[Music] good afternoon everyone if you could take your seats uh I'm Elliot Gerson and it is my great privilege to introduce the next session uh it is uh uh a really uh in a sense Central to the theme of many of the things that you've been hearing about this week the world on fire populism the rise of authoritarianism uh and basically the whole mess in the in the world that we've been talking about through one prism or another uh over the last few days and we will continue to and we are going to have someone address the root causes of that in a way that no one else could and he is someone who certainly needs no introduction and I don't want to take time away from him and after his remarks you'll all have an opportunity to ask questions but I will given the fact that it is the 20th anniversary of the ideas Festival say something about our guest who you know all about his distinctions you read him you follow him you watch him he also has a long history with the Institute uh he co-founded and the chairs weave the social fabric project but more significantly although it's pretty wonderful uh in the annals of the ideas Festival I can now say to you officially because I went back to our archives and confirmed this that no one has spoken at the ideas Festival more than David Brooks and appropriately uh David uh I think one reason when we created this we had no idea if it would survive more than 2005 one reason it was so successful was David Brooks and then a couple years after that he came and he has been here every year every year since uh there is no one spoken as often a couple of other things that make him an exception here and an entirely deserved exception one is that early in this process of the ideas festival kinea and I decided that we would have a rule to make sure we keep things fresh and people would come back for new things every year we had a rule that no one would speak more than three consecutive years years but of course we had to have the David Brooks exception and we do and the other thing that this is an example of an exception of is that we decided at the very beginning that the format we would use in almost all instances is conversation and dialogue either an interview or a moderated panel and that we were not going to have lectures as one often has at other kinds of conferences and events but then again given the wisdom insight and popularity of this man we had to make a second David Brooks exception which was to allow him to have these kinds of formats with regularity so without any further Ado it's my great pleasure and privilege to bring up David Brooks I should correct Elliot I haven't actually spoken more than anybody else it just seems that way um I uh I read my first book for book on tape and uh the sound engineer told me a story when you read your book for audio you realize how boring your book is uh and how many how often you repeat yourselves but the sound engineer told me the story that there was a novelist who was reading a 700 page novel uh and he's in the middle of it and the sound engineer looks in and the novelist is weeping and so the engineer says there something I can do and the novelist says don't I ever shut up and so that's me at Aspen now every other talk I've given here has been uh about how to live a better life uh how to improve your life this one is not because of the global situation I thought I should rise to the occasion and try to diagnose the whole Global situation but I felt guilty about that that if I don't give you some practical life tips your lives will fall apart over the next year before I can give my next talk so in the first few minutes I'm going to give you some actual life hacks which I've uh got from the Internet or the Bible one of the two and so here are a few life hacks these are practical life hacks then I'll get to politics when you have 90% of a large project finished finishing up the final details will take another 90% def denying or deflecting a compliment is rude accept it with thanks getting cheated occasionally is a small price to pay for trusting the best in everyone because when you trust the best in others they will treat you the best purchase a tourist guide book to your hometown you'll learn a lot playing tourist once a year the thing that made you weird as a kid will make you outstanding as an adult it's not an apology if it comes with an excuse just because it's not your fault doesn't mean it's not your responsibility if you think you saw a mouse you did and if you saw one there are others if you can't make up your mind between two options flip a coin but don't go by how the coin comes up go by your emotional reaction to how the coin went up take photos of your parents every day that's how you want to remember them if you meet a jerk once a month you've met a jerk if you meet a jerk every day you're the jerk don't ever look at a recent photo of your first great love and this one is from waren Buffett you can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow which is good when you're mad at them you can tell them to go to hell tomorrow way today so that's that's my life-altering advice for you crammed into about 90 seconds now we turn to politics now I got my political start when I was uh five my parents were somewhat leftwing we lived in New York and I uh they took me to a place where hippies would go called a beIN and a beIN was where uh hippies would go to show how little they cared about money and material things and one of the ways they showed this was they let set a garbage can on fire threw their wallets into it just to show we don't care about money I'm 5 years old I see a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can I break from the crowd reach into the fire grab the money and run away and that was sort of my first step over to the right and so I I veered right and then I veered left but the main thing I am like all of us probably in this room is I believe in Liberal democracy and I was uh a foreign correspondent in the 1990s at the high Watermark of liberal democracy I was