America Has a Moral Problem, Not a Political One — with David Brooks

Burnout at work is a tale as old as time. Tale as old as time. But a new generation may have found the fix. We can learn so much from Gen Z and what they are teaching us about modeling the boundaries that would have prevented all of us from burning out in the first place. How to win the battle against burnout. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Former Secretary of State John Kerry joins us on the pod. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 393. 393 is the country code for Kosovo. 1993, Jurassic Park hit theaters and Michael Jordan won his third straight NBA title. What do Michael Jordan and First Lady and Melania Trump have in common? They both make a shit ton of money playing with orange balls. Things are getting desperate around here. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 393rd episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? Today we're speaking with David Brooks, a writer now at The Atlantic, formerly in the New York Times, and author of several books, including How to Know a Person, The Second Mountain, and The Road to Character. I'm just an enormous fan of David Brooks. I love an old, white, straight dude who starts talking about his emotions. And I find he has such a moral base, a moral compass. And he's unafraid of criticism. And he, I don't know, just love a guy who, I think David would describe himself as a conservative, although he probably excused any real label. But he talks a lot about community and decency. I think he's unafraid. I love Brooks and Capehart on PBS. I admire somebody who has that kind of footprint, who's not afraid to talk about emotions and relationships in the context of, I guess, the traditional American values. Anyways, I feel like David Brooks is the moderate or the conservative we need right now. Very much enjoy him and look up to him. So we discussed with David America's moral crisis, the roots of rising resentment, and how social media and AI are reshaping who we become. So with that, here's our conversation with the inimitable David Brooks. David, where does this podcast find you? I am at the University of Michigan. I'm at an office. They stuck me in a few steps away from the president's office. So if you need me to get any student into the University of Michigan, I can just pop over and talk to him. So I need that in writing because I have a 15-year-old, David, who is good, but I'm not sure he's Michigan material. So I need well-connected people. Does he happen to play basketball by any chance? Have you seen me? Yeah, no, that's a weird thing. I just had a physical. I used to be 6'3". Now I'm 6'2". I'm shrinking, which happens when you get older, which is really exciting. Anyways, let's bust right into it. Earlier this year, you announced your departure from The New York Times after 22 years. You've sort of, you've kind of, to a certain extent, you kind of identify or mark the times on a lot of levels. You said leaving felt like St. Peter leaving the Vatican, that you were raised to think working there was the pinnacle and you never contemplated leaving. What finally convinced you to leave and join the Atlantic? Well, first of all, I've been there 22 years and I'm 64. I figure I've got about 10 or 11 years of full-time work left in me. And I thought I'd be disappointed in myself if I didn't change. I do think changing environments, changing situations is a good way to change your thinking. So even though I was perfectly happy there, I thought I would change. Second, I think America's problems are less political and more subpolitical these days, that we've sort of lost our humanistic core, a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning. People are filled with resentment, spiritual crisis. 58% of college students don't have a sense their life has purpose. And so I thought to really address the issues at the level that I think they really exist at, A, I would like to write longer. So at The Atlantic, I can write 5,000 words, even 10,000 words. And at Yale, at any great university, dealing with reviving the humanistic core is supposed to be what the project is all about. And so I thought I'd put myself more on a college campus where I could begin to think about, you know, what makes our soul sing? How do we find things to fall in love with? How do we have a sense of resilience? How do we just fall in love? I gave a talk at Yale recently called How to Be Ambitious Without Being a Jerk. And I think those subjects have become central to my concerns more so than following Donald Trump every day, though I still do that too. And how have you—so talk about some of the subjects that require 5,000 words versus 1,000 or 1,500. Have you changed topics or are you just expanding on them? Well, you know, I'm doing a piece today about resentment. And I think we live ultimately in a culture of resentment. And resentment is funny. It starts with a sense you can't have something. You lack something or somebody else achieves something that you don't have and you feel a loss of social standing. Somebody doesn't see you and you want to be respected by this person, but they don't even