David Brooks with How To Know A Person

is that even in times like this it's not naive to lead with trust it's not naive to lead with respect uh it's sometimes the most defiant and brave thing you can do is to try to really get to know the people around you and that's kind of defiant humanism we need in times like [Music] these [Music] you all here welcome um good evening and welcome to the Jonathan samon hot buttons cool conversations discussion series I'm Lily rabinov Goldman president and CEO of JCC Greater Boston we are all so glad that you came out on this very cold but less icy than yesterday um January night to join our speaker series um this spir this series The Jonathan samon hot buttons cool conversation series invites distinguished public figures to engage in conversation on thought-provoking and stimulating subjects of concern to the Jewish community and Beyond this evening we are honored and excited to welcome you to an evening of conversation with one of the nation's leading writers and political commentators David Brooks I think you all know that David Brooks is an oped columnist for the New York Times a writer for the Atlantic and IR regular on the PBS newsour um David Brooks who is with us tonight is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the second mountain and the road to character he joins us tonight to talk about his latest book how to know a person the art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen I I would suggest we didn't all just see each other deeply but we we we did the first step um he offers practical heartfelt a a practical heartfelt Guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to Foster deeper Connections in every aspect of Our Lives something particularly relevant given the current state of the world as we be begin our program tonight we'd like to thank Temple Beth Shalom for hosting this event with us tonight we would love to thank our donors without your financial support we would not be able to produce tonight's amazing program we appreciate your commitment to fulfilling the mission of both hot buttons cool conversations and The JCC so without further Ado I'm going to hand things over to David and please welcome him warmly thank you now that you've all made new friends my work here is done um thank you it's a pleasure to be here pleasure to be here in this beautiful synagogue and feel like it's my bar mitzvah all over again I'm going to speak a little longer but in English uh thank you clearly a reformed Temple uh now I'm assuming everybody in this room uh remembers the movie Fiddler on the Roof and you know how warm and Huggy Jewish families can be always singing and laughing and dancing so I came from the other kind of Jewish family uh the culture in our our uh world was think yish act British and so we were stiff upper lip types uh the teacher apparently told my parents David doesn't um play with the other kids he just observes them which was good for a career in journalism I always tell journalism students if you're at a football game and everyone's doing the wave and you just sit there you have the right kind of aloof personality style to become a journalist and then when I was seven uh I read a book called Paddington the bear and decided at that moment I wanted to become a writer and I've been pretty much writing every day since and it really became the center of my identity at a very young age in high school I wanted to date this woman named Bernice and she didn't want to date me she wanted to date some other guy and I remember thinking what is she thinking I write way better than that guy so those were my values um and then when I was 18 uh the admissions officer officers at Columbia Wesley and and brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago um uh and my uh the famous phrase about Chicago it's where fun goes to die um my favorite saying about Chicago it's a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish student St Thomas aquinus um and so it's a pretty cerebral intellectual place a good place for a writer to be and I fit right in I had a double major in history and celibacy while I was there at Chicago um and as a freshman this is literally true we uh my we entered my freshman roommate into the Golden Gloves boxing competition in Chicago uh we gave him a nickname the kosher killer uh and we trained him he had never boxed a day in his life and so he trained the Chicago way which was we didn't actually practice boxing we just read a lot of books about boxing and his career um lasted 29 seconds um so all this say I grew up in sort of cerebral household and I was a cerebral kind of guy and then I went off and I was hired in 2003 to be a conservative columnist at the New York Times uh not allowed of company there uh and that was another way of just being a little cerebral and then I got a job in TV at the PBS NewsHour but for t for TV the newsour is pretty cerebral it's a cerebral version of TV we have long 12-minute conversations uh and so and we have a great audience um somewhat uh seasoned our audience is seasoned um uh and so if a 93y old lady comes up to me in the airport I know what she's going to say I don't watch your program but my mother loves it um and so all this is to say um living up here uh and there's a moment that symbolizes for me that mode of Life uh I'm a big baseball fan I've been to hundreds maybe even thousands of baseball games and all that time I've never caught a foul ball and I'm sitting with my youngest son in Baltimore and the batter loses control of the bat it flies in the air and it lands in my lap and so getting a bat is a thousand times better than getting a ball and so any normal human being would be holding up his trophy waving high five hugging everybody being a Jumbotron celebrity I just put the bat on the ground and stood Straight Ahead well literally everybody in the stadium looked at me and so I had the emotional reaction of a turtle basically um and so I decided that living this way was little unemotional uh fear of intimacy it was not the right way to live and so I decided I was going to try to improve in some ways I'm not a remarkable guy but I am a grower and so I tried to improve the Chicago way I wanted to learn about emotion so I wrote a book about emotion uh called The Social Animal uh and then I wrote a I want to have better character so I wrote a book about character formation called the road to character and unfortunately I learned writing that book um that writing a book on character doesn't actually give you good character and even reading a book on character doesn't give you good character but buying a book on character does highly recommend that uh and then I wrote a book about going through hard times and recovering called