David Brooks | How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply

Srini Rao

David, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

David Brooks

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. As I said before we hit record here, yours are books that I returned to over and over again. I quote them repeatedly. And even when I'm asked about my favorite books, your name comes up over and over. And you have a new book out called How to Know a Person, the Art of Seeing Others and Being Deeply Seen, all of which we will get into. But given the subject matter of the book, I wanted to start by asking you, what

is one of the most important things that you learn from one or both of your parents that have influenced and shaped your values and what you've ended up doing with both your life and your career.

David Brooks

So interesting. I hadn't thought about that much. I should have a good answer for that. My parents were academics. And so they were big readers and writers. And they took seriously the idea that if you read important books seriously, it would change your life. And I've come to believe that to be true that when you read a book, even it could be a book written by somebody 3000 years ago, they're introducing you to parts of yourself you didn't know. They're naming.

things in your world that it hadn't occurred to you. And they're giving you, expanding your imagination. And then I think finally they're giving you, when you read a great novel, for example, you don't necessarily have new information, but you've had a new experience and a new emotional experience. And you know how to feel in different circumstances. And sometimes very strange and alien circumstances. So they've widened your repertoire of emotional knowledge. And I think my parents having books all the way around the house.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

David Brooks

and reading and writing them transferred that to me.

Srini Rao

Hmm. Well, your parents being academics, I'm the son of a college professor, but one of the things that comes with growing up in the Indian culture is creative pursuits like writing are great as hobbies, not careers. And I wonder what the narrative in your household about pursuing a creative career like the one you did, what was the narrative with your parents about making your way in the world?

David Brooks

I think I had the opposite pressure. So it depends on like, I'm basically fourth generation American. And so my great grandfather was a butcher and he was very practical minded. And he wanted his kids who were really the first generation to go into something very practical. And so my father, for example, became a lawyer, my grandfather became a lawyer, though his heart really wasn't in the law. His heart frankly was in writing, and he was really good at writing legal briefs. And he wrote letters to the editor of the New York Times almost every day.

David Brooks

and often got them published. And he was dead by the time I got hired by the times. But I would have loved to have been able to tell him that your grandson got to be a columnist in the New York Times who I think would have really made him genuinely joyful to know that his family had projected in that way. And then my mom and dad, they were pretty serious intellectuals. So they were 1950s sort of 1960s, 70s, New York Jewish intellectuals.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

David Brooks

And I think when I went into journalism, it was a, I don't know, I wouldn't say a step back, but it was a step less intellectually rigorous to work for a magazine or newspaper than to be an academic. So I think there was some sense, especially my mom might have felt that I had not gone into the deepest sphere of writing. I've gone into more popular sphere.

Srini Rao

. Yeah. Well, it's funny because every Jewish podcast guest I've had is like, you know, Jewish household narrative is the same as the Indian one doctor, lawyer, engineer failure.

David Brooks

Yeah, so I'm welcome to my life. Yeah, no, I think that's very true. I would say it's genuinely true of a lot of different immigrant groups. They come here and then there's that phase where the family is, the first or second generation is like, yeah, I sort of like my old culture, but I really like this new culture. I'm a little embarrassed by the people in my grandparents. They're not like hip to America. And then the next generation, they say, no, I really like that old culture that we had. I want to recommit to that.

And that's certainly been true in the Jewish families. I know in the young 20 year olds who have, their parents were pretty secular and now they're diving deep into Jewish faith and Jewish traditions and things like that.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I found in my own experience that like, I'm basically trying to reconcile two cultural identities, one of being an Indian American and one of being raised by Indian parents and being this weirdo kid who's like the creative one in a family full of professors and engineers and doctors.

David Brooks

Yeah, you know, I was teaching on and off at Yale for 20 years. And what was interesting to me is in the beginning, the kids were Chinese. And I'm not talking about Chinese American students. I'm talking about Chinese students. They would come over and they would, they really want to do an econ. They'd want to do a hard sciences. They wanted to do something very practical and that would really be built, you know, career building and that practical moneymaking also scientific sense.

And, but then as the 20 years went by, I had more and more Chinese students wanting to do literature and facing a lot of parental pressure from parents who didn't want them. But I was really struck to see the more and more young Chinese students saying, no, it's what American University's secret is the students challenge the professors, the students get to lead. It's not just we absorb what wise professor says, and that's the kind of life I wanna live.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I think that makes a perfect segue into one of the earliest things you say in the book, which is that being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full kind and wise human being, but it's not enough people need social skills. We talk about the importance of relationships, community, friendships, social connection, but these words are too abstract. The real act of say building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small concrete social actions. Well, disagreeing without poisoning the relationship, revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace.

being a good listener, knowing how to end a conversation graciously, knowing how to ask and offer forgiveness, knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart, knowing how to sit with someone who's suffering, knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced, knowing how to see things from another's point of view. But this is what struck me the most.

You said that these are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don't teach them in schools. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life. And I think that has struck me so much because this is something that I ask anybody who has worked in our education system, because a theme like this is one that seems to be ongoing in a lot of my conversations. But let's say that you, David Brooks, were basically

you know, hired away from the New York Times to be the person in charge of education policy for all of the United States or, you know, how would you redesign the entire thing from the ground up based on this perspective?

David Brooks

Yeah, well, I wouldn't walk away from the traditional academics and the test scores and the grades I have problems with, but we could talk about that. But you know, I think I'd put a lot more emphasis on moral formation. And moral formation sounds like a very pompous, old-fashioned word, but really it's three things. One, it's learning how to restrain your natural selfishness. Two, it's finding a set of high ideals, a source of meaning and purpose in your life so you know what ideal you're serving in your life.

