wanted to be and so i wanted to learn to be more emotional uh and so i did what any complete wonk would do i looked at brain science and like who tries to become much more emotional by looking at fmri machine but that's what i did and but i got to meet uh so many great scientists who wrote about emotion there was a guy named antonio dimaggio who's out in california he studied people who have had strokes and they have lesions in their brain they can't feel emotion and you would think those people would be super smart mr spocks but in fact they can't function in life because what our emotions do is they tell us what we value they tell us what we desire and if you don't desire if you can't assign value to things you can't make decisions and so those people um damazio would ask him do you want to come have an appointment on tuesday or wednesday and one guy spent 20 minutes debating the merits of tuesday versus wednesday he couldn't come to a decision because he didn't have an emotions to tell him what he wanted and so through that process i began to see that the head and the heart are not different that the head and the heart are the same thing that that knowing is a form of love uh and that we're not primarily cognitive thinking creatures we're primarily desiring creatures and so it was a slow process of sort of opening up the heart and you know i write in the book i i read about a guy who bought a home with a bamboo stand by the driveway and he hated bamboo so he chopped it down he took an axe to the root system he dug a three-foot hole he pours plant poison into it he pours three feet of gravel six inches of cement and then two years later a little shoot of bamboo comes up through the driveway and in my view we all have that we all have these deep desires and when you see kids in fourth grade at a school play you see their fervent desire to be great and you see a lonely person at a bar in new york you see their deep desire for connection and we sometimes try to pave over those desires um but eventually the bamboo shoots up and so just living in the world with emotion thinking about it and writing about it was my process of trying to touch the bamboo can you tell me the difference and describe the difference between finding happiness as opposed to finding joy because i'm i'm still struggling even throughout all your readings trying to pinpoint those differences so happiness is an expansion of self you get a victory your team wins the super bowl you get a promotion you feel big about yourself and you're proud of yourself and happiness is great joy is the transcendence of self it's a mother and daughter staring into each other's eyes so they forget where one ends and the other begins joy is a moment where you're out in nature and you've lost a sense of your own body you're just part of nature and so joy is the transcendence of self and i'm for both i'm for happiness and joy but my view is if you aim for joy if you aim to transcend yourself you're heading in the right direction and your life will go well and what does transcend yourself mean i mean so you know there's a passage i quote from zadie smith and she's in a nightclub and she's lost her handbag her feet are killing her and suddenly this song from tribe called quest comes on the sound system and a guy with big eyes reaches out to her grabs her hand and just starts dancing with her and she says i gave myself up for joy the top of my head flew away and we just danced and we danced and there are some moments when you're dancing or sometimes when you're playing basketball where it's not you it's just the whole movement that you feel at one with the larger movement of the group and you're not thinking oh i'm david brooks or i'm zadie smith you're you've lost consciousness you're in a state of flow if it's at work um and i think there are times when we all experience that the best part of work for me is the moments when i'm writing and i'm not thinking about myself at all i'm just in the work i'm in the writing and there are moments when you're dancing what they call collective effervescence you're not thinking how do i look how stupid do i look how bad do i dance you're just in the dance i had a friend named chris wyman who was writing poetry in prague and a falcon landed on the wind on the windowsill and if the bird was so beautiful he he just looked at it and he called his girlfriend who was taking the shower and said he got to see this and they came out and they looked at the bird and then the bird turned its eyes and locked eyes with wyman and wyman said when i locked eyes with the bird i felt my insides crumble i felt the distance the the connection between me and the bird it was like looking into centuries and his girlfriend um understood the power of the moment and said make a wish make a wish and wyman wrote a poem about later with the stanza and i wish and i wish and i wished and i wished that the moment would not end and just like that it vanished and so wyman is talking about these moments of transcendence when we feel oneness with nature some people have those moments where they feel oneness with god sometimes oneness with someone you love and it's that sense where self and other overlap and you can't tell where you end and the other begins you're just unself-consciously in life and to me those are great moments can you explain how our society endorses goals that are ultimately unsatisfying we've this is a different way of asking about the meritocracy i guess but right well you know we do have the illusion of that career success can make you happy and in one of my books i made the distinction between the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues and the resume virtues are the things that make you good at your job whether you're a good accountant a good lawyer a good teacher and the eulogy virtues are the things they say about you after you're dead whether you're courageous capable of great love uh honest and we all know the eulogy virtues are more important but look at our school system what do they teach they spend a lot more time teaching the resume virtues how to be good at your job how to do the technical skills that'll make you a good lawyer how to be successful and so on the most important things of life of how to have good character our schools often have nothing to say and on the most important things of life our school system and sometimes our families say you're on your own kid figure out what goodness means to you and so that leaves a lot of people adrift uh and so we have a society that's we're just much better talking about career because we preach the illusion that careers is going to be the core of your life and what's going to make you happy even though we know that's not true and i do think the reason we do is because we don't have the moral vocabulary to know how to talk about that other stuff and i had one of my students um i was having coffee with him and he said we're just so hungry and i found that to be true of my students and of society in general they're people are hungry for a moral vocabulary how do i talk about spiritual transformation how do i talk about moral growth how do i talk about being good at relationship when i'm out on book tours one of the things they do is they they book you into these business conferences where you get to talk about your book to a group of three or five thousand business executives and at the conference they've been talking about their fiduciary responsibilities and healthcare benefits and you walk into a room and they're like 3 000 62 year old white guys in boring suits and i'm going to go talk to them about george eliot's love life or i'm going to talk about how saint augustine felt his soul expand in the presence of god i always think well this is not going to go well and yet when i speak of these things compared to all the other speeches i've given there's a quality of silence that i don't get because people are so hungry for a spiritual and moral conversation and um every almost every time after the speech somebody comes up to me and it might be a ceo or something and you say hey can we have a phone relationship because i'm we're going through some stuff i have nobody to talk to about i really think i'd have a career as a ceo whisperer but and and i but i take that as a sign that a lot of americans really know this is really important but don't have a venue to talk about it don't have a vocabulary to talk about it and feel the gap feel the hunger and it it manifests as what the medieval is called acidia which is lack of desire when you're sort of lost without a sort of spiritual calling when you don't know how to do moral development you're you're not touching your deepest desires and so life just seems kind of flat and i i think i've certainly suffered that i think a lot of people suffer from that you keep on saying we don't have the vocabulary i'm sitting here talking to you right now give me let's talk about the vocabulary sure so well let's talk about um i was talking about one of my books on a tv show and i said this book is about sin this book is about um uh confronting our own sinfulness and how do we overcome it and i got an email from uh somebody in the publishing business said you know i love the way you talk about your book but i wouldn't use the word sin it's such a downer use the word insensitive and in my view if you don't have a word sin if you don't understand what sin is in yourself then you don't really know how to confront your own weaknesses and you don't see how sin can be so corrupting and can be this contagious thing that can spread throughout you similarly grace uh grace is unmerited love and grace doesn't make any sense but if you don't have a sense of grace then you don't have a sense of the fundamental goodness of the universe and you don't have a sense that sometimes you just surrender to that goodness which you don't deserve and so for example sometimes you get sick and people who are your close friends don't show up for you but then there are other people you barely know they totally show up and when those other people totally show up for you that's grace they're giving you love you have not earned you don't deserve it doesn't make any sense but you just get to experience grace and so when you're in this language you're in a language of good and evil you're in the language of fall and redemption and one of the passages i love is is a john steinbeck passage that that says you know we're all trapped in the drama of good and evil it's the only drama we know and at the end of your life uh there's only the clean hard question he writes was i good or was i evil did i do well or did i do ill and seeing daily life as a moral drama is something a lot of us don't do but i i had a friend who um he identified his course in which was aloofness and not really paying attention to other people and every night on his pillow he was saying when i was with that person was i think about that person or was i thinking about my next meeting and so he he sort of registers the moral drama of his life and on days where he did what he should do he feels good on days when he um did not do then he feels a shame and for him i think the internal moral drama of did i do well or do i do ill today is the central drama of life and um that's sort of counter-cultural but that's the way he lives and i think that's the way people used to be trained to live one of the stories i tell in one of my books is about dwight eisenhower when eisenhower was nine he wanted to go trick-or-treating and his mom wouldn't let him and uh he threw a temper tantrum and he punched the tree in his front yard and he punched it so bad he rubbed all the skin off his knuckles and his mom sent him up to his room had him cry for an hour and then came up an hour later to bind his wounds and recited to him a verse from proverbs which is that he who conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city and 60 odd years later when eisenhower wrote his memoir he said that's the most important conversation in my life because it taught him that he had this moral failure that was baked into his nature which was anger and temper and passion and hatred and that his life it was going to amount to anything he had to really engage in moral combat against this sin this sin of anger and hatred and we think of eisenhower as this sort of garrulous country club kind of guy but that was an illusion he he uh he was a hater during world war ii and during his presidency he would be up nights smoking uh hating and he tried to combat that he would all the people he hated he'd write down their names on a piece of paper and rip up the paper and throw the garbage can as sort of an effort to purge his hatred and so seeing life as a moral combat is not something we do a lot uh but i do think it's the sort of the right way to see the world i'm gonna go home we're gonna leave here today and i'm gonna go home and i'm gonna sit at the dinner table my wife well what what are the some of these vocabulary discussions i should be having because because naturally it's gonna go how was your day how would the interview go great but that's all surface we'll give give us some so practically in the say in the case of marriage uh there's a formula that uh tim and kathy keller uh talk about you marry somebody and uh you think they're perfect and then about six months in the parish you realize that the person you thought was perfect was is actually kind of selfish and as this person is making the as you're making that discovery about her she's making it about you and your natural tendency is to think well our relationship has some problems and the real problem is the other person's selfishness but if you have a moral conscience you say no actually my selfishness is the problem here my selfishness is the only selfishness i can control and the keller's right that if you have a couple both of whom see their own selfishness as the core problem then you have the makings of a good relationship because each is working on themselves and how does that selfishness express itself marriage is about the day-to-day and so there's a great marriage expert named john gottman and um he says relationship is made of bids and counter bids so you're sitting reading the paper and your wife says oh look at the beautiful cardinal outside the window you can either move toward her and put down the paper and say oh that is a beautiful cardinal or you can ignore her or you can make what he calls an away bid leave me alone can't you see i'm busy and the gauntlets say a marriage will survive when