know you exist. And so it starts with a feeling of impotence, but then it goes on and becomes a trans value of values. And by that, I mean the person feeling resentful doesn't only wish he had what he didn't have. He decides that what he doesn't have is not worth having. And so eventually the resentful person says, all that stuff that seems noble, that's all a fake. So kindness, that seems like weakness. Generosity, that's all for performance. And Donald Trump is the essence of a resentful person. I remember in the 1980s, and there was an entire magazine called Spy Magazine that was dedicated to ridiculing Donald Trump. And a lot of the Manhattan real estate people looked down on this schmuck from Queens. But he exemplifies resentment in that he does not acknowledge the higher registers of human nature. If you remember in the first term, he went to Normandy, and he was like, the war dead are just suckers. Why would anybody risk their life for country? It just didn't make any sense to him because he had cut off the higher registers of human nature. John McCain, his heroism did not make any sense to him. Even this week, attacking the Pope, Catholic social teaching just would not make any sense to Trump because the resentful person assumes that which is lower is more real. That selfishness, venality, the lust for power, those things are real. And the things at the upper register of human nature, those things don't exist. So I ask myself, how do we get out of a resentful age? And that's the kind of subject that takes, you know, 6,000 words to get into and out of. I find on the left that we're constantly trying to demonstrate empathy for the right and the president and understand him better. And I just think it's depravity on display. And I think we need to stop making excuses for it. But then the question becomes, all right, let's reverse engineer it. He was elected. He was democratically elected. So his values, people consciously chose in a democratic society to promote his values. So when you try and reverse order or reverse engineer it further downstream, is it the economy and people feeling left behind? Is it a lack of critical thinking? Is it poorly educated youth coming of age? And is it big tech making us more angry? Is it our political system that's so starched that people were ready for something authentic, even if authenticity was conflated with coarseness? Try and reverse engineer to the seeds of this depravity. Yeah, I make a pretty sharp distinction between Trump and Trump supporters. And so I think Trump is a monstrous human being. But I think most Trump supporters that I know had good reasons for supporting him. I ran to a guy years ago in South Dakota who said I had my best day of my life was when I was 35 and I was foreman of a section of a plant that made casings for refrigeration units. And they laid me off because they had updated the equipment. I was no longer qualified. And I said, you know, I thought I'd disappear quietly. So I packed up my stuff in my little office. I put them in a box and I carried it out. And when I opened my office door, there were 3,600 people. All the employees of the plant had formed a double line between his office through the plant across the parking lot to his car door. And he walked through that line as they all applauded him to show him what a good guy he was. And he says to me, that was 35 years ago. Every job I've had since then has been worse with less pay, less reliable hours. I can barely go outside because my mother-in-law lives with us. She's 99. She's really sick. And so he said, that guy Trump may be a jackass, but I need a change. And so I don't agree with him, but I get where he's coming from. And so my one-liner about Trump, he's the wrong answer to the right question. But that doesn't totally absolve the situation, because then you ask, well, how did 77 million Americans take a look at Trump and see nothing morally objectionable, or at least nothing morally disqualifying? And I think that is a very deep story. and I go to a philosopher in Malister McIntyre who died about a year ago within the last year. And he basically said, up until a certain time in world history, people had their morality was shaped by their social roles. I'm a tailor, I'm a soldier, I'm a teacher, I'm a whatever, a farmer. And my morality, the way I behave myself, the standards of decency are defined by how well I fulfill my moral role. And he says, when we took all that away and we privatized morality. We said it's up to each person to come up with their own morality. Well, most people can't do that. If your name is Aristotle, you can maybe come up with a morality the rest of us can't do it. And secondly, we have no sense of a shared moral order. If we're going to trust each other, we have to agree right and wrong. And so we left successive generations morally inarticulate and confused. And there was a book by a guy named Christian Smith, who's a sociologist at Notre Dame. when he went to college campuses and asked young people, when's the last time you faced a moral dilemma? And most of the young people couldn't name a moral dilemma. They didn't know what it was. A moral dilemma is one of two values you