the second Mountain uh and it sort of worked I became more emotional uh and a little better at intimacy and I can prove it though I have to do some name dropping uh I've been interviewed twice in my life by Oprah uh good one good name right and the second time was in 2019 and after the second interview she pulls me aside and says David I've rarely seen someone change so much in middle age you were so emotionally blocked before and she Oprah she should know so like uh and but the sad thing is that as I've become slightly more human American society has become more deuman and so uh we all know some of the obvious statistics depression rates are rising suicide rates are rising 36% of Americans report feeling lonely most of the time 45% of teenagers say they're persistently hopeless and despondent the number of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since the year 2000 the share of Americans without a romantic partner is up by a third the share of Americans who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category is up by 50% since 2000 so this is some sort of Social and relational crisis uh we're just sadder than we used to be and sad societies become mean societies because when you feel ignored you regard that as an injustice which it is and you want to lash out at somebody you feel existentially unsafe and so I gave you all those sad statistics I could give you a bunch of mean statistics rise in hate crimes rise in gun violence look at our politics I have a favorite restaurant in New York and the owner told me that he has to kick somebody out every week now for abusive behavior my sister-in-law is a head nurse at a hospital and she says her main problem is keeping staff because the patients have become so mean to the nurses they burn out and want to leave the profession uh and so what what's going on why are the forces of dehumanization on the March well I there are a lot of stories all of which I agree with there's a technology story social media is making us crazy and young people just spend a lot less time with their friends uh there's a sociology Story by my friend Robert putam at Harvard year uh that we're just not as active in Civic organizations we're not as good at socializing then there's the demography story becoming a more diverse society which is great but it's just easier to get along when we all sort of similar diversity just makes it more challenging there's the economic story widening income inequality we're not leading similar lives I have a theory which I've never seen any day on which is a family story we used to grow up in extended families and you have to deal with your crazy uncle Don you had to have some social skills the story I tell and the emphasize is the most direct one uh we inhabit a society in which we don't treat each other with consideration and respect and we don't teach the skills of how to treat treat each other with consideration and respect uh it requires a good heart to do that but it also just requires plain old social skills which are skills like carpentry or playing tennis how to be a good listener how to end conversations gracefully I never used to know how to end conversations gracefully I remember I went to my fifth High School reunion and I didn't have the skills my only skill the only trick I had was I have to go to bar the bar and so about 20 minutes into my high school reunion I'm so drunk I had to leave cuz I was going back to the bar how to sit one with someone who's grieving how to offer people criticism in a caring way how to ask for an offer of forgiveness had a host a gathering where everybody feels embraced these are just skills and so the book is really trying to teach us teach myself and hopefully others these skills and so how good are you at these skills when you meet somebody how well do you know that get to know that person well I've don't know most of you but I can say with great deal of confidence you're not as good as you think you are there's a guy at the University of Texas who studies this who finds that when people first meet each other uh and have a conversation they accurately understand what the other person is thinking 20% of the time some people are pretty good they're 55% of the time uh some people are 0% of the time but think they're 100% of the time they're just social idiots so in any group of people there are diminishers and there are illuminators the ministers are people who stereotype they ignore they're not curious they never ask you a question I sometimes leave a party and I realize that whole time nobody asked me a question and I've come to believe like like only 34 or 40% of humanity are question askers the rest are nice people but they just don't ask you questions on the other hand some people are illuminators they make you feel lit up respected they're curious about you so there was a novelist named Ean Foster who wrote about 120 years ago I guess his biographer wrote a him to speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse Charisma a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be a most honest best and sharpest self it would be great to be able to listen that way there's a story possibly apocryphal told about Jenny Jerome who was a young woman in the 19th century who would later go on to become the mom of Winston Churchill but when she was young in Victorian England one night she was at a dinner party and she was seated next to the Prime Minister William Gladstone and she left that dinner thinking that Gladstone was the cleverest person in England then sometimes later she's at another dinner and she happens to be seated next to Gladstone's great political rival Benjamin Israeli and she leaves that dinner thinking that she's the cleverest person so it's good to be glad so and it's better to be Disraeli Bel lab's famous research facility they had some of their researchers were much more Innovative and productive than other researchers and they tried to figure out why was it their education was it their IQ and they couldn't figure it out and then they realized that the most productive researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with an electrical engineer named Harry nikist and Harry nikist would ask them questions ask them about their problems get inside their heads and help them think through problems and they made breakthroughs so Harry nikist was an Illuminator uh and so um Hada and I'll just try to over the next few minutes walk you through some of the stages of getting to know someone the first is the first meeting when you first meet somebody they're asking themselves unconsciously a set of questions is this person going to be nice to me am I a person to this person am I a priority to this person and the answers to those questions