David Brooks

it's these skills of teaching people to be considerate in the concrete circumstances of life. And just to take the third one, through most of American history, we really did teach these skills. The schools thought their job was not to get kids into Harvard and Yale. Their job was to get to produce young men and women of good character. And so one headmaster said, I try to produce students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck.

And so they mean I teach somebody who you can count on, the chips are down. And there was no one way to do this teaching. They did it from the left, the right, the religious, the non-religious, but they gave them, there were things that we would consider kind of absurd. Like there was a, schools used to have things called the courtesy club or the thrift club, how to not throw away all your money. And then if you go back to the novels, think of the novels of Jane Austen, which those are novels that are really instructions in manners.

David Brooks

And now we think that term manners is kind of stuffy in old fashion. But for people in the 19th and early 20th century, manners were just ways of being kind and considerate. And so the world was filled with these institutions of moral formation. Uh, and they were, you know, the boys and girl scouts, the, uh, the settlement house movement, the boys and girls clubs, and a lot of them have just stopped doing character formation because they don't know what to say.

And so they default to, we're just going to help you get a job. And so I would, if you gave me a magic wand to turn over classrooms, the first thing I would do is I'm going to teach you a series of courses on the different moral ecologies of history. You, it's really stupid to tell young people to come up with their own philosophy of life. Most of us are not Aristotle. They can't do, we can't do it. And so one course could be just here are some of the wisest people in the history of humanity have thought.

David Brooks

Here's the Greek tradition of honor and courage. Here's the Jewish tradition of obedience to law and the covenant, the Christian tradition of humility and grace, the Buddhist tradition, the Hindu tradition, the rationalist scientific tradition of obedience to reason. And I don't know, try on these different traditions and see what one fits, so you'll have a moral philosophy of life. The second and much more mundane would just be these basic practical skills.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

David Brooks

I had a student, a young woman who said I've had four boyfriends and all them ghosted me at the end. And so none of them knew how to have a conversation to break off a relationship. And of course she was filled with distrust because she assumed that all the rest guys would also vanish on her. And so just to teach people the basic skills of how to break off a relationship, very practical. Or on the other side, I saw a study recently where they asked people, young men, how many times have you asked a man or a woman out on a date? And the numbers were...

vanishingly low. And they discovered one of the reasons was nobody had ever taught them how to flirt or how to ask somebody out on a date. So it might be, it doesn't seem trivial to me to have classes in flirting. How do you flirt? It would make lives better.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Srini Rao

Yeah, so I ended up writing this article on Medium that went viral, and then I think the Smarter Living section at the New York Times featured it. And I said, I was like, one of our most fundamental skills that basically drives human evolution is our ability to procreate, yet we learn absolutely nothing about how to interact with a member of the opposite sex in school. It's like something you figure out through trial and error. And to top it off, like I had parents who had an arranged marriage, so they had no model to explain any of this to me at all.

David Brooks

You know, I talk to my students about marriage a lot. And my students are like, one young woman said to me, marriage is a box that'll come in the mail when I'm 35. So I don't really have to think about it now. I was like, nope, wrong. And so I said, you know, I advise you not to get married till after 25 or something like that. But making the marriage decision is just a very important decision. And I used to give them this little sermon, which I'll give you a 30 second version of is, first, marriage is a 50 year conversation. Pick someone you can talk to for the rest of your life.

And so that's essential. Second, love comes and goes, but admiration stays. Pick someone you admire, and that'll be a persistent. And then the third thing is there are three kinds of love, according to the Greeks. There's eros, which is passion. There's philia, which is friendship. And then there's agape, which is selfless giving love. And if you have eros, but nothing else, then you have a hookup, but you don't have a marriage. If you have philia, you have a friendship. But you should have all three. You should feel all three.

toward this person and then you can start thinking about marriage.

Srini Rao

It's funny because I have a much cruder version of that as a note titled chemistry, connection and compatibility based on my own relationship experiences. But that was such a beautiful way to say it. And it's funny because one of the quotes that I repeat frequently when people start asking me about decisions is your quote from one of your books. I don't remember which one it was, but you actually said in one of your books, who you marry is the most important decision you'll ever make.

David Brooks

Yeah.

David Brooks

Yeah, and so every course in college should be about how to make the marriage decision, the literature of marriage, the neuroscience of marriage, the sociology of marriage. I've told dozens of college presidents this and nobody listens to me.

Srini Rao

Well, one thing I wonder about is, you've talked about this idea of a sort of moral ecology that should be taught. What impact do you think that...

the advances that we've had in technology, things like social media, the internet have had on the way that young people perceive all of these things and the importance of them. Because from what I've read about you from having dug deep into your work, you as a journalist kind of precede this entire era. Like, if I remember correctly, Cal Newport even has referenced you in his own work around deep work as somebody who really is somebody who basically in a lot of ways is an icon of what deep work really looks like.

David Brooks

Yeah, well, I wake up in the morning and I get up at seven and I write every day till one p.m., basically. And so, my wife, when we got married, thought we'd have all these long leisurely breakfasts, but I need to write a thousand words before I talk to a human being. And I used to wear a Fitbit, and my Fitbit would tell me I was napping between seven and one p.m. And I wasn't napping, I was doing what I was put on this earth to do, which is to write. And so, I really do shut myself off at those hours.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

David Brooks

The rest of the day, I'm the same distracted mess that everybody else is, which is, you know, I was on the plane yesterday and trying to read a book about our culture, about American culture. And the author was talking about how I used to read these 700 page Russian novels, but now he just has to check his phone every 45 seconds. And so I'm reading this guy about his own distraction. Meanwhile, I'm just, I'm checking my phone.

every 45 seconds as he's describing his need to check his phone every 45 seconds. So that's distraction cubed. And so I think it's had the deep negative effect on us, our ability to concentrate and do the sort of prudent work we need to do. Second, in the online world, social media world, there's judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere. And so a lot of my students and me too are extremely sensitive to the hostile criticism that is so easy to bandy about online.