in the Soviet Union if you remember in the final days of the Soviet Union Boris yelton was the democratically elected president of Russia and this old Soviet apparatus staged a coup and they had tanks rolling through the town and yelton if you recall stood on a tank in front of the Russian White House the Parliament building and said I dare you shoot me and all the Democratic activists surrounded him to offer sort of a buffer and I was there uh and I interview I found a woman who was handing out sandwiches to the Democratic protesters and her name was Valentina koseva and she was 93 and so I asked her to tell me her life story and she told me that she'd grown up in the Palace of the Zar before the Revolution just after the revolution she'd been lined up for a firing squad because she was on the wrong side of the Russian Revolution her mother saved her life she got married her husband was disappeared in the 1930s purged and sent to the Siberia never to return her two boys were killed in the Battle of Stalingrad by the Nazis one of her sons was rifle budded to death and then she married again her second husband also was sent away to the gulag and she never saw him again and then in the 1950s under kushev she was part of the calik people which is the Muslim people and they were sent off to Exile and so I'm just my my brilliant interviewing techniques when she's telling me this story is and then what happened and then what happened and basically every bad thing that happened in Soviet history happened to her and it was so moving to be talking to her at age of 93 passing out sandwiches at what we thought would be the rise of democratic Russia and it didn't turn out that way obviously and the I I covered in those days the end of aarthi I covered the oso peace process participant is in the room uh and I covered the reunification of Germany I covered nothing but good news for five years history has since taken a dark turn and the interesting thing about the dark turn it has taken especially this year is that it's happening all around the world I was raised with the idea that we Americans are outliers we are more individualistic we're more mobile we're just outliers compared to most other countries in the world that is not true anymore the IPOs organization which is a British firm asked people in 28 countries about certain attitudes and we are absolutely typical of the world now our pessimism is typical 59% of Americans say they believe our country is in Decline that's compared to 58% of people around the world 60% of Americans agree with the statement the system is broken compared to 61% worldwide our hostility to to Elites is absolutely typical 69% of Americans think that the political and economic Elite don't care about hardworking people compared to 67% worldwide 63% of Americans agree that experts in this country don't know what they're talking about compared to 62% worldwide we're just typical even our authoritarianism is typical 66% of Americans say that country needs a strong leader to take it back from the rich and the powerful compared to 63% worldwide 40% of Americans we need a strong leader who will break the rules compared to 41% worldwide so there are two things to take from this the first is that we're typical we're no longer extraordinary we're a typical country with typical beliefs and the second is that all around the world and all these 28 countries measured there's an incredible hostility to the system an infertile landscape for for right-wing populism and if you look around elections of the world it's a big election year you see right-wing populists thriving in place after place so Garrett filder is a right-wing popularist in the Netherlands his party Rose to power in the European elections the German afd very farri group surged in in France the Marine Leen party surged causing a the whole French political system to go into meltdown you look at Indonesia you look around Latin America right-wing populists are surging all around the country country and of course here at home Donald Trump I I noticed uh The Economist says it's about two-thirds likely that Donald Trump will be a re-elected president so that's typical of what's Happening all around the world and so to me it's a mistake we're going to we're going to watch the debate tonight but it's a mistake to see the US election in isolation from these Global Trends and if Trump ends up winning it'll be because there's just this Global TR tide in country after country after country uh uh and so like what's going on like why has this happened uh why is it happening all around the world all at once uh now there are certain obvious things we could say people are reacting against globalization there have been policy failures the financial crisis Afghanistan Iraq but these policy failures are not all around the world and yet right-wing populism is all around the world it's something deeper is going on and I think it's some sort of global spiritual relational and and moral crisis and it shows up in the deepest Essences of our societies so first thing is and I'll just take us statistics we've just gotten a lot sadder as a society Rising suicide rates Rising mental health problems uh the number of people who say they have no close personal friends is up by fourfold since 2000 the number of teenagers who say they are persistently hopeless and despondent is 45% the number of people not in a romantic relationship is up by a third since 200 the number of people who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category is up by 50% since 2000 so we've just become a lot sadder as a society and when you get sadder you get meaner I give you all these sad statistics I could give you a bunch of mean statistics gun violence hate crimes the one that gets to me it used to be two-thirds of Americans give to charity now fewer than half of Americans give to charity we've just become sadder and meaner and that's deep in the fabric of society we've also gotten a lot more pessimistic and some of that is the media's Fault we've