there are five toward bids for every one away bid and so with every conversation we're having with our spouse we're either moving toward her or him or we're moving away and the quality of the relationship and the your goodness as a partner is determined by how you make these tiny small decisions uh in the day-to-day and so the rule is always move toward and the people they say who are relational masters are looking for things to be grateful for looking for ways to talk to their spouse and say that was wonderful what you did i'm so grateful for you for doing that and these are just like the small conversational bits of everyday life but they're the way you um make your marriage either a loftier thing or sort of a degraded thing there's a great c.s lewis passage that says there's a core piece of us inside that is the peace that decides that decides how we're going to behave in the day-to-day actions of life and every decision we make either makes that core piece of ourselves into something a little more holy or a little more degraded if you take a homeless person in to have a burger at mcdonald's you've improved that core thing if you walk by the homeless person and ignore their existence you've slightly polluted it and over the course of a lifetime your your core self is uh is shaped by the small decisions you make every day and when most of us think about life in the terms it's it's embarrassing because most of us screw up so often this is all helpful i'm still a little confused if if i want an example of this uh vocabulary besides appreciating the little things that go unnoticed what what are some actual things we could discuss that improve this vocabulary i look at the examples of virtue around and i was down in waco and there's a guy named jimmy derrell down there who had a church and it was comfortable normal church and but there were a lot of homeless people in waco and he said you know the homeless people should be in church but he couldn't get the homeless people to come to church so he moved his church to the homeless people they call it church under the bridge because it's under a highway bridge where the homeless people live and that's an act of of self-sacrificial love because he's doing something hard and he lives in a building with um a homeless shelter attached to his home 60 homeless people and he has built a supermarket to cure the food desert that was there and what marks him i was with somebody in waco early morning and he just walked up to her and he grabbed her by the shoulders and said i love you you're the best and so here's someone who's seeing someone else with dignity who's reaching out emotionally reaching out practically it's just a gift and the life as dietrich bonhoeffer said life lived well is life of gift and we tend to live transactionally i do this for me you just and you do this for you but if you live life as gift that's just a very practical way of walking through the world and jimmy durrell lives that way and you look at him you think wow that's a really remarkable person he does not have a lot of income he doesn't have he dresses in sort of a sloppy way but um he sees other people very deeply and opens their heart to them and that's just daily in practice and it's it's not easy i was with a woman yesterday who started a school which is called the fuji's and it's for refugee kids and it started sort of haphazardly there were these refugees that came to her town and she started a soccer league and they called the team the fujis and she saw some needs some of the kids their parents were unemployed and the kids were coming to the soccer games anxious and so she took care of they tried to get the parents jobs then she opened her school and then one thing led to another and she's got neighborhood uh school which helps all the parents and then she opened another in atlanta and she's moving to cleveland and it's just radiating care in ways that in her case are kind of heroic but she says listen it's it's not it's not a heroic life you can see me starting schools for refugee kids but what i see is i'm in the corners cleaning up where the kid threw up it's not easy it's not fun it's not glamorous it's just extending care and a lot of the people i admire most extend care to non-kin which most of us extend only to kin so most of us are pretty loving to our families but there are some people who have a super abundance of care and they they if they see a kid lonely on the street they extend care to that kid they see a homeless person they extend care and it's it's a capacity of compassion and and care that is beyond what most of us do and when you see them you just that's what a good life looks like one of my heroes is a woman named dorothy day who spent 60 years not only serving the poor but living in poverty living with the poor and she did it because she was when her daughter was born she had a sort of a messy young adulthood when her daughter was born she wrote an essay about what it feels like to give birth this is back in the 1920s and she wrote if i had sculpted the greatest sculpture composed the greatest symphony or written the greatest novel i could not have felt the more exalted creator than i did when they placed my child in my arms with this vast flood of love and joy came a need to worship and to adore she needed somebody to thank for the vast flood of love and joy she felt and she became a catholic at that moment and the church commanded her as jesus did and the beatitudes to live with the poor and serve the poor and so she spent 60 years doing that and that's you know that's not something most of us are capable of but it's it's a model we could do a little more in that direction didn't she fall in love and then have to break up early yeah the man who was the father of her child um was not religious hated her for becoming religious uh he was a materialist and um she basically had to leave him and in her case she suffered too much sometimes people want to live a life of of chastity of asceticism and they make service to the poor seem like a horrible burden and sometimes she could do that other times she wrote a book called duty to delight and she could also take great delight in in music and other things the people i know who say are serving the poor serving the homeless they have what richard rohr calls a bright sadness they've seen the worst that life offers to people but they go about their life with a sort of brightness and they tend to be extremely cheerful and they they they're like coaches in a soccer team they're just you are great you are doing great uh and so i i've certainly the people i admire most have that that bright sadness because their life is gift and and their life is deep relationship their life is care and it's a life of emotions all on the surface and as a result they um they they are up nights worrying about the people in their care and they can't detach themselves but it's a it's certainly a rich life you know the one of the transformational moments in my life was um being invited over to a house of a couple named kathy and david in washington dc in about 2015 and i was then divorced and single and sort of on a downward valley of life and uh kathy and david had this kid named santi who was in the dc public schools and he had a friend whose mom had some health and other issues and often this friend didn't have a place to say or foodie so they said well he can stay with us and then that kid had a friend and that kid had a friend by the time i walked over to their dinner on a thursday night in 2015 there were 40 kids or 25 kids around the dinner table and various kids sleeping around the house and they had created a chosen family and i walk into the hallway and i meet the first kid and his tall kid named ed very charismatic and i reach out to shake his hand and he says to me we don't shake hands here we hug here and so i'm not the huggiest guy on the face of the earth but i learned to hug with them and i went back for years after years we've been having dinner on thursday nights we go to vacations together and what was transformational about that community was that their the kids were emotionally transparent that they beamed love at you like flowers beaming into the sun and they demanded you beam it back and so there was a just an opening up of care and relationship and i took my daughter there and she said that's the warmest place i've ever been i took a friend there who's been doing youth programs for 50 years and he said i've been doing youth work for 50 years i've never seen a program turn around a life only relationships turn around lives so this community our community is like a chosen family we have our own families which we love and cherish we've got another family filled with people we care about and so we sort of help each other along and the father figure of this family this guy named david when one of the young women her kidney failed he gave her a kidney and that's what i mean about extending care even to non-kin and to me that these are the kinds of lives that you don't have to get all theological or you don't get all philosophical about what goodness looks like but when you see it right in front of you you say i'd like to be a little more that way and so to me that's what moral education is just finding people who are i think wow that's really admirable i i'm not going to do that but i could do a little so you gather wisdom from others can you explain how you do this yeah i read a lot so i travel a lot so when i'm on planes i um i'm reading and i'm marking and so i don't read the way normal people do i read to collect wisdom and some of it's just anything that i found useful for myself sometimes it's stories that uh exemplify a process i'm trying to understand and sometimes they're unusual so for example dostoyevsky the russian novelist was a guy who was super ambitious in early life and he was a revolutionary and the czar arrested him and they sentenced him to death with his the other people in his uh radical group and they put him one morning in coffin where like in shrouds and they marched him out to the square and they were about to shoot when a horse arrived and said the zara spared you you'll do hard labor but you will not be executed today and he went back to his tell and he sang at the top of his lungs and he wrote a letter to his brother right away and said i've just seen that all that i worked for in my life uh is all wrong and he had this revelation about how to live life and what mattered in life he had a revelation about what mattered on other people and how to see other people and he went and did five years of hard labor in siberia in those five years he was never alone for one second but he came back and he'd had a moral education and he was able to write crime and punishment uh brothers karemots off and all the other books because he'd had an episode which was a moral education in a particularly dramatic form and if anybody wants to know well how do people get better in life well he's a very concentrated form of that so it allows you to think about it and see and so i'm always looking for stories like that that are teaching us um how to get a little better and they're instructed for me and when i find something that's instructor for me i pass it around so talk about the period when you were writing the road to character what were you learning yeah i was uh writing the road character just to understand it started out as a book on humility because uh you know i have discussions with my friends about what's the most important trait a person can have and some people think it's courage that if you don't have courage to lead life then you can't achieve anything but i think it's humility and i think our society is torn apart by egotism but humility to me is not thinking lowly of yourself in some parts it's not thinking about yourself at all but my favorite saying about humility is it's being radically honest about yourself from a position of other centeredness i just say the people who are able to get outside themselves and see where they're really good at and see what they're really bad at really honestly so abraham lincoln was a very humble man there was a moment where he was trying to get one of his generals general mcclellan to fight more aggressively in the civil war and he visited mcclellan at his home with his aide john hay and mcclellan didn't come down to see him and lincoln the president is waiting in his living room for 45 minutes and the guy doesn't come down and eventually just goes to sleep and hey is incensed he's he's insulted the dignity of the president and lincoln's not bothered he said if i get somebody to fight it's not about my dignity i'm happy to sit here and so lincoln had a real humility about himself he knew he was really good at some things his brain his speaking ability but he didn't he was didn't put himself at risk it was not his ego on display that needed to be flattered and so what's what's valuable about that is humility and so i wanted to write about people who were pathetic at age 20 but by 70 they were magnificent and i wanted to understand how this process came about that some people who could be scattered and disorganized as young adults seem really remarkably admirable as older adults one of the people i wrote about who was a favorite of mine was a woman named frances perkins and she was sort of a do-gooder but she was sort of rootless in her 20s she wanted to do some good for society didn't quite know how to do it and then one day in the early part of the 20th century she's having tea in washington square park in lower manhattan and she and the other ladies she's having tea with um hear a commotion so they rush outside and uh they see a fire and they've stumbled one uh on one of the most famous fires in american history the triangle shirtwaist factory fire they had put up a factory all these seamstresses were there and they had done terrible exit avenues bad regulations violated all the codes and she went to the fire and saw 115 odd people burned to death because they were trapped in this factory and she saw about 40 or 50 of them decide rather than to burn to death they're going to leak to their deaths so she watches them leap to their deaths and it was her agency moment it was a moment as they say a call within a call there are some moments where we sort of know what we're going to do but then everything gets clarified and crystallized and she decided at that moment that worker safety was going to be the calling of her life and worker rights and so when you see that and then she spent the next six years