And finally, and this is a point I've heard from the NYU social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, which is that when you're on social media, you're not having an experience. You're spending time without experience. And if you spend a lot of time on social media, you will have fewer experiences to draw upon. And those are experiences of good or evil. You've just had experiences of distraction. And so a life without experience is going to be a more fragile life, a more unstable life.

Srini Rao

Yeah, wow. Well, I think that layers onto something else that I thought was really interesting that you said. You say that life goes better if you can see things from other people's point of view as well as your own. Artificial intelligence is going to do many things for us in the decades ahead and replace humans at many tasks, but one thing it will never be able to do is create person to person connections. If you wanna thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with others. So I started mapping out an idea for a book about

probably sometime last week, because I got into this probably 40 to 50,000 word conversation in one thread with chat GPT, because I just kept asking questions. And then I told it, I need you to ask me questions so I can write this. And I realized what you had said there, I was like, wait a minute, this is actually not just about our ability to communicate with other humans, but also effectively work with AI. And so I wonder if

one of you could comment on that, because I think that the conclusion that I came to after this 40,000 word thread was that, as paradoxical as it is, the most important skills in the age of AI have absolutely nothing to do with AI.

David Brooks

Yeah, I think AI is going to reveal what being human is by revealing what it can't do. And so it's really good at language synthesis. It's really good at sort of short-term memory or it's really good at amassing large amounts of data. It does not understand anything. It does not have motivations. It does not have drives. It can mimic emotions, but obviously it doesn't have any emotions. And so I think, A, you should write that book. But I do think...

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

David Brooks

the ability to make another human being feel welcomed, to offer genuine sympathy as opposed to synthetic sympathy, the ability to improve your life by improving what you love. And so St. Augustine famously said, you become what you love, and you should be careful what you love because you'll become what. And if you love money, you'll become obsessed with money. If you love power, you'll always feel insecure. But if you love friendship, then you'll probably be happy.

And if you violate friendships in order to get more money or to get more popularity, then you've put a lower love above a higher love. And so I think it's going to usher in an age of great humanity. I mean, the good part about AI, I think it'll make us all a lot smarter. When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov now like 24 years ago or so, what happened to the world of chess? As I understand it, the chess grandmasters of today are way better than Garry Kasparov ever was because they've been training on these machines.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

David Brooks

And so their intelligence has been augmented. On the other hand, people with bad motives will have much more power to do bad things. So really what matters a lot in the age of AI is the quality of your soul. Are you well-intentioned and use AI for good? Are you bad-intentioned and use AI for bad? And so I think that kind of moral formation is again, much more important because the tools and weapons we have at our hand are more powerful.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, you know, it's funny because one of the chapters that you know I ended up outlining was about the skills that matter, you know beyond AI and one was about emotional intelligence and I'll give you an example because like I think the idea that this dehumanizes is kind of short-sighted I You know my I have a one-year-old nephew We've been just and I've been keeping a list of all the words that he knows inside of my AI note taking out And one day I was like I just finished reading a book that one of our upcoming guests had written and I was like I remembered something from that book. I was like, oh, he mentioned dr. Seuss

can you take my nephew's list of 50 words and turn this into a Dr. Sue style book? And I was like, great. And then I went into chat GPT. I was like, my nephew's favorite books are these high contrast books. Can you make it, you know, like do the illustrations to match in that style? And the most beautiful thing was when I was showing him the proofs, you know, we haven't gotten the physical version yet. He was just shouting the words out loud. And I thought to myself, I'm like, yeah, that is like, in my mind, one of the things that we're not seeing is that this can actually be something very human.

David Brooks

Yeah, I think one of the things that we're led astray by is the phrase artificial intelligence, because it gives the impression that the machine has the intelligence, but really it's just synthesizing human intelligence in basically human language. And so I too, I think it can, at the first I thought it's never going to produce a piece of artwork that really moves me, but I've been humbled to see some photographs or paintings that it has produced that are humbling, are very moving, but that's because it's synthesizing what other humans have done.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

David Brooks

But I think the one thing I'm suspicious of it ever doing, for example, is a distinct voice. That it's great at synthesizing the mass of humanity's output, but the way Joan Didion used to write, the way Tom Wolfe used to write, the way Leo Tolstoy write, I think the distinctiveness in having a distinctive voice will be tremendously valuable because I think it will have to struggle with that.

Srini Rao

Do you want me to tell you the hack to get around that? I figured this out last week. The biggest mistake people make is that they ask the AI questions. So I actually said, all right, you know what? Instead of me, you answering my questions, I want you to generate an outline and I will write it, but I just need you to prompt me with questions in order to write it. And it ended up coming out and I'd send it to three friends. They're like, wow, this is good. I was like, yeah, that's because it's in my voice.

David Brooks

Sure.

Srini Rao

refined like that was like one of those and you know, a convenient byproduct of that is it kicks you into flow really fast.

David Brooks

But the questions, do they make sense sequentially? Are they the same progression of questions that you would ask me or you would ask it? Or does it do questioning well? Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it actually does questioning well. In fact, it's better that way. So I ended up asking it, I was like, why did this work so well? And it went into this entire dialogue about the cognitive benefits of questions. I was like, okay, great, that's going to be a chapter in this book idea. Because I think that that's our, we kind of treat it as a better Google. I shifted into basically two groups, what I call the better Google paradigm and the new era of creation paradigm. Whereas the first paradigm is all about execution. The second one is about exploration.

David Brooks

Right, that's great. And I think you should write that book, because it's exactly the nexus of where I think we have a lot to learn.