determined that we can get your eyeballs if we create headlines that generate fear and anger and so the number of headlines that generate fear and anger is up by about 200% over the last 15 years but it's not only the media somebody some researchers took a look at sort of global conversation uh in print starting in 1850 up till today and they measured how many of the of thing books magazine articles newspaper articles whatever how many of them were positive and how many were negative and from 1850 to about 2008 most of this stuff was positive there were dips during the Great Depression which you'd expect and there were increases in the 1990s when we had Prosperity but basically we're a pretty happy country and then starting in the financial crisis but ever since the negativity of American culture has just collapsed so we are have a more negative public culture than we did in the Great Depression then during World War III then during World War I than any of the crises of the past 150 years we just are incredibly pessimistic country and if you even asked high school students the share of high school students who say it's hard to have hope for my life has been surging and so this negativity has a political veence on the right it manifests as catastrophism and so I interview a lot of trump people and the general theme you hear over and over and over again is this country is on the verge of total Destruction just a catastrophizing mentality on the left it shows up in the form of mental health problems and depression and so 34% of conservatives say they report feeling in poor mental health at least half the time 34% of the conservatives but 57% of progressive young people say they report feeling negative mental health just higher rates of mental health problems higher rates of neuroticism and it's very gender 41% of liberal males say they have poor mental health compared to 60% of liberal females it's not clear to me why this is happening but it you see the Mental Health crisis feeding into our politics and so my underlying point is that the global crisis of populism and the rise of authoritarianism is not just about policy and politics we're undergoing a global spiritual recession and a lot of people are trying to use politics as a form of social therapy remember Ryan streer is a researcher formerly at the American Enterprise Institute he discovered that people who call themselves lonely are seven times more likely than others to be active in politics so there's a lot of lonely people dominating our political activism in a healthy Society we have what you call the politics of redistribution we have big arguments but there are arguments about how high taxes should be or where spending should go that's in a healthy Society we don't have that kind of politics anymore we have the politics of recognition people are going into politics in order to feel good about themselves and in order to make the other side feel shamed they're going out for a sense of purpose and meaning and so politics people are using politics to fill a hole in their own soul to be affirmed and to get retribution on the people they dislike politics is a seductive form of social therapy because it seems to solve your spiritual and psychological problems it gives you the illusion that there's a war of Good and Evil and you're on the side of good it gives you a moral landscape so you get to have some meaning in your life it gives people a sense of belonging if you're lonely suddenly you're part of team red or team blue it gives people a sense of righteousness that you don't have to sit with the widow or feed the poor but if you get indignant in front of the TV set you feel you're doing something right for the cause and it gives people a sense of purpose a sense that somehow they're contributing to something larger than themselves the problem is if you're asking politics to fill a hole in your soul to solve your psychological relational and moral problems you're asking more of politics than it can give you because you don't really have Community you're not working with others you're just hating the same people you don't really have moral action you're just indignant in front of the TV set there's not really a morally comprehensible landscape it's not like one side has the Monopoly on virtue and the other side has Monopoly on Vice and so when you try to use politics to fill the hole in your soul you get you're you're seeking to get out of the sense of anxiety alienation depression but you're simply winding up in a state of moral war and it makes everybody mean and brutal and and makes all the problems worse so I've tried to describe a kind of unpleasant America and an unpleasant World a negative mood what's the cause what are the Deep roots of the negative mood that I think is leading to populism and leading to authoritarianism well I'll start with some child psychology there was a guy named John Busby several Year many many years ago who said one of my favorite sayings about life in general and the saying is all of life is a series of Daring Explorations from a secure base all of life is a series of Daring explanations from a secure base and he's a child psychologist so he meant you need a strong family a strong home and then you can be daring and having a daring life so do we have that in the world today do people have a secure base do they have the opportunity to do daring Explorations and I think both those things are in Decline so what is a secure base secure base in Busby's terms was family and family is not something you choose family is something that we're bred into it's deep in our soul uh people are not transformed by institutions to which they are lightly attached we're attached to this specific family this specific sacred piece of land this specific country this specific philosophy or faith these are things that we don't choose often but they are deeply woven into the fabric of our identity of who we are and they give us a secure psychological base when we get married it's not a contract we're not doing it