will be expressed in your eyes before any words come out of your mouth and so it's important to cast a loving and just loving gaze giving people leading with a sense of trust I was at a diner in Waco Texas and I was having breakfast with a 93y old lady named Lar dorsy and she presented herself to me as this strict disciplinarian a tough lady she'd been a teacher and she said I love my students enough to discipline them I was a little intimidated by her into the diner walks a guy named Jimmy derell who's a pastor pastors to the church to the homeless in Waco he he knows us both he comes over to our table he grabs Mrs dorsy by the shoulders and he shakes her way harder than you should ever shake a 93 old and he says to her Mrs dorsy Mrs dorsy you're the best you're the best I love love you I love you and that strict disciplinarian I've been talking to turned in an instant into a bright eyes shining 9-year-old girl he brought out a different version just with the power of His gaze and part of that he's just a warmer personality than I am but part of it is that he's a pastor uh and so when he sees anybody he sees someone made in the image of God he sees he's looking a little into the face of God forgive me in a synagogue in Jimmy's mind he's seeing somebody so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person and you can be atheist Jewish Christian Muslim Hindu but seeing every person you meet with that level of respect and reverence is an absolute precondition for seeing them well so it's that gaze of knowing who you're talking to the second is uh what I call accompaniment which is just hanging out most of the time when we're with other people we're not like having Soul Ser searching conversations we're just hanging out we're at a meeting we're picking up our kids we're doing something and accompaniment is an other centered way of being in normal life it's just like we think of a Pianist accompanying a uh a singer he's there looking at her trying to make her shine and so it's just a comfortable way of being other centered in present life uh and so I have friends in DC who uh say we like our friends to be linger the kind of people who just linger after a meal and they're just a pleasure to be around and sometimes accompaniment can be a little more profound than that so I had a student teaching at y I only teach at schools I couldn't have gone into um and so I had a student named Jillian uh Sawyer who was she was a grad student and when she was an undergrad her dad got pancreatic cancer and they had this conversation that he would probably wouldn't be around to see some of the big life events of her life like marriage and child birth and he passed away and uh after she graduated from college one of her friends asked her to be a bridesmaid in her wedding so she was a bridesmaid and she watched the Father of the Bride give a beautiful toast to his daughter and then it came time for the um father daughter dance and she thought it's just too tough for me I'm I'm gonna go to lady's room and have a cry so she left the room went to the lady's room had a cry and came out and when she came out of the ladies were a few minutes later everybody from her table in the adjoining table was standing there in this H the hallway and she wrote to me in a paper which she gave me permission to quote about what happened what I will remember forever is that no one said a word each person including newer boyfriends who I knew less well gave me a reaffirming hug and and headed back to their table no one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my grief they were this just there for me just for a moment and it was exactly what I needed and so that's a company was just like somebody at that one of those tables said let's go be there for Jillian and so it's an other centered way of being the third phase of getting to know one and the main one is conversation you can't try to imagine what's going on in somebody's mind you have to ask them and so how good a conversationalist are you probably not as good as you think you are and in DC where I live now the world is full of terrible conversationalists we are the most a the most emotionally avoiding City on the face of the Earth but B we have a lot of blow Hearts I I had a friend who served in the inom administration and I was on the phone with him and he was talking and I was on my cell phone and the phone dropped the call dropped and so I thought oh wait a minute he'll call me back and so I waited two minutes and then I waited five minutes and then I waited seven minutes and so I finally called his office and his assistant said oh he can't talk he's on the phone and so I said no he's on the phone with me he doesn't realize he's been talking for 10 minutes at me so I went around and I I asked conversation experts give me some tips here for how to be a better conversationalist and I'll just share a couple of them with you one is treat attention as an onoff switch not a dimmer if you're going to pay attention to someone pay 100% not 60% I just had dinner in town here and there was a couple there on their phone the whole time like they didn't talk at dinner the whole time um second be a loud listener I've got a buddy named Andy Crouch who when you talk to him it's like talking to a Pentecostal Church he's like yes amen yes preach that love talking to that guy make them authors not Witnesses when people people are telling you a story they don't go into enough detail so if you ask them where was your boss sitting when she said that to you then suddenly they're really narrating the scene you get a much Fuller picture of their experience Don't Fear the pause if we're in a conversation and we're talking about something really important and I start talking say I start my comment here at my shoulder and I talk to the end of my fingertips at what point have you stopped listening so you can think of what to say probably here so what really let me talk to my fingertips then pause and then respond the Japanese are much better at this they can they're comfortable with 8C paes which in Social time feels like an eternity but they wanted to digest what the person said don't be a Topper this is uh this is one really resonates with people because we're all guilty of it if you say to me oh I had a terrible flight i' we sat on the tarmac for 2 hours and then I say oh I know exactly where you're going through I had a terrible flight I sat on the tarmac for 6 hours it sounds like I'm trying to relate to you but really I'm saying let's stop talking about you and let's talk about my Superior experiences this is I got from um these two are from talmudic Scholars uh one keep the gem statement at the center if we're having a disagreement there's probably something