Srini Rao

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's actually get deeper into your book. Because, you know, like I said, I think to me, there's always such a depth to your books and you touch on these huge topics that, you know, sort of impact our lives. And we've kind of been talking about it to a degree, but we've just touched the introduction. But what was the genesis of this book? Like, why was this the sort of next logical book for you?

David Brooks

I think a couple things. One, I'd written a lot about the decay of social life in America, basically. The rise of suicide, the rise of depression. The 36% of Americans say they feel persistently lonely. 45% of high school students say they're persistently despondent or hopeless. The number of people who have no close personal friends is up by four times since 2000. So there's just this social crisis. And I'd written a bunch about relationships and community.

and stuff and social capital. But it occurred to me that's all too abstract, that community is an abstract word, but what community really is a concrete set of social encounters. So if we're gonna do well as a democracy, we have to be a lot better at doing social encounters. So that was the noble social reason for doing the book, the patriotic reason. But then there's the selfish grubby reason is that I'm not naturally good at this, I wanna get better. And so writers, we're all working on our stuff in public.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

David Brooks

And one of my favorite sayings about writers is, we're beggars who tell other beggars where we found bread. And so if I find something in some book of psychology that I find helpful in how to end a conversation well, and I can repeat that, I derive great satisfaction of spreading the knowledge I happen to come across.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, you know, I'm thinking about how we approach this and how we pack, you know, so much insight into a 30-minute conversation that we have left. So let's start with the two distinctions you make between illuminators and diminishers and how this relates to that whole idea of, you know, knowing and actually seeing a person.

David Brooks

Yeah, so diminishers are people who don't see you. They make you feel invisible, unseen, uncared for. And partly it's because they don't ask you questions. They're just not curious about you. And I often leave a party and I think, you know, that whole time nobody asked me a question. And I've come to conclude only about 40% of humans are question askers. The rest are perfectly nice people. They're just not that curious. And then the diminisher is also stereotype. They ignore, they do a thing called stacking, which is when they learn one fact about you.

They make a whole series of assumptions about what the rest of you must be like. And that's a great way to miss see somebody. Illuminators, on the other hand, are persistently curious about you. They pay close attention. They learn to see the world a little from your point of view. And they make you feel respected, seen, and lit up. And so, for example, there was a novelist who wrote about 100 years or so ago named Ian Forster. And his biographer wrote of him was to talk to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity.

you had to be your best and most honest and sharpest self. It'd be great to be him. And then the final story I'll tell on this is a story that may be apocryphal, but it gets a point across, told about Jenny Jerome, who would go on to become Winston Churchill's mom. But when she was a young woman, before all that, she was in Victorian England, and one night at dinner, she was at a big dinner party. And she happened to be seated next to William Gladstone, the Prime Minister of England. And she left that meal thinking that Gladstone was the cleverest person in England.

And then sometime later, she was at another dinner party and she was seated next to Benjamin Disraeli, who was Gladstone's great political rival. And she left that dinner party thinking that she was the cleverest person in England. And so you wanna be the person who makes other people who light up and shine. And so that's being an illuminator.

Srini Rao

Yeah, yeah, the funny thing is, I think that one thing that people find difficult and it's funny, because, you know, Charles Duhigg just wrote a new book called Super Communicators, and we were just talking about this and how, you know, we start to, like getting to a level of depth and asking people deep questions. But one of the things you say is that when you're first getting to know someone, you don't want to try to peer into their souls right away, it's best to look at something together. Through small talk and doing mundane stuff together, your unconscious mind is moving with mine, and we're getting a sense of each other's energy, temperament and manner. We're

with each other's rhythms and moods, acquiring a kind of subtle tacit knowledge about each other that's required before other kinds of knowledge can be broached, we're becoming comfortable with each other and comfort's no small thing. Nothing can be heard in the mind until the situation feels safe and familiar to the body. Now, what's funny about that to me is I start almost every interview and I started an interview with you today by asking what is a pretty layered and personal question. So talk to me about that as it relates to this because I don't really

waste a lot of time on small talk, I'd like to think.

David Brooks

Yeah. I think the main part, we're sort of in a podcast setting. So it's sort of set up for serious conversation. But if you were to sit down next to me on the plane and you're, you turn to me and you pass me the peanuts and then you said, so have you, your parents influenced your life? I'd be like, Oh, wait a second here. Um, so, you know, I, I love that question. And, but, you know, I often start out it, but just by asking people how they got their name or something they're proud of. People love to talk about what they're proud of. So if they're wearing their kids sports team jersey, they love to talk about that.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Right.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

David Brooks

But I think your instinct is the right one. I think we are way too timid and shy that we assume that if we ask the question like you asked me off at the top, people will say none of your damn business, you're invading my privacy. And I've spent a few decades as a journalist asking people personal questions. And the number of times somebody has said to me, none of your damn business is zero. No one ever says that. Because I have found that if you ask people respectfully to tell the story of their lives, they're ecstatic to do it.

One of the people I said in the book is a guy named Dan McAdams, who is a psychologist in Northwestern. And he studies how people tell their life stories, how they shape the plot and the characters of their life story. And so he pulls people into his lab. He asks them a bunch of questions. Tell me the high points of your life, the low points of your life, the turning points of your life. And then at the end of four hours, he hands them a little check to compensate them for their time. And a lot of people just push the check back and say...