cherished clash. But they would say things like, you know, I parled in a parking space. I didn't have any quarters. And he would say, well, that's a problem. It's not really a moral dilemma. And he found that many of the young people had just never thought about how to talk about morality. Fast forward a couple of years. a woman named Christine Emba writes a book called Rethinking Sex. And she's talking to young adults about their sex lives. And she talks to young women who say, you know, I felt icky after a hookup, but I couldn't tell you why. And then the saddest story in her book was she interviewed a woman who had been raped. And the young woman said, I somehow know rape is worse than a nosebleed, but I couldn't tell you why. And so we've rendered generations left, right, and center morally inarticulate. And so they just don't have the language to process why electing a guy like Trump, why that might be wrong, why that might be a foolish thing to do, or even to process their own moral formation. If you don't have words like sin, redemption, grace, it's really hard to understand your own inner environment. And it's very hard to make moral judgments about others. And so I think there's been a loss of moral knowledge. And that explains why people look at Trump and think, eh, whatever. So a loss in moral judgment, do you think that's because attendance to religious institutions is at an all-time low, that we've been divided from our neighbors by big tech algorithms? Like, what are the underpinnings of that loss of an ability to articulate morality? Yeah. Well, our founding fathers took a look at human beings and said, these people are kind of amazing and wonderful. but they're really selfish assholes a lot of the time. And if we're going to build a democracy out of these people, we have to do moral formation. And moral formation is a fancy word for a scene I once saw in the first season of Ted Lasso. He's asked, what's your goal for your football team, FC Richmond? And he says, I don't need to win champions. I just want to help these young people become better versions of themselves on and off the field. That's a good definition of moral formation. And it used to be every school, including public high schools, colleges, who's, they thought our primary job is to turn out morally foreign people. I read about a schoolmaster who said, our job is to turn out graduates who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. The kind of people you can count on when times are done. And one of my heroes was a woman named Frances Perkins who was Mount Holyoke class of 1905 And her worst subject was biology So they made her major in biology They said it be good for your character if you major in your worst subject. And then they had the phrase there, do what no one wants to do, go where no one wants to go. And Frances Perkins spent her life traveling around serving the poor and became secretary of labor. And now colleges, we've sort of gotten out of the morality business, in part because we decided, well, people are naturally good. They don't need morality, in part because we're a diverse society. People don't know what to say. But we've left people naked and alone. And if you've got a world where 58 percent of college students don't know, have any sense of purpose and meaning in their life, they're lacking something pretty core. And we've also got out of the business of training people to be considerate to each other in the concrete circumstances of life. I had a student who said, I have had four boyfriends in my life and they all ghosted me at the end. Nobody taught those young men that they have to have a breakup conversation. And probably nobody taught them how to break up with someone without crushing their heart. These are just basic social skills. Like how do you criticize somebody at work in a way that's respectful? I mean, how do you sit with someone who's depressed? How do you sit with someone who's grieving? Morality is not mostly about what you think about abortion. Morality is mostly are you considerate to people in the concrete circumstances of life. Nobody ever taught me how to get out of a conversation gracefully. I remember I was at my fifth high school reunion, and my only move to get out of a conversation in a cocktail party-like setting was to say, I'm going to go to the bar and have a drink. And 20 minutes in my reunion, I'm so drunk, I have to leave the reunion because I had like six drinks in 20 minutes because I would just say, I got to go get a drink. But see, so aside from the big moral issues, just the loss or social skills. My friend George Hahn went to a Catholic boy school in Cleveland, St. Ignatius, and above emblazoned or carved into the archway at the entrance is, it says preparing men for others. And I love that. I think that's a decent mandate for fathers and for, I don't know, for trying to help young men and talking about service. What were we doing before that resulted in a greater sense of service and kindness that we're not doing now. I'm trying to get to some sense of, you know, I think a lot about young men. And I go to the role or I'll put forward some theses around fault lines. An absence of male