deep down that we agree upon if my brother and I are fighting about our dad's healthc care we might be fighting about that but we both want what's best for our dad and so if we keep returning to the thing we agree upon we save the relationship amid disagreement then the other one is find the disagreement under the disagreement if we disagree about tax policy there's probably a philosophical reason much deeper down that's causing us to disagree so let's explore together what that is it's more fun than just shouting at each other and then the most important conversation key to conversation is questions the quality of your conversations depends on the quality of your con questions and I know you were all fantastic question asked ERS because you're all former children and kids are just really good at asking questions I have a friend in New York name now in naobi way who was teaching seventh grade boys how to be journalist how to ask questions and so the first day she ever did this she uh sat in the front of the room and she said to the students uh okay ask me any question and I'll answer it honestly first question are you married no second question from another boy are you divorced yes third question from another boy do you still love him she's like [Laughter] whoa and she starts crying and says yes next question does he know next question do your kids know they just WR remorseless and so when you're asking questions the great questions a lot of them not all of them are story eliciting questions get tell asking the question in a way that elicits a story tell me about a time and so I read in a book called um you're not listening by a woman named Kate Murphy I read a book uh where she she described a a focus group moderator who had been hired by grocery stores to figure out why people go to the grocery store late at night and she could have said why do why do people go to the grocery store late at night but instead she told the focus group tell me about the last time you went to a grocery store after 11: p.m. and there was a woman who hadn't said anything at the focus group who piped up and said well I'd smoked a joint and I needed a manaja TW with me Ben and Jerry so you get a little hint into what she was going through when you get to know someone my favorite questions are 30,000 ft questions questions that get people to look at their lives from a higher perspective and so some of them are um what crossroads are you at we're all in transition most of the time at one one transition or another in our lives so what transition are you in the middle of if this five years is a chapter in your life what's the chapter about what would you do if you weren't afraid I have a friend who was being interviewed for a job and after the interview he said to the interviewer what would you do if you weren't afraid and she started crying she wouldn't be doing HR at that company and I used to ask my Yale students what would you do if you weren't afraid and every year one or two would say I wouldn't be at Yale I'd leave it's not the right school for me but I need the prestige and so fear just plays a role in our lives uh I was at a dinner party where I it sounds so awful my wife makes fun of me for when I did this she I think she cringed but I like I asked the question how do your ancestors show up in your life we're all formed by our cultural heritage and we had a Dutch family there and they talked about Dutch Heritage a black family talked about the African-American experience I talked about Jewish Heritage and we tried to figure out how we're all shaped by our ancestors it was a great dinner party and so these are just big questions I dinner with a a sociologist at a conference uh and I and he said I'm 80 I probably got one big project left what should it be that was just a big question and for the next hour and a half we talked about his interests we talked about facing death we talked about old age it was just a a great dinner conversation and so what I've given you so far is how to get to know another person in normal times in happy times but we don't live in happy times and so just a few minutes on some of the tougher conversations that we have one of my my oldest friend in the world uh was a guy named Pete and he was actually from Reading Mass we met at age 11 at at a camp in Connecticut and we spent the next 50 some odd years as very close friends and our our friendship was just based on play we played basketball we played rugby we played everything together he was about 8 Ines taller than me so I didn't do so well but we had great games uh and then when he was 57 uh depression descended upon him uh and uh my wife noticed immediately that just a light had gone out I didn't even I thought I'm reasonably well educated I didn't know what Depression was and I learned over those three years that you can't learn about it by extrapolate if you're lucky enough not to experience that you can't learn about by extrapolating it from your moments of sadness a friend of mine who also suffered from depression a guy named Mike Gerson who was a Washington Post columnist wrote that depression is a malfunction in the instrument we use to perceive reality that you you're not seeing the world accurately and my friend Pete had these obsessive voices in his head that were lying to him that said you're worthless nobody would miss you and so he was just trying to endure it and I was not skilled in accompanying somebody through this and so I made some very what I now know are very common blunders the first thing was uh I tried to give them ideas on how to make the depression lift like I said he was an eye surgeon I would say you know go to you used to love going to Vietnam doing surgeries you found it so rewarding why don't you go do that but eventually I learned that giving people ideas for how depression lifts is just another way of saying you don't get it because it's not ideas that are missing it's a lot of other things but it's not ideas the second thing I tried to do with psychologist call positive reframing I tried to remind him of all the good things in his life you got a great marriage you have a great career your boys are wonderful and when you do that you're just reminding the depressed person that they're not enjoying the things that are palpably enjoyable and so you can make them feel worse finally I learned over years that the one of the few things you can do is first acknowledge the reality of the situation this sucks second an expression of good willll I want more for you I want more for you it's not going to do any good but at least it's an expression of Goodwill and third just remind him you're not going anywhere you're going to be here through this it'll be you'll be here when it lifts you're just