I'm not taking money for this. This has been one of the best afternoons of my life. And no one has ever asked them. And so we should be a lot, we underestimate how much we'll enjoy deep conversations. We underestimate how quickly people wanna go deep and we'll just have more fun in life if we ask the big questions like you just did.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Well, I think you also, you write about certain traits that enable these kinds of conversations with this much depth, the first being accompaniment. And you say when you're accompanying someone, you're in a state of relaxed awareness, attentive and sensitive and unhurried. You're not leading or directing the other person. You're just riding along as they experience the ebbs and flows of daily life. And I love that because you also used a music analogy. And when you did that, it made me think, I played the tuba for nine years and I was good enough to be a soloist.

director's wife accompanied me on the piano and it brought back that memory. But I never thought about it in the context of a conversation. Can you expand on what that means and also the traits that you associate with it?

David Brooks

Yeah, I just had a conversation with a pianist on how to accompany him. And I'm not a musician, so I don't know what I'm talking about. But they said, no, you're, you're like following the person as they make a series of choices, they're setting a flow, they're setting a rhythm. And you're there to make them shine. Uh, and so I found it a very humble, other centered way of being in the world. And I, you know, I have a friend who sort of does that socially. He's just, he's always, you know, paying attention to you. What, what's going on in your life? How can I be of help?

And it's just this generous way of being. We've got friends in Washington who say, we like our friends to be lingerable. We want them to be the kind of people who are such good companies, you just wanna linger with them. And that means you're not steering the relationship, you're just letting it develop and you're just having fun together and the relationship will develop on its own pace. So there's gotta be some patience in there before you can get really deep with another person.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Mm.

Srini Rao

So the friend, is this the guy who hands out the five index cards? Because I remember hearing about that thinking, I gotta have you tell that story.

David Brooks

The other centered person was indeed that friend. His name is David Bradley. And he's just, he ends, literally ends every conversation I've had with him. He's been a good friend to me for many years. What can I help you with? And that's just his basic posture. And he has a phrase that he uses, coming in under. And so when he's in a conversation, he's not lecturing down. He's coming in under. How can I be of use? And the thing he does most famously is what,

his whole friendship circle calls the David Bradley index card trick, or it's not even a trick, it's a practice, where you come to him with some problem, like maybe you're trying to decide whether to take this job or that job, or marry this person or not marry that person, or divorce this person or not divorce, and you go into his office and he asks you a bunch of questions. And then he, after about half hour, he hands you a newspaper.

And he says, here, read this for 10 minutes. I'll be right with you. And he hands you the paper and you're reading it, but really you're looking over the paper and looking at him and he's furiously writing down stuff on index cards. And then after about 15 minutes, he hands you the cards. And the cards are not the answer to your problem. The cards are a decision-making matrix for how to think about your problem. And so I went to him once two years ago because I was overwhelmed by stuff, the stuff to do.

And he put one index card, the things I like to do, and then on another index cards, the way I'm actually spending my time. And then on the third and fourth index cards, a whole way of thinking so I can make what I like to do really how I'm spending my time and how to structure decisions before I say yes and before I say no, and what I really value in my life. And it was tremendously useful. And people who've had the index card treatment done to them.

Some of them put the cards on their mirror so they see them every day. Some people 20 years after he did it, they stop him and say, you changed my life with that treatment. So it's just he attentively pays attention to people. And then he's really good at trying to think through decision-making processes. So he's not solving your problems, but he's giving you a structure so you can solve your own.

Srini RaoYeah. Well, let's talk about one other thing. You talk about the idea of two layers of reality. You say there's the objective reality of what happens and there's the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, main, meaningful. The second subjective layer can sometimes be the more important layer. And

This is the one that we want to focus on. And so one thing I wonder is why are we so blind to that subjective reality? And how does it relate to another idea that you talked about later in the book, which is the concept of either trauma assimilation or integration.

David Brooks

Yeah, well, so one of my favorite, one of the key quotes in the book is from Aldous Huxley, experience is not what happens to you, it's what you do with what happens to you. And so some people suffer abuse and are traumatized and really disrupted. Some people suffer abuse and they figure out how to accept the horrible thing that happened to them, but their life, they have a very different experience of what happened to them than other people. And so we don't really see the world with our eyes, we see with our whole life. And we underestimate how different

the same situation looks to other people. And so we may be all at a party, and it seems like we're all in the same room, surrounded by the same people, looking at the same things, but we are all having very different experiences at the party, depending on our history, depending on our personality structure, depending on a thousand different things. There's a study I cite in the book that was done way back in the 1950s. People at Princeton and Dartmouth were watching a completely vicious football game between the two schools, and each side that...

thought that their other team had committed twice as many penalties. And researchers weeks later showed them the game film. And each side took a look at the game film and said, see, this is objective proof that the other side committed twice as many penalties as our side. So even when looking at the film, they saw completely different games. There was no one thing called the game. The only thing is how it's seen by each person. And so the upshot of this is when I'm going to get to know you, I can't just try to imagine what happened to you.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

David Brooks

And I don't even primarily care what happened to you. I care what you made of what happened to you, what meaning you tell, what meaning you tell now about what happened to you. And so if I'm gonna get to know you, that's why questions are so important. I can't try to put myself in your shoes, I have to ask you a question. And then to move on to the, I forgot what it was, simulation and integration, was that the, yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I think that was the distinction I made between the two. Like what, you know, you kind of like laid it out in the way I interpreted was some people assimilate to trauma, assimilate the trauma and other people integrate it. And I thought that was pretty related to what we just talked about as far as subjective and objective reality go.

David Brooks

Yeah, so if somebody loses a spouse, some people say, okay, I have my basic worldview and I'm going to try to integrate that or assimilate that into my existing worldview. Other people say, no, I've just lost a spouse or I've just had cancer. I've got to totally update and modernize my worldview. And if you want to adapt to trauma well, you've got to prefer the second route. Don't try to assimilate into your old worldview. You have to realize you have to go through a process of worldview change. You have to update your models.