because it's in our self-interest we're doing it because we're willing to make a lifelong commitment hopefully to another human being Rabbi Jonathan saaks who was the head Rabbi in Britain until he died recently explained the difference between a contract and a covenant he wrote a contract is about interests a covenant is about identity it is about you and me coming together to form an us that is why contracts benefits a contract will benefit a person but a covenant will transform a person and specifically it is these attachments often for most of us to these deep things that are woven into our soul first the family second the sacred Place loyalty to America loyalty to your town loyalty to your country and third is a sense of a moral order now people who are religious have a sense that there is a coherent moral order that is not dependent on our choices and you don't have to be religious to believe that that there is a sense of that the world is morally coherent and you can bu build your life around a sense that there is such a thing as right and wrong Civil Rights Movement based on the idea that as Lincoln said if slavery is not wrong then nothing is wrong if segregation is not wrong nothing is wrong there is a coherent moral order woven into the fabric of human life George Marsden is a historian who wrote what gave such widely compelling Force to King's leadership and or atory was his Bedrock conviction that moral law was built into the universe and so you it's very hard to feel existentially safe if everything's up for grabs if right and wrong are up for grabs if your family are up for grabs if your country is up for grabs it's hard to feel secure now liberalism Democratic liberalism which I rever is based on individual Choice it's based on the idea that we get to human we respect human dignity and we respect our choices but liberal societies only Prosper when they are based on things that precede choice there's only a firm foundation for us to make our choices when there is these covenantal obligations to each other through family through Nation through God or through some idea that there's a thing is called right and wrong and when individual Choice gets so extreme that it eats away at the covenants of our life then it begins to erode the foundation of liberal Society and in my view over the last few years liberalism has gotten we've had an extreme form of liberalism and this is measurable there's this thing called the world value survey and the world value survey they go all around the world and they ask people uh about their values about how individualistic how much you believe in autonomy or how much you believe in community and especially in Europe and the english- speaking world over the last 20 years our values have shifted away from the world I'm this is my my view of a slide I'm going to hold up a chart which most of you will not be able to see that's my slide this is my technology um but basically the slide shows values all around the world the African world is over here Latin America is over here the confusion world is over here and way out sticking at the end is the US and Western Europe our values have shifted away from the rest of the world we're much more individualistic much more autonom and uh We've entered this form of extreme liberalism where everything is a matter of choice I remember I was teaching at uh Yale only teach at schools I couldn't have gone into uh and we were going around the classroom and we were the kids were the students were talking about what they want to do after college and we got to one of the my best students a woman named Zara from Ghana and she said well you have to understand it's not my choice it's the village sent me here and she just comes from much more communal culture than those of us in the west and but we have gotten so individualistic I think we've begun to under mind the fundamental foundations our families are in struggle patriotism is in trouble our sense of social trust with one another is in trouble but and and that points to I think the most disorienting thing that's subtly disorienting to a lot of us what I call the privatization of morality it's not only the privatization of morality is the idea that each of us has to come up with our own moral values and this is an extreme form of liberalism it's an extreme form of individualism and if your name is Aristotle or nii maybe you can come up with your own moral philosophy most of us learn our morals in morally cohesive communities in our neighborhoods in our families we have that sense of right and wrong formed within us by the people who love us and the people who Embrace us and we have some sort of existential security because of that but when you privatize morality then everyone set a drift and it's not only a drift like physically deeply at the core of our souls were set a drift and Walter Litman a great columnist in the middle of the 20th century saw this coming in 1955 he wrote a book called uh the essays in public philosophy and he wrote If what is good what is right what is true is only what the individual chooses to invent than we are outside the traditions of Civility and so what I'm really describing here is a sense of constant flux a constant flux not only in a lot of things in our life which is good but in the deepest foundations of our lives and this situation was foreseen also by two writers who I have never quoted from in a Talk Carl Marx and Frederick Engel I'm not a Marxist but in the Communist Manifesto they wrote that Bourgeois capitalist life will lead to the constant revolutionizing of production uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions Everlasting uncertainty and agitation they wrote all fixed fast Frozen relationships with their trained of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are Swept Away new formed ones become Antiquated before they can aify all that is solid melts into air all that is Holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face the sober senses the real conditions of his life and his