involvement in young men's lives. I do think boys need men. and optimizing for service as opposed to attention. When we have an economy that just tells everyone get attention regardless of how you get attention. And I do think big tech plays a role in elevating content algorithmically that divides us and rewards coarseness and cruelty. So I'll just start there, and I'm sure you have others. But how do we get to a sense of repair? What is the neosporin for this decay, if you will? First, a revival of humanistic ideals. Humanism is based on the idea that we're partially sinful, partially wonderful, but we can be cultivated to repress our selfish sides and to strengthen our more altruistic desires, our desire for love, for respect, and for other things. And so the way you do that is first you hold up exemplars. You read about Pericles, you read about Shakespeare, You read about Martin Luther King. You read about, you know, Francis Perkins or George Marshall. And you think, OK, I can be a little like that. There was an educator in ancient Sparta who said, my job is to make excellence admirable to young people. And so exemplars are powerful. What I got in my college, the University of Chicago, was I said, hey, you're a peon, probably not capable of coming up with a moral philosophy, which was accurate. But you are the lucky inheritor of a whole series of moral systems, moral traditions. And so we're going to teach you about those moral traditions and you see what fits you. And those are things like Stoicism, Epicureanism, Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, rationalism. And so find the sort of leaders you want to, the sort of moral philosophers you want to follow. and then the basic skill building and then the cultivation of the heart. I think one of the things that's happened in our society is we have become so rationalist that we short people by IQ at age 15 to 17 and really even sooner, the young people, an eight-year-old who's been tested in third grade either knows the system thinks I'm smart or the system thinks I'm dumb. And the system thinks I'm smart, they go off into the crazy stratosphere. I listened to your interview with Ted Dintrushnet the other day. And he talks about how we put these children through the most boring sorting process possible. But then the kids who take these tests in third or fourth grade who realize, oh, I'm dumb, they check out. And so you get apathy out of that. And so there's just been this loss of avenues. One of my best moments at Yale where I teach on off, is I was teaching a young man, a very brilliant young man. It was about your inner life. It was how to develop character. And at the end of the class, and he was going to go off to a Rhodes Scholarship, really smart kid. He said, Professor Brooks, I want you to know, your class has made me a lot sadder. And I was like, yes, this is a total win. Because he was good at playing the game. But working on his internal life, And nobody demanded that of him. And so he went off to Oxford and he studied how characters formed and moral philosophy and moral development. And I assume he's, you know, a better person for it. We'll be right back after a quick break. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been talking about the war in Iran in distinctly biblical terms, citing Psalms, the resurrection of Jesus, and the book of Quentin. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. President Trump is comparing himself to Christ. Vice President Vance is fighting with the Pope. Watching all of this is the increasingly influential pastor Doug Wilson. He co-founded the church that Hegseth attends. Wilson's a Christian nationalist who would like the USA to be a theocracy. He'd also like to help us get there, though he doesn't think it's going to happen anytime soon. I believe that it is accelerating. I believe that we're making significant gains. I see assembling resources, and I'm encouraged in that labor. but I don't expect to see what we're praying for in my lifetime. Pastor Doug Wilson and how much you should worry about his plans on Today Explained from Vox. Weekdays, afternoons, wherever. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. It's a shame when the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong audience. 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Support for the show comes from Built Rewards. If you're like the majority of Americans, you know what it's like to kiss a huge chunk of your paycheck goodbye every month. Before you even see a dollar of it, it goes off to pay for your rent or mortgage. But Built makes it possible for you to actually earn something back on that big housing payment. They started out by rewarding members on their rent, but now, as of 2026, Built members can now earn points on mortgage payments, too, wherever they live. Every housing payment earns you points you can use towards trips with top travel partners, including United and Hyatt. Plus, you can use them towards Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, and so much more. Build members also get access to a neighborhood concierge. It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and find new local spots, and all while you're being rewarded at more than 45,000 merchant partners. It's simple being a renter, and now owning a home can feel a whole lot better with Build. Join the membership for where you live at joinbuild.com slash propg. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash propg. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. So I think a lot of this begins very early in the home. You're the father to three children, is that correct? That is correct, yes. How is your approach to being a parent and a partner? I mean, how do you try and actualize this at home with your kids? and how, if you were to do it again, you know, having had a life of introspection and, you know, you think very deeply about these issues, you know, what would you do if and what would you do differently if all of a sudden you locked and loaded again and had three more kids? How do you try to affect this, actualize it at home as a dad? And if and what would you do differently now if you had children? One of my favorite things from psychology is from a guy named John Bowlby, who was an attachment theorist in the 20th century. And he says all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. So we all need that secure base. And that's emotional security, your attachment with your parent. But it's also moral security, a sense that you have a sense of what's right and wrong. It's a sense of spiritual security, financial security. You need that secure base. And so I think what I did reasonably well and what their mom did reasonably well was to provide that secure base. Trivial example, my kids happened to gravitate despite my gene pool. They were all good athletes. And they gravitated toward positions that were maximally humiliating. So my two boys were pitchers. And when you're a pitcher and the other team is scoring runs, you're just alone out there on the mound. And my daughter was ice hockey and she played defense. So you're standing there and they just scored a goal, gone around you and scored a goal. And so my role was the world may be criticizing my kid for this or that, but that will not be me. I'm just there to support. I'm just there to support. And one of the nice things that I did, we didn't really push them, pressure them into this meritocratic madness. We let them have their own lives. And so, you know, and I see this in my students. I'd say 20% of them, when they do something the mom and dad think is right and will lead to a prestigious career, the beam of love gets strong. And when they do something off course that mom and dad think will not lead to success, the beam of love is withdrawn. And so that's called conditional love. The most important relationships of their life are conditional. And those students are fearful and risk averse because they don't have that secure base. The thing I would do differently, it's taken me really my adulthood to get out of my head and into my heart and to be a little less cognitive and a little more emotional and emotionally expressive. And that was not how I was raised. You know, I was not, I had, I think we had a loving home, but we never said I love you to each other. That would never have happened in my home. And I did say that with my kids. And we, I remember once my mom looked at me playing with my kids and she said, have you raised your kids in the opposite way that you were raised? And I thought was, yeah, pretty much, pretty much. But I should have been more emotionally open to them and more emotionally expressive. That's taken me a lifetime. And I think with age, you get a little more emotionally vulnerable. And even today, it's hard for me to be as emotionally expressive as I feel with them. Because, you know, once you get a relationship, you lock in a certain mode of communication. It's hard to break out of the way you're traditionally relating to each other. I think a lot of men relate to that. And that is, and I'm trying to understand why, and I think it's more than just the way you're, the household you were raised in. It's society teaches you to be a man. And part of being a man is to be stoic. And that somehow if you're emotive, it makes you weaker. that emotional expression, quite frankly, is sometimes conflated with being homosexual. At least that's how I was raised. The very sensitive guys were likely probably not sleeping with women and less masculine, and that we conflated being expressive and emotional with what at the time was something perceived as negative. And I'd like to think that's changing a little bit, but I still very much struggle And I like what Cindy Gallop says that the most the greatest wasted resource in the world is good intentions that you don articulate And do you think that do you think that men still have do you think things are getting better Yeah, vastly. I think so. If you, if you go back to the 1940s, it had good sides and bad sides. The men, there was, it was very hard for men to express their love for their kids or even to demonstrate it. And they didn't feel a particular need. The positive side of that is there was a lot more self-effacing behavior. There was less ego. There was less display, less performance. I had a friend who wrote speeches