And that process of updating your models after loss is what we call grief. And the mind is working its own way at its own time with its own repetitiveness of changing how it sees the world. And that's just a process, a hard process we have to go through.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Well, I know one of the questions that you posed, I can't find the exact thing because I took so many notes on your book was about, you know, sort of how somebody is like traumatic experience or really like life changing experience reshaped their entire view on what was important, what mattered. I'm paraphrasing what you said, but for you, like what have been what's been one of those inflection points in your life that made you change the way you saw everything.

David Brooks

Yeah, I think, you know, I got divorced about 11 years ago now, so 12 years or 10 years ago, somewhere in that. I'm very bad at retroactive time estimation. And so I went through divorce. I went through some hard times. I was living alone, quite lonely, aware of that I'd sort of misled my life. I spent too much time at work. I hadn't been open with my own emotions. I hadn't really been brave enough to confront my own emotions.

I had the normal male fear of intimacy and the normal idiot male response, which is to try to be a workaholic and cover over what's going on deep inside. And so I went through a process of trying to improve myself and try to become more familiar with my emotions, more better at intimacy, better at emotional expression. And I've had any number of people tell me that they almost don't recognize me compared to who I was 15 or 20 years ago. I just...

Last week, I was talking to a guy whose our kids went to school together, and he said, I always thought you hated me. And I said, I never had any negative thought about you. But because I was sort of withdrawn and aloof, he interpreted that as dislike. And that wasn't hate, that was just me being socially inept. And so I've tried to become a little socially epped, if that's a word. And this book is a product.

Srini Rao

Well, you know, I think what strikes me as so paradoxical about that is the things you mentioned are what your books are largely about.

David Brooks

Yeah, well, we're, like I say, we're all working out our shit in public. And so we, so we're just trying to like, I, you know, the first book I wrote in this process of self-improvement, I guess you'd call it, uh, was a book called the social animal. So it's a book about, it's a book about emotion and a book about the unconscious. And so I'm classic University of Chicago intellectual type. I, I don't just have emotions. I need to write a book about emotions to teach myself to have emotions.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yep, I've read that.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm, yeah. Well, let's do this. I want to cover one other final thing. This is out of personal interest because I need to figure out how to deal with family members who are difficult. Let's talk about this concept of defensive architecture. Can you first define it for us and then we'll go into the problems with it and then talk about how to address it?

David Brooks

Yeah, so defenses, this is a classic psychological concept, is the children experience the world and they do what they need to do to survive. And so some kids, they get abused. And so they build a defensive architecture where they see threat and they're hypersensitive to threat. Some kids are, they're not given a sense of that they are worthy that people will show up for them. And so their defensive architecture.

tends to be the world will never give me what I need. And I just got to get used to that. Some people, they're afraid of emotion or they have negative emotional experiences. And so their defense of architecture is avoidance. And I think I specialize in that one. And so they basically go through life avoiding emotions as much as they can. And their defenses work because they're under certain circumstances, but eventually they all become outdated. If you...

If you go through life thinking the world is threat, then you'll see threat everywhere, even where no threat exists, and you'll be a very combative person, and life will turn out to be kind of unpleasant. And so we all need our defenses for a time, but most of us need to overcome the defensive architecture we built up early in order to survive.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So how do you overcome that defensive architecture? Then what's the key to that?

David Brooks

Yeah, in my case, it was avoidance. It was like the, you know, the emotionally avoidance. I once spoke to a teacher who said, I had an avoidance student come into my classroom like a sailboat tacking into the wind. He wanted to get close to me, the teacher, but he didn't know how to do it. So he was like, you know, just caught a hanging around hoping some sort of human contact would happen. And in my case, I just had to learn to force myself in the circumstances that went against some of my natural proclivities. And...

one thing that happened to me at a conference like a year ago was I was at a, you know, I'm a lot of journalists, you'd think we'd be socially very adept because a lot of our job is like interviewing people. But a lot of journalists are socially awkward. And we go into journalism because the interview structures are social encounters. It's a much easier thing to do than a two way conversation. And so I was sort of like that. And then I went to a conference about a year ago, and we were at a room and they gave us hundreds of people.

a sheet of paper with song lyrics on it, and it was lyrics to a love song. And the person on stage said, okay, pick a stranger that you don't know and sing the love song into their eyes. And if you had told me like five years ago to do this, I would have spontaneously combusted. But I did it. And it's like a matter of getting yourself skilled enough so you can do emotional vulnerability and even in front of a stranger.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, in the interest of time, I wanna go into the sort of final part of the book, which is what you call the theory of life tasks, where you say if you wanna understand someone well, you have to understand what life tasks they're in the middle of and how their mind has evolved to complete this task. Human lives aren't so formal, like they can't be reduced to a series of neat stages, but you kind of broke it up this way to kind of give us an understanding. So let's go first into what you call the Imperial task consciousness.

David Brooks

Yeah, so when you're a kid, you want to show you can do things in the world. And so your main task is to show, yeah, I have industry, I have control, I can be a success in the world. And in that task, sometimes what other people are thinking is less important. But sometimes defying authority is important to show you can do things in the world. So a kid in his terrible twos will do something not just that mom doesn't like, he'll do it because mom doesn't like it.

just to show he can take some control over his own life. And people confronted by this life task tend to be very competitive. Boys in particular tend to be quite competitive and they wanna show they're the best. They wanna show they can succeed. And so sometimes I think I look at, frankly, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and I think they've never grown out of their imperial task. Everything's a status symbol to them. They just wanna show they're powerful, they can do stuff. And so that's sort of the...

a first immature stage in life. I shouldn't say stage, but task.

Srini Rao

Yeah, that takes us to the interpersonal task. And you say that people in the midst of the interpersonal task often become idealistic. The person with an interpersonal consciousness can not only experience other people's experiences, she can experience the experience of humanity as a whole. She can feel the pain of community and be driven to heal that pain.