doing worker safety and worker rights and became secretary of labor under franklin roosevelt the first woman in the u.s cabinet in history and when you see that you think oh a call within a call there are moments when we're sort of marching along but then something burning happens that outrages us and we become indignant and our ambition is focused and so for perkins after that moment she would work with anybody make any compromise to get to advance the cause of worker safety and worker rights and so you think oh so that's how some people get admirable they they respond to a moment of anger and indignation at some social wrong and they get laser beam focused and so when you read these stories you think oh that's how the process happens so you know as a writer you're just trying to learn from people who've been through stuff that's bigger than anything you've been through and trying to apply it in your own life and what happened to your life when that book was completed you know i think that was the first time when the road character came out it was the first time i was really speaking in public about moral things and there are downsides to speaking in public about moral things you can come off as super preachy and i sometimes do that you can come off as self-righteous and i sometimes do that um and you can come off as a hypocrite because i'm writing about all these amazing people but i know in my own life i don't live up to it most of the time but i still think it's important to hold up the standard and i think our culture is over politicized and under-moralized that we spend a lot of time paying attention every little political scandal and every little political poll but we don't pay attention pay attention to the things that are really most important what's the quality of our character what's the quality of our relationships and so i think one of my callings or one of the assignments i've given myself is to try to shift the conversation a little to the extent i'm able more in the direction of moral conversation how do we treat each other well what's an admirable life look like and so i've written a lot less about politics over the last few years though donald trump has made that hard but um but i do think that's sort of what i'm here to do and i feel that's an important thing to do and i feel there's a great hunger for that and so the road to character sold twice as much as any other book i've written and it wasn't because it was better it was because there's a hunger for well how do we talk about character and people understood that yeah i wanted to figure out how to talk about that and i certainly didn't have it figured out but i had stories of 10 or 15 individuals who had great character and from whom we can all learn one thing or another does it really matter does does living a moral life really matter yes i you know one of my core beliefs and one of the things that has lost in our society is the concept of a soul and i think the core driver of all our lives is the desire for meaning what viktor frankl called man's search for meaning and the soul i don't ask you to believe in god or not believe in god it's not my department but i ask people to believe that there's some piece of them that has no size weight color or shape but which has infinite value and dignity and slavery is wrong because it's an attempt to obliterate another person's soul sexual assault isn't just an assault on physical molecules it's an insult to another person's soul we're all any unequal in our brainpower we're all unequal in our physical strength we're all completely equal at the level of the soul and what the soul does is it yearns for goodness i've interviewed a lot of really bad people in my journalistic career i've never met anybody who didn't want to be good and even the people who've done terrible sins have all these rationalizations about what they why what they did was actually good and so i think for all of us we want to think we made a good difference in the world we served some good and if we don't feel that our life feels meaningless and we get tortured by it and so we've fallen into a trap which i think we're pulling out of where we used to think we're driven by the things economists think we're driven by like the desire for money for status for power but i think most of us are driven by the desire to try to have a meaningful life and the desire to live in right relationship with others and if you ignore those things then your nature will catch up to you at some point and uh you'll feel find yourself adrift you'll find you'll wonder if your life has purpose and meaning and that's a very horrible state to be in but to you david brooks what is what is the soul uh the soul is is this mysterious dissatisfaction uh the the soul is the thing that yearns and that keeps me reading all these books about moral philosophy because i want to understand it better i want to behave better i was at penn station in new york on the subway line right near penn station if anybody's ever been to penn station new york where amtrak is in the subway it's like the most soulless place on the face of the earth i was in this crowded thing early in the morning we were all walking like ants through the tunnels and suddenly i became aware of this fact that every person around me had a soul that in some of them their souls were singing some of them their souls were sick some of them their souls were sanctified but each person of all these thousands of people had this completely infinitely dignified piece of themselves that made them special in who they are and when i do journalism i couldn't care about my stories if um i was just writing about sacks of genetic material i mean what's the point the stories only have relevance and importance because i'm writing about human beings who have souls and their the destiny of their lives really matters and that's the enchanted piece of life that i think if we lose the concept of a soul we sort of lose the concept of how to treat each other because you you want to treat someone well because their their life has such dignity and if we just treat them as physical material things then why treat anybody well and so to me that concept when you've lost the concept of the soul you've really lost a lot and so i fight to preserve that concept it is the little voice inside our head that we all have is that the soul or is that the mind yeah i yeah i identify the soul as i mean it has no space there's no thing in us but i identify the soul by the by the what it yearns for and so these are metaphors but the mind yearns for understanding we all want to figure out the world and a little kid will look at a car and try to understand how the car works um the heart yearns for fusion with another and the soul yearns for goodness um you know and sometimes the soul feels sick uh i was very earlier in the week a friend of mine had his father die and i didn't show up for him and i should have gone out of my way to be with him and i didn't and i did i just felt crappy and so that's my soul feeling sick uh and um sometimes the soul sings i i love this quote from a rabbi wolf kelman who marched with king at selma and he said we felt that the most transcendental feeling they were marching across the bid with king and suddenly they were swept up in this group sensation that things changed for the good that progress is possible and he said that was the most spiritual transcendental experience of my life and the peace of him that was singing was the soul and these are just metaphors they're not there's no physical part of us but i don't understand human behavior without that concept because i see so many people trying to lead good and caring lives often at great sacrifice and it wouldn't make sense unless they had some piece of them driving them to do that and that set of desires to lead a good and meaningful life i call that set of desires the soul that's great can you describe what the first mountain is yeah the first mountain is the mountain we seek to climb most of us early in our lives we get out of school and we want to establish our identity we want to know who we are we want to achieve success we want to make a difference in the world we want to get good at our job and that's the normal thing to do and so a lot of us spend the early parts of our adulthood or the earlier parts of our life getting good grades trying to be good at school trying to get into a career trying to establish yourself in your career and it's a perfectly good thing to do but in my case you get to the top of your career and i had way more career success than i ever thought i was like this ain't so great i remember the first i wrote a book in 2000 called bobo's in paradise and i was driving around la on my book tour and i got a call from my publisher and it said you're going to be on the new york times bestseller list and so i want to be a writer since i was seven this was one part of the dream like to get on the best seller list and i felt nothing it was nothing like getting on the bessel list was some thing that was happening externally to me and it was sort of a disappointment and but we all know people have achieved great success and their life is is is not going well we have these celebrity suicides anthony bourdain kate spade and that first mountain doesn't satisfy and so a lot of people achieve success and it's just not satisfying some people fail they're no longer climbing their mountain and some people something happens that wasn't part of the original plan they have a cancer scare they lose a child and when that happens the desires of the first mountain to become corporate vice president or whatever just seemed trivial and so i think the first mountain is the part of life we're often good at which our society oriented surrounds but it's insufficient and then what is the valley the valley is when we all have valleys in our lives but the valley is the moment when you're suffering and the suffering carves off in the top soil that you use to cover up your heart and soul and it exposes the soft fertile flesh below and for some people it's the death of a loved one for some people it's getting fired it's for some people it's a public humiliation for me it was a combination of events that happened around 2013 when my marriage had ended my kids were leaving or had left for school college and all my friends had been in the conservative movement and they um i was no longer really part of the conservative movement anymore so i lost a lot of friends and so i was living alone and i did what any idiot would do in a moment of spiritual and relational crisis which was that i um tried to work my way through it i tried workaholism is a very good distraction from any spiritual or emotional problem and it's what a lot of people do when i did that and so the story i tell is that if you went to my kitchen in my apartment where i was living alone and you opened the drawer where there should have been silverware in my kitchen it was just post-it notes and where there should have been plates it was just um stationary because i was just working working working and that when i think about that that's a metaphor for a life misspent and there are a lot of valleys in life i lost my mother a couple years ago and that's a dark moment but there are different kinds of valleys where it's your own fault where you've been living by the wrong values and people who go through those values have to do a more recalculation of what am i doing with my life and what do i need to get out of this and i think the valley you know there are certain moments you do certain things you do in the valley one of the things you do is you throw yourself on your friends and i had a friend who was a great listener and we would have these late night conversations on the phone and he i would describe a problem and he would ask me six questions and then i'd expect in the rhythm of the conversation for him to give me some advice but then i need to ask another six questions and i would think oh that's what good listening is it's asking the next six questions and so that was very important to have friends like that and when i was in that valley i felt oh i'm being such a pain in the rear to my friends but now that i'm out of the valley when a friend throws themselves on me i'm delighted because it's a chance to um deepen our friendship and be of service and so it's always a mistake to think you're being a pain when you throw yourself on your friends i've learned that and then the other thing you have to do is go out into the wilderness and spend some time in solitude these moments solitude is sometimes necessary and there's a rabbinic story about moses who was a shepherd and one of his little lambs took off like a gazelle and wins the wilderness and moses had to chase it deep into the wilderness and the rabbis tell us the lamb is most himself he needs to go off and be alone to um to find himself and the reason you need to be alone is if you live life as performance to try to impress other people when you go off into the wilderness there's nobody to perform for uh the trees and the mountains they don't care and so you have to go out there and um and not be the gifted child anymore just be on your own where everything else falls apart and as one scholar said after that has crumbled then you're ready to be loved and einstein had a good phrase that our problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness at which we created them you have to get a bigger level of consciousness and that's a hard process because you have to crack open your old self and try to be a new self and i read a guy named henry now and uh and i was in the valley and i re somebody recommended this book and now one said you have to stay in the pain to see what it has to teach you i was like screw that i don't want to get out of the pain but and i tried but i think what noun is essentially right that you have to you have to rest in that and see what you know why you got to this place and so there's throwing yourselves on the friend on your friends there's going out in the wilderness and sort of cracking open your own self and then the final thing i learned in the valley is that you have to be lifted out of the valley very few of us can climb our way out on our own but usually there's some loved one around or some group of people who reach down into the valley and they embrace you they give you a hand and they help pull you out and but you have to be willing to be led by those people and to be open to those people and dependent on those people and that's how the