relations with is kind the all that is solid melts into air all that is Holy is profaned it's that sense of deep inner disturb that I think it haunts a lot of us and the authoritarians know exactly what to do with this whether it's xiin pin Vladimir Putin Iran Hamas Victor Orban Marine Leen Maga what's unites them they say I'm going to restore order I'm going to restore order to the street I'm I'm going to restore order to the borders I'm also going to restore order to the your your soul they stand up for family they stand up for what to me are reactionary values on lgbtq issues they stand up for everything and they make it all about order and so a lot of people flock to the authoritarians and the populism because they're not only saying screw those Elites they're saying I'm restoring order to your deepest anxieties and it's just tremendously powerfully appealing to people all all around the world so that's the first part the lack of a secure base and the authoritarians promising of course they're not really delivering a secure base they're just delivering authoritarian narcissism but it has this spiritual resonance with people so the second part of that John bsby quote that all of life is a series of Daring Explorations from a secure base is a part about the daring Explorations the chance and the opportunity to make sure your future is going to be better than your past we all need that sense that our life has some movement some purpose and progress and for a lot of us it does but for a lot of people in American society it doesn't and the key divide in American society right now and the key divide in our politics is over education levels and this is not only true in America it's true in all the countries I've been talking about what they call the diploma divide so why would there be this gap which did not used to exist it used to be the political divisions are about money Rich voted Republican poor people voted for the Democrats now it's highly educated people vote for the Democrats less educated people vote for the Republicans and this basic pattern occurs again and again and again all around the world why is that the short answer to me and the reason a lot of people feel they don't have a a chance of possibility and daring Explorations is that the game is rigged that rich people just have vastly better educational opportunities than poor people our sorting Society has created a cast system three-year-olds who come from a home with parents making over $100,000 a year are twice as likely to attend preschool as poor parent poor kids by eighth grade children from afluent families are performing four grade levels higher than children from poorer families students who grow up in a home making over $200,000 a year have a one in five chance of scoring a 14400 on their SATs one in five for poor kids the chances are 1 in 50 at every step of the way High kids from Highly Educated parents and highly affluent parents have this huge Advantage there's a guy named Daniel marovitz who calculates that if you would add up all the things that affluent parents give to their kids whether it's private school tuition OBO practice soccer practice travel teams it even trips to museums trips to Europe it amounts to a $10 million investment in each kid and they just soar ahead and PE kids whose families can't make that contribution they fall way behind and so marovitz mates to me the shocking claim which he's a very careful scholar is that the educational gap between rich kids and poor kids is now wider than the educational gap between whites and blacks in the era of Jim Crow that's just a yawning Gap and it has produced a cast Society we don't live in a single Society anymore we live in a society divided by educational levels in 2003 there was a woman named Anette loo great sociologist who studied how children are raised and she said people from workingclass backgrounds practice what she called natural growth parenting life is hard let the kids enjoy their childhood children from Ed college educated families practiced what she called concerted cultivation which is how I raised my kids and how a lot of you probably raised your kids the calendar becomes the central thing on the door and you're shepherding your kid to sports practices to OBO practices to whatever and you're really investing in your kids so you can thrive in the meritocracy but it has created a vast difference so college educated people live very different lives than High School educated people the average high school grad in this country lives eight years shorter than the average college grad 40% of high school grads are obese compared to 20% of college grads High School grads are much less likely to marry and twice as likely to get divorced in college grads 60% of births to women with a high school degree happen out of wedlock that's a rate 20 times higher than College grads the opio death rate for those with a high school degree was 10,000 was 10 deaths per 100,000 10 deaths per 100,000 for a college degree it was only two deaths for 100,000 and so these are just vast chasms uh in how we live how we Prosper or don't prosper and so a lot of people look at that Gap and they say the system is rigged and populists attack the educated class or as Donald Trump once put it I love the poorly educated uh and so populists say those Elites they've rigged the game they've closed off opportunities you are screwed and I will fix the problem and so on both these deep levels the need for a secure spiritual foundation for your life and a sense of hope populists claim to have an answer and so I'll spend three minutes on what we should do to repair the situation the first is people are in the center and people are on the left have to have some version of faith family and flag we have too often allowed populace authoritarians to grab for example patriotism I took a walk today with a guy named Richard Reeves who's speaking here today and he's from Britain and he noticed that the far right was seizing the British flag and seizing a lot of the symbols of