for George H.W. Bush, the elder, who was raised in that World War II era. And the speechwriters would write these paragraphs on how asking George W. Bush, H.W., to talk about himself, what a great guy he was and how he was going to make a great president. And he would cross out those paragraphs. He said, I'm not going to brag about myself. They said, you're running for president. You have to tell the country how good you are. And he finally did it. He read the paragraph. And his mom called him up the next day and said, George, you're talking about yourself. And so there was a sense you don't talk about yourself. Joe DiMaggio, when he hit a home run, he did not do a bat flip. So there was that emotional reticence had an upside. I thought it was elegant, gentlemanly, but it had a ferocious downside. And I think it's changed in part because women are more powerful in the culture and they demanded it. But it's also changed in part because of what we've learned about the brain. There was a prejudice which stretches all the way back to Plato. That reason is reliable and wise. And the passions are these wild horses that run out of control. And your job as a rational person is to suppress the passions. The last 30 or 40 years of cognitive sciences taught us that's complete nonsense. That if you people who suffer lesions where they can't process emotion, They're not super smart Mr. Spocks like on Star Trek. They can't make decisions because your emotions assign value to things. And if you can't assign a value, you can't decide what you like. And your desires, your conation, that pushes you in the direction where you want to go. And so if you want to be a wise person, it's not enough to be a rational person. You have to be wise about reading your own emotions. And I think that the shift in that science has made emotional processing seem more relevant, but also more important. And we're little less prejudiced that the emotions are these primitive, stupid things. Your emotions are very smart. They put the mind in a frame of reference so you know how to think about things. And so learning how to read your body turns out to be just tremendously important. Knowing when your heart is racing, when your anxiety, knowing a thing called emotional granularity, which is the ability to tell the difference between adjacent emotions, between frustration, anxiety, angst, anger, and stress. And if you can tell the difference between your different emotional states, you're just a lot wiser about how to operate in the world. I have someone very close to me who has been struggling with panic attacks. And the first session, this person, the psychologist said, you're not in touch with your emotions. And that's easy to say, but how do you, are there hacks or practices for reestablishing those connections? Yeah, I would advise a recommended book by a guy, Mark Brackett, who's at Yale, called Permission to Feel. And he says you should check out your mood meter, what he calls. It's an opportunity to reflect. You're probably either high pleasure or low pleasure, high energy or low energy. So if you're low pleasure, high energy, that's anxiety. and so you you if you just pause in the course of a day say where am i where do i put myself on the mood meter which is basically a chart with four quadrants and you can say i'm feeling uh i'm feeling good but low energy and that's tranquility and then you the process of naming your motion giving a label to it is a tremendously powerful tool because you want your emotions to be your advisor and not your master to tell you, you know, here's what you're feeling. Here's what your emotions are measuring. Are you moving toward your goals or away from your goals? And so you want to know that information, but you don't want your emotions dictating where you go because then they'll spiral out of control. So the mood meter is a good one. Reading literature is one. If you've got young people, there's the activity they can do in school that is most likely to increase their emotional awareness is trauma, is playing a role in theater. And that really has these big effects because you have to put yourself into not only the mind of another person, but into the heart and soul of another person. And that's a revelatory experience for a lot of people. You have a new podcast about the moral and philosophical underpinnings of human decency. Curious how you so far distinguish or the differences you've observed between trying to communicate. I mean, your superpower is that you make people feel things. You articulate ideas that resonate with people and you make them feel something. I think you've mastered that in the written word. I think it's different. I write things and I do stuff, things on podcasts. And I find that the ability to resonate with people emotionally is a different skill across those mediums. One, have you observed that and how, if and how, if you changed your approach and what do you find this working or different about the medium of podcasting versus the written word? Yeah, well, I'm still hiring my team, so we haven't actually launched the podcast. So it'll launch hopefully later in the spring. But it's a very interesting observation, which