not your friendship is not going away you're not alone here and I think in retrospect I wish I had done more little touches like a more text I read about somebody when he was depressed uh he had he had a friend who just sent him a postcard from wherever the guy was just no reply necessary I wish I'd done a little more of that um and then I I um I'm a big fan of the book man search for meaning by Victor Frankle and when he was in um the concentration camp at aitz or whatever he was in a lot of camps um he would tell the depressed people life has not stopped expecting things of you uh and that sounds a little harsh to me but I trust Victor Frankl knows what he's talking about uh life has not stopped expecting things of you and the people who suffer from depression have a credibility because they've been through pain and they they have a credibility with those who are also going through pain there's a beautiful quote from thoron Wilder without your wound where would your power be it is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble in the hearts of men the very Angels themselves cannot persuade the and blundering children on Earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living in love service only wounded soldiers can serve and those who have been through something have that kind of credibility so that's one kind of hard conversation the second kind of hard conversation is the conversation across difference and often across political difference and ideological difference and often in these conversations there's a power inequality when I walk into a room I walk in with the New York Times Yale University PBS I work at the Aspen Institute you have never met a human being with more Elite baggage than I have and so people on the left and right see me as part of a system that they find is oppressing them and so often they come to me with critique uh and my instinct is to always say no you have to understand I'm one of the good guys here you have to understand my situation and I've learned that that's the wrong approach the right approach is to try to stand in their standpoint it's to ask them three or four or five times in different language tell me more about what you believe what am I missing here uh and I may not and you'll find if you ask it five times you you get much better answers each time you ask uh and it may not persuade them but persuasion is more about listening than it is about talking people can only be waited after you spend 80% of the time listening to them and if you ask them about their standpoint their point of view then at least you're showing them respect and one of the best conversation books I've ever read was called crucial conversations by a group of authors led by a guy named Joseph granny and they say in that book in every conversation respect is like air when it's present nobody notices when it's absent it's all anybody can think about so at least you're showing respect and the authors of that book also say in every conversation exists on two levels one the nominal thing we're talking about second the emotional flow between us as we're talking with every comment I'm either making you feel safe or less safe respected or less respected and so it's that under conversation is actually more important and so these are some of the ways of trying to have less unpleasant B hard conversations so for the last few years I've gone around asking people tell me about a time you felt seen uh and sometimes the stories are kind of ordinary but meaningful to the people I had a woman who was probably around 40 tell me Well when I was 13 I had my first taste of alcohol I came home so drunk that when my friends dropped me off they put me on the porch and I was so drunk I couldn't move and my dad who was strict came out and I thought he was going to scream at me all the things I was always already saying to myself I'm bad I'm bad I'm bad but he didn't he just scooped it her up in his arms he carried her inside he laid her on the sofa and said there'll be no punishment here you've just had an experience and she remembered that story like 30 years later because he knew what was going on in her head he didn't need to scream at her so she felt seen uh Rabbi Elliot KLA tells a story about a woman who because of a brain injury would sometimes just fall to the floor and um apparently when she would do this people would just rushed to lift her up and she told him I think people rush to help me up because they're so uncomfortable seeing an adult lying on the floor but what I really need is for someone to get down on the ground with me just sit there and that's that's what makes people feel seen when you don't do the thing that's comfortable for you but what's comfortable for them and sometimes in books I come across somebody who saw somebody well I was reading a book uh about one of Robert kro books and Franklin Franklin Roosevelt in the in the midst of the depression hosted a 28-year-old Congressman uh in his office in over the Oval Office and the congressman's name was Lyndon Johnson and after Johnson left FDR turned to his Aid Harold iys and said you know Harold that's the kind of uninhibited young pro I might have been as a young man if I hadn't gone to Harvard and then he said in the next couple of generations the balance of power in this in this country is going to shift to the South and West and that kid lynon Johnson could well be the first Southwestern president pretty good sometimes moments of seeing are just I find tremendously moving and so I came across this story in a beautiful Memoir called Lost and Found by a woman named Katherine Schultz who's a New Yorker writer in the book she describes her dad who was displaced in Europe in World War II had come finally to this country and he sounds like just a wonderful guy his name was Isaac uh and uh he was valuable he apparently had opinions about everything from the infield fly rule to whether apple crisp is better than apple cobbler uh he just sounds like a tremendous guy but toward the end of his life he just went silent which was unusual because he was a very talkative guy but he just went silent the doctors couldn't really figure it out uh and then at the very end of his life the family gathered around him and they decided they were going to say the things they didn't want to leave unsaid and Schultz describes the scene my father mute but seemingly alert looked from one face to the another as we spoke his brown eyes shining with tears I had always hated to see him cry and seldom did but for once I was grateful it gave me hope that for what may have been the last time in his life and perhaps the most important he understood if if nothing else I knew that everywhere he looked that evening he found himself