British patriotism so there's a paper in the UK called The Guardian which hope many of you know it's a progressive paper and on page two they had a big full page picture of the Red Cross which is what there's a certain symbol of England and that the whole page two was that and on the page one editorial said we're not letting the farri take this from us please cut out this piece of paper and hang it in your window of your of your living room because we're going to reiz patriotism we're not going to let the right have that so that's the first thing and the similarly progressives and cist have to have a way to talk about the sacredness of family and the sacredness of patriotism second and this Fred Riley who uh is executive director of weave the social fabri project which we work on together it's the need to give people secure base give them interpersonal trust 71% of young people gen Z ask him if you do you agree with the statement most people are selfish and out to get you 71% of gen Z yes how do you not live with fear if you think most people are selfish and out to get you and that's low social trust and so we do at weave is we take people who are building trust to the local level and we try to support them Trust is built locally by people who show up for you by people who are there with you by people who know you I wrote a book that came out in October called how to know a person and it was based on the idea that trust is it exists existential security exists when the people around you see hear respect and know you when the reporting of that book I was down in Waco Texas and I was at a um a diner and I'm having uh breakfast with a I think a 95-year-old lady named laru dorsy and she presents herself to me as this Stern disciplinarian like she'd been a teacher and she said I loved my students enough to discipline them and I was a little intimidated by this drill sergeant later uh but into the diner walks a mutual friend of ours named Jimmy derell and Jimmy derell sees us he comes up to the diner he grabs Mrs dorsy by the shoulders and shakes her way harder than you should ever Shake 95-year-old but he says to her Mrs dorsy Mrs dorsy you're the best you're the best I love you I love you and that Stern disciplinarian lady that I've been talking to in an instant turns into a bright eyes shining 9-year-old girl with the power of His gaze he brought out a different version of her and that's when when you have people around you who are able to see you in that way then it's you feel seen heard you feel safe we evolve to be surrounded by people were looking out for us and part of the reason Jimmy derell was able to do that is that he's he's a warmer personality than I am but part of it is he's a pastor he pastors to the homeless in Waco he has a church called church under the bridge the homeless people didn't feel comfortable going to his church so he brought the church to them he has it under a highway overpass where they sleep and so he's a pastor so he thinks every person he sees in is made in the image of God every person he sees has a soul of infinite value and dignity every person he sees is so important Jesus was willing to die for that person now you could be Christian or Jewish or atheist or Muslim or Buddhist I don't care but we have to learn to see each other with that level of reverence and respect or else we will feel unseen disrespected unheard existentially unsafe so that's ways to try to create a secure base in the community as weave does interpersonally as I hope to do in my book and on the national level as people come up with new ways to secure the family secure the flag and secure Faith then on the other side of the equation we somehow have to create more opportunity for a wider array of people we have to fix the meritocracy in the 1930s a guy named James conand who was president of Harvard created our modern meritocracy it is not a natural growth it's an ideological project and his ideological project was the central human trait is intelligence and we're going to sort people starting at age five by how smart they are and I'm fine with intelligence it's a good trait to have it's not the most important trait in human ability to me the most important trait in humanability is hunger it's the drive to keep working to keep learning to keep moving and to keep getting better at something the second trait is the ability to work in teams there's a funny thing that there's zero correlation between how you do in school and how you do in life grades predict nothing and that's because school is all about self it's about how am I doing individually life is generally about how am I doing as a team how am I doing with others so there's a basic non seiter between schools and life the third trait I think is character ask people there somebody did a study why do people get fired in only 11% of cases are people fired because they're not smart enough to do the job or they lack the technical knowledge the main reason people get fired 89% of cases is cuz they're or they're un they're unteachable they're uncoachable they don't do well with their teammates and so somehow we have to build a meritocracy around a broader definition of Merit that won't be able to be gained by the rich a definition of Merit that includes Drive resilience good character empathy social ability and if we widen out that what how we Define Merit I think we'll have a fairer society and we won't have these bottlenecks for people so these are tough times I uh sometime last November I was at at a hotel bar on my travels and if you'd seen me there you would have said sad Guy drinking alone but I call it reporting and so I was at the bar and I'm on Twitter of course and I'm scrolling through all these images uh mostly from the Middle East and they're just brutal images and you think about the famous dates of our Century are just brutal dates September 11th January 6th October 7th it's tempting in these times to turn into what the authoritarians want us to be which is war of all against all US versus them it's just War