valley ends there's one phrase you used in your book you said it's gotta crack you or crack you open those moments of suffering in the valley of moments of painful moments in our life can either break you or break you open and the breaking is when you get fearful some people something bad happens and and some people just get fearful and they close in on themselves and they want to be invulnerable so they close in and they develop this coding of hard brittle stuff and often they react angrily and they lash out at others because they're fearful and there's a saying that pain that is not transformed gets transmitted and often you're around people who are very hostile and angry and usually something has touched the meat deep inside and they just covered it over but other people are broken open they discover at those low moments the the really vulnerable parts of themselves that are the nerves that are exposed and they decide i'm going to live in a way that they stay exposed because when i expose these soft tender nerves i i'm able to relate to other i'm able to be a better person i'm able to be a more caring and loving person i had a guy from australia write to me and he said the worst moments of my life was when my wife died young and he said in the years since i read a guy named parker palmer and he said i learned what palmer had to teach me which was you have to listen to your life and see what your life has to teach you and he said this guy from australia said i feel almost guilty at how much moral and spiritual growth happened after the death of my wife because i profited from her death but i i lead a different kind of life i speak in a different register i value different things and i think there's an example of a guy who was broken open and who something really bad happened to it and he benefited in a weird way and if you ask people go around and ask people what made you who you are it's never nobody ever says you know i took a vacation to hawaii and it was great and that changed my personality it made me who i am nobody ever says that people say i went through a hard moment of struggle and it refocused my life or i was in the marine corps i was in war i struggled with a very ill child i had a cancer scare i covered john mccain he was in prison camp and a little of the the shallow frat boy that john mccain was went away in that prison camp and a deeper register entered his life and most people have had that moment it's very rare that you find someone over age 30 or 40 that hasn't had that moment and been changed by it so then you leave hopefully you leave the valley and you enter your second mountain what is the second mountain yeah if the first mountain is about acquiring things getting a big career and getting a name getting an identity the second mountain is about contributing things uh the first mountain is about climbing up the second mountain is reaching down and helping people who were struggling themselves the first mountain is about ego the second mountain is about an orientation about others so i met a guy in kentucky a few months ago who was a banker and he lost his job and now he works helping men come out of prison to re-enter the world and when he he's on the second round when he talks about that experience his eyes just glow in the way they never did around banking and if he hadn't been fired or faced bankruptcy whatever it was i'm not sure he would have reoriented his life because you know the momentum of life just keeps you going and you get a sort of short-term reward for being a successful banker i mean you're a big person in your community and if when he's going to wherever the prison is and helping the guys who are coming out there's probably not any reward at all there's not any status reward and certainly no financial reward but to see him is to see a guy whose eyes are lighting up and this is a pattern i see again and again as i travel around and talk to people that um their lives really did have two halves so you've said i can recognize first and second mountain people explain what you see uh with a first mountain person um they want to know what you think of them and the first mountain person they've got a certain rhythm and pace and they're somewhat hard to reach and so they um they're sort of clawing their way and the things they talk about uh and i see this where i live in washington you go to a coffee shop and you overhear conversations and 90 of the conversations are about career strategy and i'm all for having a great career but really 90 and so those those people are living a certain kind of life but then you look at somebody else and you see that you see their eyes are locked into another person and they're talking in hush tones and they they look at life a little differently so for example one of the stories i read in a book called practical wisdom was about a hospital janitor named luke and luke cleaned the rooms in on the floor of his hospital and one of the rooms has a kid who was in a coma that he wasn't coming out of and his dad would sit there just sit vigil over him and one day luke cleaned the room but his dad was out getting a smoke and the dad later came up to luke in the afternoon and said he didn't clean my kid's room now the first mountain response is to say yeah i did clean your room uh but you were getting a smoke and in the first mountain mode you think of my job my job is cleaning rooms but the second mountain mode is saying my job is not cleaning rooms my job is providing comfort to patients and their families and so in that case you go back to the room and you clean it for a second time that day so he can have the comfort of seeing you clean it and that's what luke did and so it's a very subtle difference it's how do i see my job is it doing a transaction so i can make some money and go home or am i serving patients and their families and that's just this little shift in perception that it can actually change a lot of how people live you said that during your years in the valley you were radicalized can you explain yeah i mean i i think our society is much more screwed up than i thought that if you look at our society right now you've see a 30 rise in suicide rate 30 or a 70 rise in teenage suicide rate since 2011. you see mental health facilities in every college i go to being swamped the number of people who say they're depressed is doubled in a generation and so what you see is a lot of people in a lot of pain who are expressing themselves partly of suicide partly as depression partly as opioid addiction it's 72 000 people die of opioid addiction every year so that's more people dying more per year of opioid addiction than died in the entire vietnam war and that's happening every year and that's a social problem people cut off from meaningful lives people cut off from each other it's a cultural problem it's a moral problem and it's a relational problem and how have we got to a point where we not only lead the world in narcissism we lead the world in depression given all that we have in this country uh and maybe it took me going through it to ex no observe it in the world around me but it's certainly evident in the world around you and you know i talk to you know people are managers in businesses i i overheard them asked what's the thing you need in your department and the person answered a shrink my employees need mental health and so this is i don't quite understand why it's all happened maybe it's a smartphone i don't know but something pervasive is happening in the culture that makes us feel more isolated more alienated more distrustful more tribal uh and more alone uh and that's i think just cultural values that have kind of run amok can you explain how you make yourself strong in your weakest places yeah i think what you do is you um i think we have to analyze what's our weakness and tell a story about that and we make sense of our lives by telling a story of our lives and so for me i think my one of my weaknesses is a tendency toward shallowness and so the story i tell is someone who's like struggled against that um other people you know psychologists have a phrase some people need tightening and some people named loosening and some people their emotions are all on the surface dorothy day one of my heroines when she was a young woman when she read a novel she didn't just read the novel she started acting like the characters in the novel and unfortunately she read a lot of dostoyevsky and so she was like emotionally a wreck living in a garret sleeping around two suicide attempts two abortions living like one of these lost dostoevsky characters and so she needed tightening some of us who are overly inhibited and overly reticent we need loosening we need to be loosened up and so you got to tell a story about what uh that core problem you face is and i think that's part of um what moral development is just like telling a story about what your problem is and what you need to work on and then taking action about that so another hero of mine is george marshall who was who ran the u.s army during world war ii and his core problem was ambition he was just ruthlessly ambitious and so we've said it made a rule in the army i'm never going to advocate for myself if somebody wants to promote me fine i'm not going to advocate for myself and in world war ii he wanted to take the command of of operation overlord which was the d-day invasion and he really wanted this job and churchill and stalin told him he was going to get it and fdr pulled him in his office and said would you like to run operation overlord and instead of just saying yes he said my own personal desires have no bearing on your decision and roosevelt asked him four times and four times marshall said it's not about me you do what's right for you and the country and fdr took the the chance to give the job to eisenhower instead of marshall and marshall was crushed they said one of his biographers said it was the only day in the war he went home early because he really wanted that command but this was his code and he became one of the most admired americans of the 20th century because he was able to live by a code he knew where where his weakness was going to be and he he took action to make sure it didn't bring him down can you discuss how too much emphasis is placed on mind and reason and not enough on heart and soul the things that bind us together yeah well starting in the 18th century we had this image of us as rational creatures the enlightenment at least the french enlightenment rene descartes he first thought that the mind was separate from emotions the mind is separate from the physical body and that the mind was was the beautiful thing about human nature and so he decided he could create a whole philosophy which was um i think therefore i am i'm going to rationally and logically think my way through my life and i'll direct my life as my reason tells me to direct it and if our reason was really that powerful we would follow through on all our new year's resolutions we decided hey i'm going to stop eating donuts and we would actually stop i'm going to stop drinking and we would actually stop most of the time when we screw up it's not because we don't know what to do we know what to do we don't have the willpower they don't have the drive and the desire to know what to do and i think one of the things i've learned in life by reading antonio dimazio and many other people is that knowledge is plentiful but motivation is scarce that it's getting the desire to do the right thing and getting the motivation to do the right thing that's really the tricky part we know we should be kind to strangers we should not just walk by that homeless guy but we're busy and we're shy and we're a little uncomfortable by the homeless guy and so we don't do what we know we should do and getting the motivation to do what we should do is the hard part and so to me we're not primarily thinking creatures we're primarily feeling creatures and desiring creatures and this is saint augustine said this 1500 years ago we are desi we are like just desire and one of the tasks in life and this is how augustine put it is to educate your desire so you want the right things and so augustine said we all have a lot of loves and we all know some loves are higher than others and if you if a friend tells you a secret and you blab it at a dinner party then you're putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship and we know that's wrong that's putting a lower love above a higher love and so what augustine said with great wisdom 15 or 1600 years ago is that you can't replace a low love by saying with a no if you uh are smoking you can't say i'm just going to stop you have to replace it with a higher love and so for a lot of people they stop smoking when they start having kids and they don't want to smoke around their kids because they love their kids more than they love cigarettes and so the way we improve in life is often replacing a lower love with a higher love and that's another way you learn to how moral progress happens and what is deep love well it a deep love is is um a completely um a passionate love and one of the things that entrances me is that when people fall in love the first few months are often like the rock music video i i love a rock music music video by the gugu dolls called come to me and it's about that passion of that first dating love and i read a study recently that 15 of people have that love all through their lives they can be married for 50 or 60 years and the complete passion never goes away and those are the lucky people and occasionally you'll see a couple in their 60s or 70s or 80s and they look at each other with the the same passionate love they did when they're 18 and they've tended their relationship well the greeks had three words for love and and it's a helpful distinction they observed the first kind of love they said was philia that's friendship the second kind of love is eros and that's passion and desire and the third kind of love is agape that's charity and just giving love and one of the books i read said if you're gonna marry somebody try to have all three if you just have eros that's that's a hookup that's not a real marriage if you just have philia that's a friendship but it's not a marriage try to have all three and that's i found that's a useful way to think about the decisions who you're going to marry who you're really going to devote yourself to in life so we're talking now about moral joy and you've mentioned yo-yo ma but i was hoping you could talk about a couple more you mentioned jeffrey canada