where he had always been with his family the center the the center of the circle the source and subject of our Abiding Love just a guy who died well seen and so if it's delicious to feel seen it's also delicious to be the Seer to be the one who gets somebody and so a few years ago I was at my dining room table and I was reading a boring book which is what I get paid to do and I looked up and my wife came in the front door of her house which you can see from the dining room table and she stood there in the doorway with the door open and it was summertime and the light was streaming in behind her and she didn't even know I was there cuz that's the kind of Charisma I have um but she paused and looked at an orchid that we keep by the table uh on a table by the front door and I had a sensation that goes across went across my head which was I know her I really know her I know her through and through and if you had asked me how I knew her at that moment I would have had trouble answering it wasn't like I wasn't seeing the personality traits I would use to describe her to a friend I wasn't seeing the biographer of her it was like I was seeing the whole flowing of her being the es and harmonies of her music it was almost as if I was not seeing her but I was seeing out from her and to see somebody really well you have to see a little how they see the world and it's what happens in a marriage you get to know the other person so well you sort of can see how they see the world and I was um if you had asked me to describe uh the word I was using how I was looking at her at that moment I wasn't observing her I wasn't inspecting her the only word in the English language that comes came comes to mind is the word beholding I was just beholding her and a couple weeks after this event I I told some friends about this um and they said um you know that's what we do with our grandkids we just behold them and so we're living in tough times the famous dates of our age are Hard dates September 11th January 6th October 7th and in times like this uh it's tempting to want to shut down callus over dehumanize but I think my final point is that even in times like this it's not naive to lead with trust it's not naive to lead with respect uh it's sometimes the most defiant and brave thing you can do is to try to really get to know the people around you and that's kind of Define humanism we need in times like these thank you very much I was fortunate to do a unit of clinical pastoral education through the Schwarz Center at Mass General where I was working at the time and I spent a whole 20 weeks trying to learn what you just said in an hour it was very difficult it was there were hard lessons uh especially if you you know to walk into a room and embrace somebody with your with your being um very worthwhile and I have carried those lessons with me in the 26 five years six years since then so thank you very much sure thank you for what you what you do yeah no it's well it's as you know it's energy consuming uh and I mentioned that Illuminator diminisher thing I'm a better Illuminator in the morning than I am after when I'm tired uh and so but I I do think you develop habits and you develop set points of how available you are and so I was at a conference in Nantucket um two years ago and we were in a room like this and the person standing at the podium said they handed out all these song sheets love songs and they were lyrics to A Love Song and they said find a stranger near you and sing the love song into their eyes and if you had told me 10 years ago to do that my head would have exploded but I found some guy and I sang the love song um so we can get better at these things thank you so much for those words um so I'm a college professor a sociologist in the last few years I've seen what I think has been obvious to a lot of people who have college age kids a real kind of retreat from being able to talk to one another and consumption with their phones and Etc and when your book came out it really kind of struck a chord for me that something I think is really needed for college students and probably for other students as well is to actually learn these kinds of skills and so I'm planning to teach a class next year I'm calling social connection I want to use your book and I'm just curious if you have any kind of tips for how you might convert this into a kind of a curriculum I know it's probably a big question yeah I I did teach this book twice while I was writing it um and I guess I found um first of all one of the things that I found hard to do was um get my kids to like say no no laptops in class uh and that that was a challenge but I made them do it I saw a video on today a professor told us class not to bring a no laptops in class so one kid brought in a typewriter yeah but the one thing um I had trouble getting and when I I've taught off and on for 20 years and my students used to call my class therapy with Brooks because we just like would spill our guts to each other um and uh but I found it harder and harder as the years have gone by to get them to be share with each other and I found it harder and harder to get them to argue with each other there's almost a norm of no public argument they'll do it in the dorm room they don't want to do it in public because they don't know what's going to be said the other thing I've learned is to be more vulnerable with them than as comfortable for me and so I was teaching and I this was 10 years ago and I was um courting a woman who um I was hoping would marry me and she said she was going to fly from Texas where she lived to New Haven to tell me whether or not she would marry me and so I I I I don't recommend this but I held my office hours at a bar between 9: and 1 in the morning that's when I did my office hours um and so I told the students um I'm gonna have to cancel office hours tonight I've just got something going on personally I didn't say anything more about that and that night of my 25 students in the seminar 18 or so wrote to me and said Professor books we're just thinking of you I'm praying for you and that that changed the whole tenor of the class the rest of the term cuz they saw that I wasn't like an auster Professor I was just another guy getting through life uh and then the woman came to New Haven and she said she could never marry me of course now she's my wife so so um one other thought and I'm not quite answering your question cuz I I'm not great at designing curricula uh I can do a reading and we can talk but I it's a skill that's different from writing a book but one thing I found fruitful conversations around this fact if you ask a lot of us or Boomer or silent generation or Gen X uh if you ask us do you trust the neighbors you I'm sure you know