David Brooks

Yeah, and so think of high school. When we're in high school, we're super, our main task is no longer to show industry that we have agency in the world. Our main task is to establish a social identity and show we can build friendships. And so we're super conscious of how other people see us. We're super painful when somebody slites us or insults us or cuts us off or breaks up with us. We don't yet have an internal architecture of our own identity. We really rely on other people's architecture.

And so when you move from the imperial task to the interpersonal task, in the first task, I ask a little kid to define themselves, they'll say, well, I play soccer. If I ask an adolescent how to define themselves, they'll say, well, I'm cheerful. And so suddenly they're giving themselves a psychological character category, not just an active activity category. And so their whole consciousness has shifted to do this thing they need to do, which is to establish a social identity and to make friendships with others.

The problem with that is if you do get somebody dumps you at that stage, as I say, you have no internal architecture to fall back on. You're so reliant on others' opinions, you have to grow and develop another life task.

Srini Rao

Well, so you used Putin and Trump as examples. The first really bad breakup I had was when I was 36, the one that made a mess of my head. So I'm wondering, I assume that people, just based on their level of emotional intelligence maturity, will find themselves in each one of these stages at different points. Each person's would be very different, not just age, right?

David Brooks

Yeah. Right. Or not even go through this. What I'm drawing on is about a hundred years of developmental psychology. And these are people like Eric Erickson and the current contemporary guy, Robert Keegan, who's at Harvard. And the mistake the developmental psychologists, some of them made was to think it was like stages. You had to go through one stage and then the next stage and then the next stage. It's like you have to take algebra one before you take algebra two, but life is never that neat.

And not everybody goes through every stage and not everybody goes through them in the same order. But the point of that chapter is that you can't really know a person unless you know what task they're facing. And so for example, now I'm older and I'm leaving, I think, or hope, I'm leaving what's called the career consolidation task, which is how to establish myself in the world. And hopefully moving on to the task that is the best way to do old age, which is called generativity, which is this need to give back to society.

And it's a more servanory at an altruistic stage or task. And I find myself in the middle, trying to give back to society while also still trying to check my Amazon ranking to see if my book is selling. So.

Srini Rao

Well, I, you know, I was like, that's funny because I'm like, David Brooks worries about his book selling well. It was my first thought.

David Brooks

You know, the book that came out the same day as mine was Britney Spears, which of course have sold millions and millions of copies. And I sit there wondering, Britney Spears, after all the success she's had in life and with all the pain, does she check her Amazon ranking? Does she care? And my guess is she's human. So she probably like, yeah, I want some validation here.

Srini Rao

HAHAHAHA

Srini Rao

Yeah, we'll come back to that because I think there's a lot there. I think that'll make a nice end towards our conversation. But one of the things you talk about here is parenthood. You said that first when they become parents, people get into this generative task, and parenthood often teaches people how to love in a giving way. And later when they're in middle aged or older become mentors, they adapt a gift logic. How can I give back to the world that replaces the meritocratic logic of the career consolidation years? So.

A couple of questions come from this one, you know, are you a parent? And if so, how, if you are, how are the things that you write about influenced your own parenting? And did I ask therapists this question all the time? Do you ever get the, you know, sort of, Hey, stop being a psychologist, just be my mom. Like, Hey, stop being David Brooks, the writer and just be my dad.

David Brooks

Yeah, I would say first, I'm a parent, I have three kids. They're grown now, but I would say one of the nice things about my kids is they never tolerated much of my work life to penetrate the home. And so as far as I know, I do this show every week called a PBS news hour. As far as I know, none of my three kids have ever seen an episode of that. I know, I know for, I know for a fact that two of my kids have never read a page of any of my books.

And so we just go through life. And one of the nice things my kids did was they liberated me from any workaholic tendencies when they were young, because they just wanted to play. And so I always wanted to play. And so I think I, I hope my, my work has made me a more human father. Now that it's in a relationship, adult to adult, but I think, I think my public life was pretty separate from my family life.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

David Brooks

except for sometimes people, because I do this TV show, people come up to me on the street to say something about whatever I said on TV. And when he was eight, my youngest son said, you know, they come for you, but they stay for me. And so I think that was the only relationship between the outer world and the inner world.

Srini Rao

Well, it's funny now that you've told me that I don't feel so bad about the fact that my dad hasn't read my books because he's a weirdo. He's a college professor who doesn't read books. I've never seen him reading a book a day in my life.

David Brooks

I think that's true of a lot of college professors. They, it's like the workman's holiday.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, let's finish this up with this one final area, which is this contrast between paradigmatic thinking and narrative thinking. You said that paradigmatic thinking is great for understanding data, making the case for a proposition and analyzing trends across populations. It's not great for seeing an individual person. Narrative thinking on the other hand is necessary for understanding individual in front of you stories. Capture the unique presence of a person's character and how he or she changes over time.

Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life. How people struggle and strive, how their lives are knocked out by lucky and unlucky breaks. When someone is telling you their story, you get a much more personal, complicated, and attractive image of the person. You get to experience the person. You get to experience their experience. But the thing that struck me most was this. You said that we live in a culture that is paradigmatic rich and narrative poor, and that this ability to construct our life narrative is something we really have no ability to do.

and we're not taught how to do it.

David Brooks

Yeah, there's a distinction I got from Jerome Bruner, a prominent psychologist, this paradigmatic narrative. And paradigmatic is most of what us do on the job. It's writing a memo, it's crafting a PowerPoint presentation, it's writing a legal brief, it's in my case, writing a newspaper column. It's a way of communicating that is not very personal and in many cases is designed to be impersonal. And so you're communicating but you're not really learning about a person. And what academics do, what social scientists do is they amass data on people.