yeah so there's some people who have joy where it's just a second where you had a moment a great thing happened you're lost in nature and it's just like wow that was an amazing moment but some people joy is their permanent outlook they're just grateful for the people they're around and they live their life as just service and so they walk through life i was just with this guy in waco he's fresh on my mind jimmy durrell and you see him walking amongst the homeless and you see him walking among the poor you see him walking among the rich and he just like peers into people and he bores down on them and he's just all enthusiasm he's like a cheerleader of life and he sort of got himself out of the way and he's just a bright warm sunny person and so i i see these people who just live life as gratitude and they live in horrible circumstances but they're they're orient oriented around the right thing and the right thing is building into intimate relationship with somebody else and they force you with their good vibe to reflect good vibe back on you and so i meet these people once a month uh jeffrey canada who founded harlem children's zone i was sitting next to the dalai lama at a washington function and that guy just radiated joy all the time he he sat there and laughed for no apparent reason and i was sitting next to him and i would laugh and he would laugh and i would laugh and it wasn't clear what was happening because i had nothing to say to the guy but he radiates joy and if you see him on tv you just see him smiling and he'll there's a little childishness about a lot of these people including him i have a friend who's an economist and the dalai lama had him he visited the dalai lama and wherever in india and the dalai lama just grabbed him by the cheeks and they pushed their foreheads together and this is usually not what grown men do with each other but there's an openness and a joyousness toward life that that um he just carries around with him everywhere he goes so can you describe what the weave project is and how you got involved yeah i was writing these columns and everything i wrote about was about social isolation it was the rising suicide rate it was neighborhoods breaking down it was families breaking down it was the tribalism in our politics and the hatred from one tribe to another and i thought the social fragment the social fabric is just fragmenting before our eyes and then i had the realization that but it's being solved at the local level by these people we call weavers who are just really good at building community and so i wanted to understand how can we lift them up and illuminate their example learn from their values and spread them around and nationalize their effect and so we spent a year to visiting just the best people on earth and people who do live lives of service one woman in chicago a woman named aisha butler she lived in this tough neighborhood in chicago called englewood and the bullets were coming through her window from time to time and she was scared for her nine-year-old daughter and she told her husband let's get out of here let's go to atlanta it's just too dangerous here we can't raise a family here and so they were going to go to atlanta and then they um were about to move out they had a barbecue said goodbye to all their neighbors and one day she was looking across out of her window at the empty lot across the street and she saw a little girl in a pink dress playing with broken bottles and tires and she turns to her husband and says we can't leave that we can't just be another family who left that so they cancelled the move she said i'm going to get involved in my community i'm going to do something for this community and so she googles volunteer in englewood and she finds an organization then she start has another and has another and now she is the head of the big englewood community organization which is called rage and now when you go to eaglewood and you go to the stores there's t-shirts that say proud daughter of englewood proud son of englewood it's still in some ways a challenging community but they've got some spirit there and one of the things she does is she takes the empty lot of which there are 5 000 in her neighborhood and one by one they buy them from the city and they turn them into parks they turn them into something and so here's a woman who said i'm going to fix this place and so we could all learn from that kind of example and to me the weavers are doing good in their community but they're also cultural revolutionaries and moral revolutionaries who are living in a different way by a different set of values not by the hyper-individualistic competitive values that a lot of us are raised in but by much more relational values and i and we travel around we meet them we bring them together we lift them up a lot of them are lonely because the work is hard and unglamorous and they're underfunded and we try to support them by bringing them together so they can say oh there's other people like me who do this work and i think you know my theory of change is that culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and spending time around with these weavers is transformational and you want to say i would like to live a little the way they're living and i think social change will happen as we change the culture and i think the weavers are the vanguard of of showing us a better way to live and showing a way toward a better america and did the weed project start did were you part of the start of that or was it a was it around and then you were writing about it and then you got involved yeah so i i helped start it and partly it was just like 45 000 people kill themselves every year it's like a silent pearl harbor and 72 000 dying of opiate addiction we're all called upon to do something a little extra and so my normal life is just writing and i thought wow if i can do anything beyond writing and i can do a different kind of communication i'm not going to be one of the trenches but at least i can lift up the people in the trenches to show this way of living and so the aspen institute um was looking for a their former head a guy named walter isaacson had retired and they were looking for a head and i'm not qualified to run the aspen institute because i've managed one person in my life so i'm not a manager or anything like that but i said listen america is divided by ravines you guys are in the bridge building business this is what you should be doing and they said well we're not going to hire you to run this place but why don't you try doing what you just said and so it got started that way and so we built a team and we traveled around the country and now we we gather them together online and in person we try to build curricula to train people we're creating a guidebook where the the expertise of these community builders it can be all concentrated and they can better learn from each other and so we're just trying to be supportive in any random way we can think of so we're now into the weavers we've defined what what the program is can you define what a weaver is and can you tell me how weavers are healers yeah uh a weaver is someone who's building community but really the core act of weaving is um seeing someone deeply in being deeply seen so it's taking a spot where there's distance and creating a relationship and so for example there's a woman named sarah hamminger who grew up in indiana and when she was growing up her dad reported on their church pastor that he was a embezzler and instead of getting rid of the pastor the family shunned sarah and her family so for eight years of her childhood people in her own community wouldn't talk to her when she was at parties she would have to sit separately in separate rooms from even members of her own family so she suffered severe loneliness she's grows up becomes a phd student at johns hopkins in baltimore and she's on a bus one day and she's passing a high school called dunbar high school and she's looking at the kids outside the school and she sees their loneliness and she says i know exactly what they feel like and they're lonely and i'm lonely maybe they'll be my friends so she gets the names of 450 underperforming high school kids in baltimore and she gets them into a program with pizza give some pizza and they uh she surrounds them with relationship so four adults who are sort of parent figures and four more who are grandparents and 12 more collaborators this intricate social network around and so where there was distance these kids are now surrounded by adults mentors and friends and basically a second family and so she's a weaver she's someone who's taken isolation and replaced it with relationship and community and one of the great things about her program is it's not only a structure it's an ethos they have a saying called show all the way up so if you're in a meeting you lay all your crap on the table you're completely vulnerable with everybody else around you and that even happens with the people on the board and so she's got a woman on the board named michelle who had something bad happen in her childhood which was she was abused by her dad and she has asian americans you say i was glad i had thick hair because nobody could see the welts on my head from where he punched me and but she never told her husband that she never told her kids that but on the boar on the board of of thread the showing up ethos influenced her and so she loosened up and told them on the board about her childhood and then told her husband and their kids and she wrote a letter about it which she gave to me and showed to me and it's really about thread has changed her and taken a life that was sort of repressed and given her a life of thick relationship and one of the um things that happened to her when she was down in the dumps as a child attempting suicide other things she listened to elton john and that was the soundtrack of her misery and later in life she took her 13 year old daughter to an elton john concert in baltimore and she started weeping and she was weeping because her life has turned out so much better than she thought it would she now has a life full with rich relationships with her kids and her community and she never could have predicted that she was 13. and in part because thread changed her culture and her mindset and weavers do that that's one of the things that's great about them and what is threat threat is this organization that helps these 450 underperforming kids in baltimore and surrounds them with 2 000 volunteers and so they take people from all around the city and they just connect them and so the volunteers will pick them up in the morning driving to school if the kid leaves school they call the volunteer the volunteer leaves work picks up the kid drives them back to school basically all the things parents or cousins or grandparents would do these volunteers are doing for those kids and they they're you can't leave thread it's like a family you're there once you're in you're in for life or at least 10 years and so these people are in each other's lives doing the mundane things getting a new phone finding some food helping get art for an art project it's just mundane stuff but it's taking people who are disconnected and giving them really rich family-like connections explain to me i'm just thread sounds like its own thing which is then a part of the weavers yeah so basically all around the country if you go to any town and say who's trusted here people will take you to the person who was binding up the community in some places it's a formal organization like thread in baltimore in some cases it's just someone who is who helps people in the community out out of a sense of caring for those around them just out of a sense of love your neighbor so in columbia heights in washington dc a neighborhood in washington dc there's a guy who works in the parking rush he takes the money in the parking garage but his hobby is understanding how the dc government works so if somebody needs a building permit or is having a problem with the city they go to the guy in the parking garage and he's like a node of their community and i found that in many neighborhoods there's a miss tompkins and miss tompkins is this old lady kind of tough and she's the one who's on the block when somebody uh is the kids are playing the music too out she tells them to turn down the music and everybody's sort of afraid of miss tompkins that everybody sort of loves miss tompkins too and healthy community got to miss tompkins and basically they they assume responsibility for the neighborhood if they're someone who's suffering something in the neighborhood they're the ones who are bringing over the food there's a woman we met in chicago who she had 75 kids over to her apartment most afternoons just doing her homework because i needed a place to do homework another guy in chicago named charles perry served 20 odd years in prison came back and uh he he walks out among where the gangs are he gives them their number and says i'm going to help you lead a better life call me and so that guy's on call 24 7 ministering to these young men and trying to get them out of the gang activity some there's also in chicago there's an organization called becoming a man and they take young gang members 12 at a time put them around a room and they have a check-in where they go around the room and each of the guys men and women say how they're doing emotionally physically spiritually and intellectually and it's these guys are super armored up they're in gangs but they have to be vulnerable and they get in relationship and so what weavers are they come in all shapes and forms but they're rebuilding community and they're weaving relationship and by and large they're geniuses at relationship if people got into harvard for being really good at building relationships they would get into harvard because that's their magic skill and i just want to understand how they do it and i want to us all to learn from them and get a little better at that skill tell me the story of how you once asked your new york times readers whether they had found purpose in their lives and what was that reaction yeah i am i i've had a few times where i've just asked readers questions i'm curious about once i asked readers over 70 to grade themselves on their lives and i call it life reports and they uh we got about 5 000 essays people over 70 and the average grade for professional life was a minus and the average grade for personal life was b minus so people thought they'd done better at work than they had in their families