these statistics better than I uh do you trust the people around you you'll still get 60% of our age group saying yes I trust the people around me but according to the world value survey or the General Social Survey I can't remember which one um if you asked gen Z and Millennial only 19% say I trust the people around me and so there's another statistic I saw that 73% of that generation believe the agree with the statement most people are selfish and out for themselves and so there's just high levels of distrust and so I would ask my class why why these levels of distrust in your generation and one woman said to me over the course of my life I've had four boyfriends and they all ghosted me at the end they didn't have the courtesy to have a breakup conversation they just vanished and so she of course she goes through this trust thinking the next guy is going to do that too and so we had actually quite good convers around that topic um and I'm sure you can design a better curriculum than I can uh but thank you for assigning my book thank you for the talk tonight and I really enjoyed the book um so you you touched upon this a little bit in the books I just hopefully you can flesh this out a little bit um you know recently there has been more armed conflict in the world than probably at any other time since SEC end of the second world war and uh this certain certainly reflects a breakdown in diplomacy so I wonder if you can talk a little about because you've actually met with a lot of the actors that are involved in these that that you know the leaders of some of these conflicts and if you could give us a little insight into some of the the psyches involved and whether or not they are uh uh potential recipients of some of your wisdom from this from your book it is interesting how sometimes you'll I know a lot of senators and um sometimes you'll uh you'll be around a politician and they're so socially awkward you think you went into politics like but some of them are um some of them are phenomenal uh like Bill Clinton famously could make everybody in the room feel they were the only other person in the room and that was true um uh Biden himself I've been interviewing the guy for 30 years uh and he's like a lot of politician Ians He he'll invade your personal space he'll put his hand on the back of your head he'll rub you it's like um but I think in general he's more comfortable around workingclass people than college educated people he he he has a very quick chip on his shoulder reflex when he thinks somebody else thinks they're smarter than him and people don't appreciate that it's come out recently but he's a bit of a tough guy he seems like kind the old Gramps but inside the White House and inside his Senate Office he's a tough guy but he um he has that Washington problem I described earlier I almost wrote a book about the Senators who work on the second floor of the Russell office building which is one of the Senate Office Buildings it was John McCain Joe Biden lindsy Graham Chuck Hegel uh I figet who else another one or two and I so in those days I was really spending a lot of time with Biden and I once came in for lunch at his office I sat down he started talking to me 990 minutes later uh they his Aid said you got to go vote so he left and that entire lunch I did not say one word he just talked at me for 90 minutes and so that's a bit of the leria problem that is common uh as for um why violence is going up some of it is probably a failure of diplomacy some of it is the perception of us decline I have a friend named Robert Kagan who wrote a book called the jungle grows back and that it takes the Western Alliance or the de Democratic alliances to really create a world order where people feel that we're just going to follow the rules or a little Hill to pay and I don't actually don't think the US is in Decline and give you all sorts of economic statistics uh for that but there's a perception uh which Vladimir Putin which she ping which North Korea which Iran uh are taking advantage of and so but that that once you the Rules start breaking down you just get in a much more distrustful world and everybody sort of battens down and you know obviously after October 7th I was um I would you would call it sad guy alone drinking at a bar I call it reporting uh and so I was at a hotel somewhere I'm having a drink at night and I'm doom scrolling through all the images we saw after October 7th and I click on an image all in the middle of my flow it's a different image comes on and it's an interview with James Baldwin and there's an interview he gave in the 60s probably uh and um he says there's not enough as much kindness in the world as one would like but there's enough there's more than you would think and he says the world is held together by the love of relatively few people and then he says the um you have to remember when you walk down the street every person person you meet that could be you you could be that person you have to decide every day if you're going to be a saint or a monster and in the middle of all those images of Gore really and the savagery that was the kind of defyant humanism I talked about at the end like James Baldwin faced a lot of hardship in his life because of racism and yet he refused to simplify other people and so that sort of inspired me to think that's how we have to be in hard times like this I'm not sure I've answered your questions hard to generalize about all the different politicians I've met but I the final thing I'll say is um most of them are surprisingly good people better in private than in public uh and they're good people caught in a rotten system uh but most of them you know I just had a I have a long-term friendship with a very conservative Senator um and when the book came out he sent me a a text and asked me to come into his office and his wife is dying and we just he's been a friend for a while but he's had just had a wonderful conversation you realize they are all they're all human beings just with an inordinate need to dominate every room they enter thank you for the question maybe thank you David I wonder if you can share with us any particularly difficult conversation you've had with someone whose views politically are abhorent and how you got or presumed to a better spot of understanding or sympathy or mutual respect because all of us you know are wondering how do we talk to these crazy Trump people yeah um I I'll tell two stories that leap immediately to mine I I I spent 2015 and in 2016 writing 80 columns under the with the argument don't worry Donald Trump will never be the Republican nominee for pres and I was living in Washington my social life was in New York I was teaching at Yale I was spending my life life on the asella