and yet as I'm scrolling through the my phone looking at all these images I come across a video and it's an interview with James Baldwin and he gave the interview sometime it looked from the black and white images it looked like the early 60s now Baldwin was a guy who was horribly mistreated by his Society because of the color of his skin and because of his sexual orientation and that guy had a right to feel bitter and hatred he had to the right to sink into the enmity that drive so much of our politics but in this interview he says you know there's not as much Humanity as you would like in the world but there's enough there's more than you would think and then he says you've got to remember as you walk down the street every single person you meet that could be you you could be that person you could be that Saint you could be that monster and you've got to decide who you're going to be and so he could have calloused over as I said said but instead he had this mentality I could be that person I may like them I may not like them I that could be me and the phrase that leap to mind as I was listening to this little 60 Minute or 60-second clip was defiant humanism that even in brutal times when a lot of our political opponents are brutal and monstrous and frankly authoritarian that perversely and paradoxically the way to reut them is to be more human is to touch the things that really we do need to solve our souls and to emphasize the deepest parts of our nature thank you very [Applause] much now I've L some time for question and answer if anybody has comments questions all that I ask is you make them long and Meandering with no question at the end we start at the front with do we have any mic Runners we have a mic Runner can you talk about your thoughts how social media for young people especially contributes to depression and Lon yeah so the Mental Health crisis has many causes as you expect some of it as I said I think is philosophical and cultural in nature which is what I tried to describe but and I was a little skeptical that social media was really leading to this incredible ramp up in depression and suicide and my argument and I'm friends with a guy named Jonathan hey who's written about this was that social media is everywhere but depression and suicide are not going up in Denmark they're not going up in Ghana uh and but Jonathan has persuaded me with a fair boatload of data that in fact they are going up everywhere wherever there's social media there's a rise in suicide and a rise in depression now we happen to get it worse because you combine social media with a highly individualistic culture where people feel solitude it's going to have the effect is going to be a lot worse so I am become convinced that social media truly is horrible not that I get off it but um and that one of the Jonathan's proposals which I think is gaining great traction it's rare you see a somebody in my business say we should do this and then suddenly all across the country people are doing it and Jonathan's one proposal is no phones in schools and school district after school district is now adopting this and it's like a lot of Technologies at first we don't know the dangers but once we learn the dangers we know we adapt and so I think that's happening with social media we're adapting I think that'll happen with AI eventually too but maybe way there in the back information could you restate the source of the uh motivating quote at the beginning about base and exploration who was that a guy named John bsby who was the father of the thing called attachment theory he I think he was like 1940s 1950s John bsby uh all of life is a sering of Daring Explorations from a secure base I see a couple of O Katie thank you I just love you David Brooks thank you for this incredible presentation you're so thoughtful and smart and compassionate but I wanted to ask you for some real world advice you know and this isn't going to be a long story I promise but I did a breast cancer walk recently and a woman came up to me and said I really love you even though we're very different politically I'm pretty sure and then I tried to kind of talk to her and I said oh well why are you feeling the way you're feeling and I said Do You Believe do are you do you have do you believe the election was rigged and she said yes I do and I said but there's 60 plus lawsuits you know I did the whole thing like why it wasn't and she said no I really think it was I've seen evidence and can you tell us how to talk to people you know and how to lean into our Humanity when people believe things that just aren't true yeah it's really hard right I mean I was nice to her but I just was frustrated yeah a this is paradox that you're asking me this question because one of my earlier years here a woman came up to me after I gave a talk and it was more one of my more personal talks and she talked about her son getting killed in a car crash and I had no idea what to say and but I'm happen to be behind Katie Kirk at the security line at the Aspen Airport on the way out so I asked you what do you say and you gave me good advice Mo mostly just hugs but I would say so I I'm at a baseball game and it's the ninth inning in Washington and a guy turns around to me and says hey are you David Brooks and I think oh nice he'll like my he'll say yo I like your column I you know I like your show whatever and I said yeah and he said you're a and he like he and my son was there and he said to my son you should be ashamed of your father he's awful and this was a trump guy and my wife is there and she's trying to calm him down she says get off me woman and then he says I'm shaking I'm in the presence of evil and that was like oh and I would like to think that at that moment my son and I Rose above conflict and reached out with compassion and empathy and understanding sadly that did not happen we were as n n as he was so I'm not and my my wife was genuinely angry with me with with the right to be but what I've learned there's I highly recommend a book called crucial