and their friends and one of things i learned from that is the people who are happiest were those who had divided their lives into chunks and uh they said the next eight years are a chapter in my life what am i going to do with this chapter and the divisions were somewhat arbitrary but it was a way for them to think about and control their lives and plan their lives and then later i asked readers to say what's your purpose in life and i expected like when i think about my purpose it's to shift the conversation a little away from politics and more stuff about relationships and character another of my purpose is to spread the kind of alexander hamilton moderate republicanism that i believe in as a political philosophy and so i think my purpose is pretty well defined i was struck when people talked about their own purpose it was just i try to be nice to people it was very general and often it was very small one of the most moving descriptions of somebody's life purpose was a guy said i just i have a little backyard garden and i find pleasure in the smallest things just the small plants and tending to my own little garden and i was struck by how small most people's sense of purpose was they were humble they didn't want to seem to get above themselves and how frankly people were less articulate about what their purpose was than i expected i expect to like have grand designs i'm going to cure cancer i'm going to turn my town around i'm going to you know whatever i'm going to serve god but people were very small and somewhat inarticulate about purpose and i i think it's an exercise we don't ask ourselves a lot of the time what's what am i called to do here on this earth is gentleness a trait you've seen in people who have compassion i would say kindness but often kindness mixed with anger a lot of people go into this profession sometimes they were loved into it that somebody poured such love into them they just took it as a norm they're going to put love around them sometimes something really bad happened to them and they they think i'm going to make sure that doesn't happen other people i have a friend who they lost their son henry and they created an organization called hope for henry which goes to kids who are in the hospital and give bring superhero people in superhero costumes to the hospital so the kids can have a fun day even if they're suffering cancer what they tend to have most of all is extreme extroversion and so there's a guy in shreveport louisiana named mac mccarter and he uh when you walk into a coffee shop with mac the first time he's in the shop within 10 minutes he learns everybody's name the second time everybody thinks this is their best friend the third time they all want him to officiate their wedding like he's just like extremely extroverted and warm and a big presence and a big personality and mac is from shreveport which is a city that's terribly divided by economics and by race and so matt came back as an adult and he created this thing called community renewal international to re-weave the fabric of shreveport there are like 300 000 people in shreveport 55 000 are volunteers in his organization and so if you drive through shreveport there are a lot of signs that houses that have the lawn sign it says we care and that means they're the host family for that block and they have a settlement house in the poor areas where the kids um uh can come in the afternoons and a bunch of kids live there if they've got nowhere else to live if you've got a wee care button and the volunteers wear these we care button and you're in the elevator in shreveport you see somebody else with a we care button you you strike up a conversation and i was with a couple last night named eminent charpelle who are hosts of one of the families in shreveport and they have seven kids who live with them and then dozens who come to their home in the afternoons and charpelle used to be in the army and she teaches them to do drill marching and the kids love to do drill marching and so they are the neighborhood host family in in their neighborhood eminent sherpal are the only married couple in their neighborhood and so they they just gravitated and it's 24 7. and they happen to be up here in new york and all their kids were like texting when are you getting back we don't live without you and that's grinding exhausting work 24 7. at one point in their in their lives they went six months without getting without getting a paycheck because their organization had no money but as they say this is a lifestyle and one of the traits about weavers is uh vocational certitude i've never seen anybody do this kind of work and say you know i'm gonna do this for five years and then maybe i'll do something else they all say this is why i was put on this earth this is what i was called to i'm going to die doing this and so the weavers are know why they're here and they have a clear sense of of purpose which leads me to how is finding a vocation different than finding a career yeah a career invocation is different vocation's just bigger a career or something you look at your skills and you look at the marketplace and you say what skills can i develop what are my strengths and how can i apply them to the marketplace so i can make a decent living and there's nothing wrong with that of course a vocation you're called to uh it's not something you choose based on your skills it's something some problem in the world that calls for you to solve it that you feel outraged by or you feel somebody else needs and the distinction was made clear to me by viktor frankl who was a psychologist in the 30s in austria and he was a psychologist and he was captured by the germans and sent a concentration camp and he had always asked the question what do we want from life and when he got into the camp he realized that's the wrong question the right question is what does life ask of me what problem is in front of me that i am qualified to solve and that's being called and so he was a psychologist in a concentration camp and he started he should he decided he should study suffering as he said suffering became a problem i did not want to turn my back on and specifically he wants to know why some people got to the camp and died right away they just withered some people could live on months and months and years even in these harsh conditions what did the people who endured have and basically they had an imaginary relationship with something outside the camp so franco when he was doing his hard labor he would have conversations with his wife who was somewhere else he didn't even know if she was living or dead but he had these long conversations with her some people had a book they wanted to write outside the campaign they had something they were committed to outside of camp and so he said it what problem is demanding that you solve it and i have a friend named fred swaniker who's in africa and he grew up as a his mom was a teacher he started teaching at 18. and he came here to go to um college in the states and somehow he felt called that africa's big problem as a continent was lack of educational opportunities there weren't enough universities and he just felt my whole life has been pointing in this direction and so he said if if when you uh chew when you're called by a vocation first of all it should keep you up at night you should care about it so much that you can't stop thinking about it second it should be something your background uniquely prepares you to do and third it should be a big problem he said if you're fortunate enough to have some skills don't tackle a little problem tackle a big problem so fred swaniker started something called the african leadership academy a school for very talented kids from all over africa and now he's starting universities in mauritius and in kenya and across africa and he's tackled the gigantic problem education across the continent but he just he had no choice and people who have discovered their vacation have reached the point of the double negative i can't not do this this is my identity this is who i am and those people are are driven for life they are totally focused and it's very impressive to come across such people and one of your piece of pieces of advice is just start doing it you explain that yeah you know you um you got to most people find their vocation by going out to where the problems are i ran across a guy named antonio who a poor kid from california but he got in harvard and he had a harvard degree and he had a chance to go into a consulting business or something like that and he said i want to go out where the problems are and so he taught in the philadelphia school systems then he went to san jose and if you go out to where the problems are you'll find some problem that really grabs you and you never quite know what that problem is and but it's through a process of trial and error and very few people can conceptualize this intellectually they just are out there and they see a kid and it's just like them so i have another friend named kennedy odayde who's kenyan and he grew up in the this slum called kibera which is the biggest slum in nairobi and he had the worst childhood you could imagine he his mom died his grandmother raised and was killed when she was bit by a rabid dog he was in a gang where many of the gang members were killed because they were criminal gang he was adopted and rescued by a priest who then abused him and so he had an awful childhood got a lucky break got to go to wesleyan university in connecticut but still thought of all those kids in kibera and so he went back to guebara and created a kindergarten school for kids in kibera called shafgo and a lot of it was just that thing his childhood and the way he lived in his childhood was sort of the core of his life and he felt called back to to go do that and that's what he does and the odd thing about kennedy is he's had in many ways really horrific life but he's completely happy and he's he's another of these people who just radiates joy and he gives you a big hug and he uh he's just ambulant all the time and you think about how is he so evil in the having come from a life of abuse and near death and smoking a lot of glue with drugs but he said before she died my mom poured unconditional love into me and that's been my fuel ever since a lot of these stories have forgiveness in them yeah a lot of them have valleys and a lot of them have um the weavers have genuinely been through something some sometimes they just had a grandmother or somebody in their life who said you assume responsibility you see a poor person in your community that's your problem like most of us walk through the street and with that's a problem it's not our problem but they just assume responsibility and a lot of them have been through some some tough times which has given them the vulnerability so there's a guy i know in new orleans named dylan tet who was a in the war in the military suffer from ptsd really went through a hard time now he's created a community of men um who are dealing with their their trauma together there's a woman in also new orleans named lisa fitzpatrick she was a healthcare executive and she was driving one day and she saw a 10 and 11 year old kid on the sidewalk and they held up a gun and they shot her in the face and for them it was a gang initiation ritual they had to shoot somebody to get in the gang and she recovered and she realized you know i wasn't the victim here i was just collateral damage they were the victims because they had to shoot somebody to have a family and so she quit being a healthcare executive and she went to work in gang relations now works for the city of new orleans doing work of that nature and so a lot of them have had something really bad happen which awoke them to a calling and they they try to address the wrong that was done to them and so it doesn't happen other people and one of those weavers is sarah adkins can you tell me her story yeah sarah uh was a pharmacist living near athens ohio and she was out antiquing with her mom and she came home on a sunday evening and her husband was taking care of their kids but she hadn't heard from him she texted him but not getting anything back so she got into the house and it was dark and there were some packages by the front door which puzzled her and so she opened the door and said mommy's home and she noticed a mattress had been placed on the doorway to the to the stairs to their basement so she thought the kids were playing hide and seek with her and so she pulled aside the mattress she went down the stairs and she saw her husband sort of slumped over and nothing registered then she saw her older boy on a couch and it looked like there was chocolate on the couch and she touched him and um realized he was cold and she said she had a vision of just golden light at that moment and she ran upstairs to see her younger son and he was also in the crib he'd also been shot and she wouldn't she couldn't tell me what body what condition his body was in and her husband had killed their kids at himself and he'd killed their kids on saturday and not killed himself till sometime sunday afternoon and he wrote a note saying um this mental illness ends with me i'm not going to pass it down to the future generation he somehow had rationalized that he was doing somebody a favor and so she called and she for the next six months she she never slept alone she slept in the bed of her parents or somebody else the community just embraced her and she decided that she was so angry at him for what he'd done that she was going to make a difference in the world and she told me i do what i do now because i'm angry whatever that guy tried to do to me screw you i'm going to make a difference in the world and so now she has a free pharmacy she teaches students at ohio university she helps women who've suffered violence in their families and as she says i'm a woman on the edge it's been three or four years now and when you watch sarah her face is super responsive to any kind of passing emotion as you see it written all over and you see she's still strung um but she lives a life of great service and she's um she's quite a um a giftful and also very funny person she's a black humor about her situation uh that enables it to project us sometimes as jokes and she deals with that and we brought sarah uh together to d.c with one of our weaver conferences we try to bring people together so they can be resources for each other and there was a kid there sarah's white and quite short there's a kid there named darius baxter who's lost his dad at