And that's good if you want to understand the trends across a lot of people. It's not good at all if you want to understand the unique human being you have right in front of you. And so for that, you want narrative. And so for example, I, um, I never asked people, uh, what do you think about this anymore? I asked them, how did you come to believe this? And that way they're telling me a story about somebody who shaped their values or some experience they had, and you're getting a richer version. Another conversational tip I heard from an expert was make them authors, not witnesses.

When people tell you about something that happened in their life, they don't go into enough detail. And so if you say, well, where was your boss sitting when she said that? Suddenly they're in the scene and they're giving you a narrative description. And I used to do these Sunday talk shows in Washington that meet the press. And the way it works is the host asks a bunch of gotcha questions, the newsmakers like senators or something evade. And it's not that useful to me.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

David Brooks

What they should do is they should say, why'd you get into this line of work? Tell me about why you do this. What, who shaped you? And we'd learn more about the newsmakers. And I think it would be a little better politics if we were just leaned more into narrative and less into paradigmatic.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, you know, in the interest of time, I want to finish with one final thing. We were just joking about your sort of need for validation. And I kind of like was thinking to myself, wow, David Brooks checks his Amazon rankings. What the hell? Like, yeah, like this is a guy who's written, you know, all these New York Times bestselling books. You're a well-known New York Times columnist. So.

You know, like for you with age, you know, how is one your need for validation evolved? Um, and two, you know, by the standards of anybody listening to this show, you are incredibly successful, but I wonder for you, like what that, the definite what the definition of success has meant with time and how it's changed with age.

David Brooks

Yeah, I've become way more career successful than I ever imagined. When I was starting out, I was like everybody else. All my pieces were getting rejected. I was tending bar. And I thought, well, if I get a job at an airline magazine, that'll be good. I'll be good. And so I've way exceeded that by the normal standards, but I will tell you, the first time I had a book on the bestseller list, I was out in LA and it was, the year was 2000.

And my agent called to tell me I was on the bestseller list, like a dream for any writer. And I was like, wow, this just feels like nothing. It feels like nothing. And it was like worldly success, and it was outside of me. It wasn't directly happening to me. And I will say candidly that having been come successful has spared me the anxiety I might have felt if I felt I was a failure. But it has not given me much positive happiness or joy. And sources of happiness and joy are the same things that everybody enjoys.

which is having fun with your kids or hanging around with your friends at a bar late at night. And I would say if you orient your life around a kind of career success, as least in my experience, not only in my own experience, but a lot of people I know who are also successful, you're aiming at a disappointment. You're heading yourself up for disappointment because it doesn't produce that much positive happiness. It really doesn't. It's the same old stupid things we all know. It's relationships, it's fun, it's experiences.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

David Brooks

Yeah, it's very far away. Success is readers who I don't know.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it reminds me of something that the actor Shah Rukh Khan said. I don't know if you've watched the David Letterman show where my next guest needs an introduction, but he had Shah Rukh Khan, which he had his own episode. I think it was like not even part of the entire series, but the thing that stayed with me the most out of that interview, because you know, Shah Rukh Khan is like this iconic character is like more famous around the world than most American actors. And.

One of the things he said to Letterman was that, I'm an employee of the myth of Shah Rukh Khan. And I thought, what a way to separate yourself from like your public persona that people attribute all these things to.

David Brooks

Hmm hmm, wow.

David Brooks

Yeah, I once read this Truman Capote was walking down the street, 5th Avenue, New York with Marilyn Monroe. And Marilyn Monroe says to him, the next five blocks, I'm going to walk as Billie Jean, which is her actual name or Norma Jean. I forget what it is. But anyway, that's her normal. And she's walking down the street and nobody stops. Nobody knows her. And then she says to him, the next five blocks, I'm going to walk as Marilyn. And so she changes her posture, her strut, and suddenly she's a star.

And within half a block, she's surrounded by a crowd. And so your story reminded me of this story, that the persona that you play in your public life can be a persona. And I think the danger is when you confuse your persona with your actual self.

Srini Rao

Yeah, no, I mean, I like I always tell people it's like my parents could give two shits that I wrote a bestselling book or any of that. My mom still yells at me when I know don't put the cap on the toothpaste doesn't change any of that. Well in the interest of fair enough. Well you know, I feel like you know, we can talk about this all day because I mean, we're

David Brooks

Yeah, yeah, for sure. But it's nice that you can afford a nicer house if you have a better bestseller.

Srini Rao

Effectively talking about the experience of what it means to be human here, but in the interest of time I want to finish with my last question Which is how we finish all of our interviews. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

David Brooks

That's good. I think something that is unmistakable is somebody writing at other depths and not other shallows. That they really are writing out of the core sources of tension and agony or sometimes joy in their life. And so, for example, I'm a big Bruce Springsteen fan, which you're compelled to be if you're my age and you grew up on the East Coast. And I often wonder how does this guy sing the same songs in 2023 with such passion that he wrote in 1974.

And I think because he really is singing out of his depths. He's singing out of the core experiences of his life. And those haven't changed that much. So he can still do so with passion and authenticity. Whereas other musicians, it was a pop song they wrote 20 years ago. And if you go to see them in concert now, they're just going through the paces. And so I think it is like we all have these core tensions, one or two core tensions that we're just trying to work out and we're probably never gonna solve it. And if you write out of those depths, then you're writing out of your authentic self.

Srini Rao

Beautiful. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Not that anybody couldn't easily find you, but where can they find out more about you, your work, and the new book?

David Brooks

Well, they can go to that aforementioned Amazon page. Now, you know, I'm easily findable, but most of my writing, aside from books, is in the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly magazine, so I'm around.

Srini Rao

Awesome. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.
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