how could I be out of touch with America like but so I I've spent the year since in constant travel and the one one first story that leaps to mind is um uh I'm in South Dakota and I'm with a 7-year-old guy and he's he's telling me about his support for Trump and he say let me tell you about the best day of my life I used to work at a factory I was the foreman of a little section that we made sort of the casings for refrigeration units uh and they replaced the technology I was no longer qualified to be the foreman so they laid me off and he said I I decided I just want to leave that factory quickly and quietly so he packed up his stuff in a box opened his little door the office and 3600 people the entire staff of the factory had formed a double line from his office door through the building out to the parking lot to his car door and so he walked through that double line while they applauded and he said that was the best day of my life and every job I've had since then uh was worse and my income's been going down I can barely leave the house cuz I've got to take care of my 100y old mother-in-law and so that guy might be a jackass but I need a change and so I get where he coming from and so that's that's one conversation leaps to mind the second conversation leaps to mind of when I really did find their views important first let me tell you another this was in Jordan the country of Jordan first let me tell you there's a there was a guy named uh Prince Hassan who was the Crown Prince of the former King whose name I'm now forgetting is Hussein and so Prince Assan was going to take over when Hussein died and at the last minute the king decided he was going to not give it to his brother but give it to his son and so we're at the the Prince's family at their dining table after this has happened within their palace and they're talking about how horrible it was to be now be basically rendered non-persons and my buddy the other American journalist leans over to me and says this is the plot of The Lion King so that's not the bad story I'm going to tell you um the story I'm going to tell you is uh I think on that same trip also in Jordan I was um invited over to family's home my other journalist and I and if you've ever been in the Arab world you know how incredibly gracious everybody is I used to take trips throughout the Arab world everybody would just be wonderful and then I go to Israel it's like would it kill you to like be kind of nice like but um but so we're having a wonderful time uh the the most of the gentlemen are there they're legal Scholars I think a couple were on the Supreme Court oforia Jordan and uh their granddaughters come in and and give us warm embrace you know greetings and then we start talking about it was years ago and there had just been a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv at a discotech called the dolphinarium many of you remember that and so we said do you really think killing a bunch of basically teenage girls is the right thing to do and they all said yes and they all said they are breeders they're creating more Jews of of course it was the right thing to do and so you're in the middle of this nice evening and these guys are saying it's okay to kill your fellow Jews and so like did we storm out well there's where journalism helps you just like keep going you just learn more but it's really rung in my head of of uh we I think we more or less just changed the subject uh we weren't going to persuade them uh we found it abhorent um but and now we see where that those attitudes have led um but that was a very challenging uh conversation just CU their beliefs were in my few murderers I've seen well during the week PBS news hours my goto news source you know and Friday night with you and Jonathan is the top thing for me I really look forward to that I saw you and Jonathan doing interview he was interviewing you at the Chicago Humanities conference recently right it was an eyeopener for me I thought that Jonathan although you have a close relationship on the program was seeing you in a very different way than he had least on the program my question is what was that interview for you H very interesting I think it's part because when we're on the air uh first of all they're giving us topics about politics and it's not always the most human subject to talk about uh and so we're like and the frankly one of the problems we fell into over covid is um the we have to cover a certain number of topics per segment and so a lot of it is I make a statement he makes a statement and then we shift topics and then I make a statement he makes a statement and so it's hard to have like real convers when we're not just dwelling and we're on a political topic but in that conversation we were really talking about the book and so it was a topic that was human and Humane and we could really just relax and we had a lot of time I don't know 45 minutes or an hour and so you could just be uh I think it probably brought out warmer versions of ourselves I'm imagining I really enjoyed that event um and so yeah I mean I mean it's um it you know what when you're in political mode and pundit mode you're very different than being human mode and since we're in Massachusetts uh I should end by talking about the guy who came before Jonathan who was from Boston nice Boston Irish Catholic guy Mark Shields and uh he was someone who could talk about politics in a very humane way he he never he left his heart his heart was always out and open uh he had served as a political consultant and he were he I think the Pol the highlight of his political consultant career was working for Bobby Kennedy he would say that was the highlight and then he worked for Ed musky he was one of the cons the managers of that campaign in 1972 if anybody remembers that he used to joke that I I was the guy who told musk to show a little [Music] emotion it's great to be in a crowd where people get that joke and then he went on to the NewsHour um and he was there for a long time our segment was called Brooks and Shields and Brooks and before that it was Shields and jigo and before that it was Shields and ggen and before that it was Shields and kulage uh I think it was shield and and he did it for a long time um but he was just uh a wonderful and we we did that show together for 20 years and we never had an angry word for each other on or off the air uh he was exactly the way he seemed and so I should end just a note of a just a truly lovely man so thank you all very much thank you thank you so thank you all so much here tonight it's really a [Applause] [Music] pleasure [Music] the

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Length: 59min 16sec (3556 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024