age nine two his dad was murdered by a mistress and darius now runs football camps for men so young african-american men will have dads and there was just a moment at the conference where darius is a tall african-american guy and sarah was a short white woman he like just draped his arm around her he's about 20 or 30 years younger than her and just offered a benediction over her and it's people who've been through the valley together but have come out with with knowledge and so a lot of weavers are are of that sort and when you go speak to someone like sarah how do you prepare yourself well that uh well that day when she walked me through her story i had no preparation i sort of knew the outline of the story but she walked through every detail um and it i hope it was therapeutic for her to talk about it what you get out of talking to these people is you get the raw story you get complete vulnerability from them uh my friend sarah hemminger runs this organization in baltimore she'll say i'm lonely um and they will tell you when they're close to burnout they are not hiding anything back and that's been a lesson to me in and how to communicate how to build relationship and often the stories are really hard and often their lives have what richard rohr calls a bright sadness a joy but also a pain maybe like everybody but um they they they trust that's that's the thing that's about them they they are rooted down in a community and if you go and ask for their story they just straight up tell you their story lisa fitzpatrick was shot in the face and they're not holding back because to them the solace is in relationship with others and if they're lonely if they're depressed you know about it and i've i've found that a lot especially with the younger generation a lot of the people in their teens there's zero hesitancy about mental illness about admitting depression complete comfortableness talking about this along with great fragility but great honesty emotional honesty and i take this as a great sign of hope and i think when i meet weavers they really preach emotional honesty and they if you're around them you just get transformed because you sort of want to be a little more like them and spending two years so far with them has um i hope loosened me up a little but when you speak with mothers or fathers or brothers or sisters who have who have had a terrible accident or a death you know you've you said we need to all work on our vocabulary about how to speak to these people and to not hide the elephant in the room can you talk about that yeah they um people have been through the valleys they've had their emotional moments where they've had reckonings where they really had to understand how weak they were they understand their own brokenness they've been there are certain values that show up again and again one of them is um radical mutuality they never think they're better than anybody they're helping it's we're all broken we're all in this together as lisa fitzpatrick says i don't do anything for people i just do things with people and they have moral motivation i just want to be a good person i just want to i just want to build a life around love your neighbor and so they have these values and traits and this is true in red america or in blue america uh and so i'm inspired by an ethos that they share and sometimes they're driven by faith often they're not sometimes they're kind people sometimes they're really angry this is especially true among the weavers and in the african-american community they there's a woman we met named tracy who lives in greenville south carolina and she just says i am furious at racial injustice in this country and i have to go i can be in a room with people who respect me but then i have to go home to greenville and i have to deal with what's there and the impatience the anger bubbles forth and we thought we could just talk about community in sort of a nice way a friendship be let's be nice to each other but in this country you can't really talk about community relationship if you're not doing a racial reckoning and so we've tried to learn how to how to talk about that across race and how to um put that front and center in every meeting we have i realized we've talked about the second mountain but we haven't talked about your second mountain is this weavers part of that second mountain i think so you know a couple things happen on the second mountain first you try to make your commitments big commitments so you don't just have a career you have a vocation you don't just have a set of opinions you try to have a philosophy and a creed you don't just have a contract marriage where it's transactional you try to have a covenantal marriage where you're really serving the marriage and then for me it's been hanging around my aok dc community the the kids in our community has been part of the second mountain just trying to be there for them and it's been a lot of days four states a week a lot of you're flying into whatever tampa airport at 1 am and you're trying to meet with weavers the next morning and have dinner with weavers that night and then another 6 a.m flight out of dallas fort worth airport and meet another set and so the hardship is all the travel the reward is getting to meet the people and the work is trying to spread their values just to to be an evangelist for them and for the way they live and i write about politics a lot i'm still a political writer but america is not going to be solved from the top down to have healthy politics we have to have a healthy culture and healthy society and have a healthy society we have to have a place where people can feel connected with one another in their local neighborhood have friendship groups grow up in homes where there are enough adults in their lives so they can relax and focus on being a kid and being a student we have to have a society where trauma is not everywhere i go i was in detroit a couple weeks ago and i was in schools in detroit where three percent of the students were at grade reading level and what the teachers were doing was just trying to get get the kids lives together so they had brought a washer and dryer machine into the school because some of the schools some of the kids came to school and their clothes just stank because they've never been washed and so they have to wash the kids clothes they have to get detergents to send them home so maybe they can do some laundry at home and so a lot of what's being done at these schools is not teaching reading it's just trying to get things okay and so we we can't thrive as a information age society if kids don't have a stable background one of my favorite sayings in life comes from psychology attachment theory it is that life is a series of daring adventures from a secure base and a lot of young people grow up in society without a secure base and they never get to have daring adventures as a result and what weavers do is they basically create family type relationships and they give kids a secure base so they have a shot in the world tell me the story of eo wilson and how his childhood experience led him to his vocation yeah i think we all have some of us if we're lucky we have moments early in life where that prefigures all the rest and i call those enunciation moments and so for me when i was seven i was i came across this book paddington the bear and discovered books were cool i want to write books and so that's been the whole life course prefigured at age seven and for eo wilson it was the same age he was seven and he uh his parents were getting divorced and they shipped him away one summer he was living in the south they shipped him away to a place called paradise beach in florida and he was staying with a family he didn't know but he they were on the beach and he never seen a beach before he was living in land and so he started wandering the beach at seven and he spent all the days out on the beach and he saw animals he had never had any conception of he saw a jellyfish and he was boggled one day he was sitting on the dock and his feet were in the water and a stingray slid beneath his feet and he said those moments a naturalist was born he was losing one world which was his family we discovered this beautiful world which was uh the oceans and nature and he became a naturalist at that moment and he's now in his late 80s and he's still a naturalist and one of our greatest scientists and what's interesting to me about moments when people find their vocation is that they're very aesthetic they find something beautiful and beauty calls to them the greek word for beauty is similar to the word for call and they find something beautiful and they they just want to pay attention that beautiful thing my daughter when she was five she walked into an ice hockey rink fell in love with hockey and she now teaches hockey in california just it's where she feels at home i ran across a description of a painter and they asked her why you're a painter and she said i love the smell of paint it's just aesthetic and sometimes we find our role in life just because something seems really beautiful and we're curious about it and we spend our lifetimes learning about that thing you use bruce springsteen as an example a lot can you discuss how he committed himself to music yeah well bruce springsteen had an enunciation moment also at a very early age he was home watched the ed sullivan show and a guy named elvis presley come on and he said that's me that's what i want to do and so he got his mom to rent a guitar tried to play it found out it was hard and he quit but then a few years later he was also watching the ed sullivan show and the beatles came on and this time he said that's me that's what i'm going to do and so he spent his childhood doing one thing uh learning to play a rock star and um as he says i had no plan b and and what's impressive about springsteen to me a lot of things i'm one of those people who goes to all the concerts and stuff is the most impressive moment in springsteen's career for me was he had his two albums first two which failed commercially then the third one was a smash success born to run he was on the cover of time and newsweek same week the natural progression after you have your big smash success would be to go big and do this big global album that make you a worldwide sensation instead he went small he stripped down and he planted himself in the towns he grew up in in free hill new jersey in asbury park new jersey and he wrote about the small lives there that he wanted to figure out how do these lives work so instead of going big he went local and he tapped into the core of who he was he didn't sell out the thing that was dr animating his art he went down into the core of it and he made an album called darkness on the edge of town about these places and what's interesting to me he wasn't afraid to be particular to be local and i saw him perform decades later in concert in madrid 65 000 kids and they have they're wearing t-shirts like t-shirts at highway 9 which is one of the highways near freehold new jersey or greasy lake which is a lake near freehold uh the stone pony which is a bar where he played in asbury park and if you build if you stay close and you build a landscape as an artist like faulkner or so bellow or toni morrison people will come to you and they'll enter your landscape and so i think it's a lesson for anybody find out what your damon is fine is the core thing that animates your life for springsteen it was those people in freehold new jersey from his childhood he needed to understand them he spent his whole life trying to understand them and he would rate make songs called born to run about escape and getting out of this town but the guy in his 60s or 70s now he lives 10 miles from freehold new jersey he's right there and so there's always something that really rubs at us i ran into a guy who's a child psychologist he has a he's very famous for a theory called the orchid and the dandelion he says some kids are orchid children they um if you plant them in a good situation they'll bloom if it's a bad situation they really struggle and some kids are dandelion children wherever they grow up they're fine they're just resilient and his life has been about exploring this the two different kinds of kids and i finally learned why he's so fascinated is because he grew up with a sister and he was a dandelion wherever he did he was he thrived his sister was an orchid she was more brilliant than him more friendly than him more sociable than him more beautiful but she she would sometimes be on top of the world sometimes deep in depression and struggle and eventually in her 40s she committed suicide and so for this researcher the contrast between him and his sister is like the animating question of his life that he wants to understand and you can be a writer you can be musician you can be in any line of work often there's that one aggravating thing you're just scratching at over and over again and for me it's been like depth like depth is the word like why how do i get as deep as those people you talk about how gathering people together is the start of community can you yeah well everybody every organization i've ever seen and every group i've seen has a technology for convening they have some way they get people together and often it's a shared dinner party sometimes it's a shared love they all love model trains and they work on model trains together but the model trains are not really the thing the model trains are just the excuse for them to get together and so communities have a lot of things in common one of them is they have a common story how do we get together how to reform where are we going they also have a common project so rabbi jonathan sachs points out that in the book of genesis the creation of the universe is told in like nine verses in the book of exodus the creation of the tabernacle which is this little structure the israelites we're building is told in hundreds and hundreds of verses why did it take so long to describe the how you create a tabernacle with this kind of wood and that kind of wood because the israelites were divided people they needed a common project to hold them together and was building this tabernacle is what took a divided people and made them a common people and so they they everybody has this technology for convening which is the way we just the excuse we have for getting together uh with each other and then the relationships flow out of that excuse me on top of that what role does trust play on community building trust is what we used to have and