conversations by a guy named Joseph granny and a bunch of other people it's had to have these hard conversations and they point out something which I've learned when somebody comes at me with that kind of critique from a trump support or whatever or from the further left my first job is to stand in their standpoint it's to ask them three or four or five times how did you come to believe what you believe and I never ask people anymore what do you believe I ask how did you come to believe that because that way you're getting them in narrative mode and they talk about an experience they talk about a um somebody who shaped their values uh and then so I asked them three or four or five times and I may not persuade them I may not agree but at least I'm showing them the respect of curiosity and in this book crucial conversations the uh author Say in any conversation respect is like air when it's present nobody notices when it's absent it's all anybody can think about and so a lot of the people who hold these views feel profoundly disrespected and if you can show them respect I'm not sure you will persuade them I'm not sure anything haven't I've been written a million anti-trump columns in the last seven years for all the good it's done to the world but at least you'll show them that respect and I think that will solve some of the sense of hurt the sense that you looked at you people look down on me uh and the it's the other thing those people in crucial conversations say is that uh every conversation exists at two levels what we're nominally talking about and the real conversation which is the flow of emotions flowing between us with every comment we make to each other we're making each other feel more respected or less respected more safe or less safe and so by standing in their standpoint hopefully you're making them feel more safe and less condescended to uh and I don't know if that'll change the world but uh it's the only thing I can think of maybe uh in the in the back I see a couple hands we've got 2 minutes and 45 seconds um thank you for your talk Fidel Vargas president CEO of the Hispanic scholarship fund and I apologize I I came in a little late but one of the other things I seem to notice and I would love to hear your perspective homogeneous societies versus diverse societies France the United States versus say Japan H how is that playing out because it's a whole lot easier to say the other and who's causing our problems how does that play into everything yeah I mean we evolve to live with 150 people like ourselves we evolve for homogeneity we now get to live and it's a privilege and honor to live in much more diverse societies and it's to me it's a wonderfully great thing but it's just tougher it's tougher for me to relate to somebody whose lifestyle whose historical narrative is vastly different than my own and that that one of the reasons I wrote that book how to know person is because we have to up our social skills to fit the society we're living in and these traits go super deep uh I there was an election in Connecticut a guy named Ned Lamont ran against a guy named Jo Lian and researchers found after that election that every town that was settled by the Portuguese in the 17th century voted for liberman and every town settled by the English voted for Lamont these are 350 year old categories and they're still shaping belief I I have a party conversation you can tell how fun I am at parties where I asked the following question and I asked it at a dinner party recently how do your ancestors show up in your life it's like we all know were formed by our heritage but how and so there was a Dutch family there and they talked about their Dutch Heritage there was a black family there they talked about the African-American experience I talked about 5,000 years of Jewish history which I'm sure was a scintilating two and a half hours for them um but you know we're so deeply formed by our ancient heritages and you just have to be very socially skilled to see people in that level of profound difference but once you do it it's fun and I'll close was with this bit of research a a concrete way to change your life so I'm buddies with a guy named Nick Epley who's a social psychologist at univers Chicago and he was because he's a social psychologist he knows that every the thing that makes us happiest is talking to each other we pretty relational social animals and so he's on his commuter train on the way up to campus from his home and he's looking around the car and everybody is on their phones not a single person is talking to each other so he's a social psychologist for the next couple months he pays people on the train to talk to a stranger and he asks them afterwards when they get off the train how'd you like it and they all say that was the most enjoyable ride I've had in months we underestimate how we how much we want to talk to each other we underestimate how much we're going to go deep we want to go deep and so I did a presentation with them at Chicago a couple months ago now and we're doing our conversation on stage and he says stop I'm going to make everybody in this room find a stranger and for the next 10 minutes tell them about the last time you cried and you hear this groan go up from the crowd and he says how many of you want to do this and a few hands go up how many of you don't want to do it 80% of the hands went up and he said go and they did it and 10 minutes pass and we can't get them to shut up so we can get back to our conversation and then finally when they do come come up he says um how many of you enjoyed that and 80% of the hands went up and that's just a small practical thing so now when I'm on the plane I often talk to the stranger I wait till there's only an hour left in the flight in case it'll be boring but still um but it's just a concrete practical way to instill a little social relationship a little social trust and to weaken the kind of existential loneliness that I think is the cause of a lot of problems so thank you very much [Music] n [Music]