trust is when you walk to your neighbor's house and you assume they'll show up for you you knock on the door they think it's normal you're knocking on the door you say can i borrow your car or can you drive my kid to school and people who are from certain neighborhoods and still some neighbors today that's the norm they leave their doors open they because of the experience of their lives it's nobody's gonna come into my house we trust each other but in many communities people remember trust but there's much less trust and if you do these social science measures of trump's you find its way down and it's especially prevalent among the young and that they assume that life will not be there that relationships will break down that dad will be gone and uh social distrust is is just the thing you hit over and over again so my weave project it's at the aspen institute aspen is an elite organization aspen colorado is a very rich town and we get money from elites and through hard experience a lot of americans have come to distrust any elite institution and i work in the new york times and a lot of people have come to distress the media and in some sense they they do it for legitimate reasons because their institutions have let them down and the elites in our society have often not paid very good attention to everybody else and yet i find if you don't i say this as someone who works for the new york times uh most of the things if you write a fact in the new york times and it's wrong you get corrected right away so the facts in our newspaper are true by and large and if you go through life thinking that everything in the new york times is untrue because that place is too liberal or to new york whatever you're robbing yourself of the truth of the facts and so i think the pose of immediate distrust while sometimes earned is sometimes lapses into cynicism we should all be skeptical but not cynical and distrust is just this acid that detaches us from each other and detaches us from institutions that asset is being poured on by the president saying fake news yeah no listen we live in a society of weavers who are really trying to rebuild relationship we also live in a society of rippers uh i think we live with the president who wants to always create friend enemy distinctions it's always us them it's always war war war and he's not the only one by the way a lot of our my colleagues in the media our business model is polarization we sort of whip up frenzies of people in our tribe to really hate the other tribe and instead of introducing them to get them to know the other tribe because it's really hard to hate somebody when you're close up to them uh we there's just ripping and there's generalization and there's stereotype and as a result a lot of people i i used to have this dumb method if i interviewed a republican politician the next one would be a democrat it was like a strict quota system and the first thing i realized is that the democrats and republicans know nothing about each other they would tell me you know here's what the other team is thinking i was like i just talked to them they're not thinking that at all and so there's just this even in the close in body like the house of representatives of the u.s senate there's just these buffers of ignorance uh and it's mystifying to me that you got a senate is 100 people surrounded by staff you think they know each other really well that is not the case they do not know each other well they are they're um they know people in their party well but they don't know people in the other party well the relationships are attenuated can you talk about unconditional love is it the core of community you know when i um teach there's some percentage of my students who suffer from conditional love their parents love them but they're also deeply anxious about their careers and their trajectories so when the kid does something the parent thinks will lead to success the beam of love is strong when the kid does something the parents think will lead to failure then the beam of love is withdrawn and so the most important relationship in their lives is at risk at all times if they misbehave and so they the the wolf of conditional love is in the door and so they're deeply insecure because the most important relationship their lives is fundamentally unstable they have to reform in a certain way to earn love and frankly one of the weaknesses of our meritocracy is that love is something you earn by performing well you make yourself worthy of love by getting a good job or getting into a good school and those kids are emotionally insecure because they never know when the love is going to go away and they're always every year they're horrible stories of the parents not showing up to commencement because the kid didn't take the job from goldman sachs they wanted them to take and so i see a not with most kids but with a percentage just this epidemic of conditional love and unconditional love is it's not something you can earn it's just you're going to be loved because that's who we are to each other and uh that's that's the only kind that really works and i think i hope and believe most parents have that for their kids but it's a love that doesn't go away no matter what you do and and unconditional love is what i think weavers try to offer because often when you're trying to find community your binding community with people who made some serious mistakes in their lives i was with this guy from pittsburgh last night who takes people in prison uh and teaches them the building trades to do bricklaying masonry and stuff like that and he says listen some people are in prison and deserve to be there and they should be there forever but some people are risen they did something really horrible but they've learned and i'm going to forgive them and i'm going to offer unconditional love to them and i'm going to teach them how to do this trade and they have a chance to turn their lives around and you need what i find with those programs is you need to offer harshness in the context of love so they offer very strict discipline demands if you're in our program there's going to be no cursing you're not going to check out women you're not going to be late to anything and we're going to offer you as they say 200 accountability in the context of 200 love and that love without the toughness is just sentimentality and toughness without the love is just harshness but the the people who really turn around lives have both those things in equal measure and they they're just i'm going to love you my love is not at risk here you can behave badly my love is not a risk i may treat you differently but my my love is not at riskier and they communicate that message which is the message i you know parents try to communicate is this a different type of love that you showed i hope i showed my kids unconditional love i mean i hope i certainly never felt it i hope i uh whether they were high or low um i hope i showed them equal love at all times you're right if you want to shift the culture you've got to have a conversation you haven't had before and it's not an impersonal conversation it must be a personal conversation so take greenville south carolina a city that's really wonderful in many ways they've rebuilt their downtown they've done wonderfully to make a beautiful place but they're still very divided uh white and black and i met a 80 year old black woman there who said it was easier growing up here in 1953 than it is for kids today and so to heal that kind of division and that sense of injustice you've got to have a difficult conversation across color lines in that town and when you bring people together across those divides you've created the potential for a new source of power and there's a guy named peter block who writes a lot about community and he says power is created when new people are brought into the room especially when people who are formerly defined as part of the problem are brought into the room so you think about the people you think that those people are causing all these problems if you can get them into the room and have a conversation and a relationship with them then you have the potential to really create a new source of power that you use together but that of course is super hard because you've got animosity you've got resentments uh you've got denial uh but i i do think social change especially across distrust across racial lines across economic lines across ideological lines it doesn't happen without the meaning of those minds and across relationships and people get triggered so fast there are a lot of people who do work to heal divides across ideology and there's a group called better angels and they've learned that everybody has their little trigger words if you're a republican they don't people don't like word their diversity they don't like the word dialogue because a lot of trump supporters hear those words and they think if i go to a meeting that's about dialogue it's just going to be a bunch of liberals telling me how racist i am and i'm not going to show up for that and so you really have to be careful about choosing your words you have to understand the vocabularies of each tribe but we think about our problems can be solved by politics and a lot of them can matters of justice economic redistribution but when your problem is the fraying of the social fabric that gets solved one room at a time and there's a phrase in the book of job and the sparks fly upward and when i look at the moments when america has turned itself around i'm instructed by robert putnam of harvard who studies the 1890s and it was a moment a little like today there was a big economic transition there's a big wave of immigration there was a lot of political corruption and change came in three stages first there was a cultural revolution in those days something called social darwinism which was super individualistic and competitive was replaced by the social gospel movement which was a very communal and then you have a civic renaissance you had the creation within a few short years of the boys and girls clubs the boys and girl scouts the temperance room with the settlement house movement the naacp the unions all these new civic organizations came into being and then a few years later you had the progressive movement which is a political movement so in cultural civic political and our society now is not going to be turned around politics first you have to have the cultural and the civic before you can get the political change and that's why i focus so much attention there there's a metaphor you use that i love you said you describe the learning process a community must go through before it can travel together like a flock of birds yeah we wonder how do flocks um travel together in formation and they they follow very simple rules fly at the speed of everybody else and always fly to the center of the group and apparently if every bird makes that individual formulation they'll all fly together and a beautiful community is just a joy to hold you know just going into uh even tough neighborhood like baltimore when they or well i grew up in stuyvesant town which is a project in new york city and we had we there were a lot of rules i used to call it singapore on 14th street because you couldn't bring baby carriages into the playgrounds like why is that rule there but they have a lot of rules but it was a community with jamaican families with a lot of irish families some jewish families of all kinds of communities and we had places to gather and so we had dozens of playgrounds and those playgrounds were really the nursery school of of my childhood in new york and they were just moms and i think you can always tell a good community with two things one is when people automatically start talking to each other at the bus stop because they assume we're gonna have a lot in common we both live here we go to this bus stop and so we have natural trust and second when people discipline each other's children sometimes in a tight community if a kid is acting out it's not just one parent who's going to discipline there are adults all over the place who feel i'm close to that kid i can discipline them and that discipline is seen as legitimate and when you have that you really have families interwoven and there's a communal sense i mean it takes a village and you do have you have created a village and tell me why you say that the central journey of modern life is moving self to well i think we're born reasonably selfish and and adolescence we're supposed to be you're supposed to be a little narcissistic you're trying to establish your identity and you're thinking a lot about yourself how am i being viewed do people like me do i look cool am i dressed right and that's adolescence and as a psychologist friend says the problem with my patients is they never left that phase but most people as they age they get over themselves they get a little easier on themselves they don't really care what people are thinking them so much and they start thinking about others and that diminution of the sense of self and the sense of what they used to call a religious day is pride pride is always fragile because the world is never treating you as well as you think you should be treated and if your condition is pride you're always going to be insecure you're always going to feel aggrieved you're always going to feel angry but most people as they go through life and i really do think people get better as they age a lot of most older people i know have gotten out of their way they're they are happier and they look when they scan the horizon they look for the bright things and not the troubling things and in fact people have done studies of this if you show people in their 20s a photograph with a lot of faces people in their 20s their eyes naturally fixate on the angry faces people and senior citizens their eyes fixate on the happy faces and a little sense of security a little sense of i can survive what happens i think grows on people as they age and it's a good sign of life that i think most of us get better at this thing as we get thank older

Channel: Kunhardt Film Foundation

Views: 573,075

Keywords: david brooks, kunhardt film foundation, life story, life, story, wisdom, new york times, columnist, republican, democrat, politics, second mountain, david brooks column, david brooks msnbc, political analysis, david brooks interview, david brooks the atlantic, political news, american culture

Id: -JRSLhClyvw

Length: 199min 25sec (11965 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 14 2022