I frankly had not thought about. I will say I do a fair bit of public speaking. And I would say what I've done, I've made my writing to be more like my speaking. And my rule of speaking is, first of all, So I try to begin every speech with some jokes because when the audience is sitting there, when they first get there, they're unconsciously asking themselves this question. Is this guy going to suck? And if you can tell a bunch of jokes the first five minutes, yeah, then they can relax and they can say, OK, he's not going to suck. But then I watched Bryan Stevenson, who I hope everybody knows Bryan Stevenson. And he frees people from falsely accused death penalties. I watched him give a speech and I learned it's impossible to put too many stories in a speech. So it's story, point, story, point, story, point. Parker Palmer as an educator said, my job is to find little stories that make big points. And so the way I think of a speech, and I don't know if you think of a podcast this way, I hadn't thought about it this way, is like I'm a big Bruce Springsteen fan. So I model my speeches on Springsteen concerts. When does he do a happy song? When does he do a sad song? When does he build to a crescendo? And so a speech, like a concert, is a series of three to five minute emotional moments. And so how you structure those emotional moments determines whether you're giving a good speech or a bad speech. Now, a podcast is a little different because it's a conversation. But I find one of the things great podcasters do is that they set an emotional tone. That it's so powerful to do different people's podcasts because they have totally different emotional tones. and some people, it's a warm, some people in some podcasts were the students were learning with each other and some were the arguers who were debating each other and some were just sharing each other's lives. I have a friend named Kate Bowler who's a great podcaster and she just like, she went through really, and she's going through rough cancer and so it's just sharing of a life. Not to name drop, but the second most famous person who interviewed me this week was Oprah. Um, you're, you're the first, obviously. Oh, thank you. Yeah, me and Oprah, I get that a lot. But, you know, she sets, she exudes a kind of warmth that, um, that that's, so I, I think the, it's really more the host who probably sets the emotional tone than the guest. We'll be right back. We're back with more from David Brooks. Well, I want to talk a little bit about politics. In our presidential elections, America, I think, has a very healthy tendency to go the other way. We're like, okay, we tried this. Now let's try this. And we're like, okay, we had Thai food. I'm up for Mexican. You know, we just don't do two meals in a row. So based on that, do you think there's an opportunity? As I said to you when we were off mic, I just interviewed Senator Chris Murphy. And he talked about, I asked him to differentiate himself from the rest of the Democratic field if he were to run for president. And he talked about common good capitalism. And you and he share some, I don't know, an approach to decency and putting decency and humanity at kind of the center and then working outward in terms of public policy. And do you think that there's a chance if there's the same pattern that we might end up with someone who goes the other way and is just very caring, demonstrates more what I call traditional feminine qualities, very sensitive? do you think that's a real possibility in terms of who ends up occupying Pennsylvania Avenue the next time? I think it's an intense likelihood that, you know, one of the great, one of the things that we're in a rough period, we're in a period of the last, especially what Trump said about Iran, about the Pope, all that is, I found it, it is produced in me as an American, just shame, moral injury and shame. It's felt brutal. And yet the good thing is culture changes really fast. So you think of the 1950s. It was a time of conformity. It was a time of crew cuts. And I'm now sitting at the University of Michigan. In 1962, a bunch of kids from the University of Michigan went to Port Euron, Michigan, and issued something called the Port Euron Statement. And that began the 60s shift in the culture. So to hell with that. We're going to have personal liberation. We're going to have individual freedom. We're going to try to reduce racism, reduce sexism. We're going to shift the culture. And so the shift in culture from the 1950s to the 1960s was epic. If you looked at the high school yearbooks in 1965, all the guys had crew cuts. In 68, half the guys had crew cuts, half had long hair. By 75, they all had long hair. So it's a shift from a group collective culture to a very individualistic culture. And that can happen super fast. I remember when I was a kid, I loved New York Jets. And Super Bowl III was a competition. That's rough. Yeah, I know. Well, now I've switched. I'm an opportunist. But Baltimore Colts quarterback, Johnny Unitas, crew cut, 1950s guy. On my team, Joe Namath, Broadway Joe, playboy, swinger. He wrote a memoir called I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow Because I Get Better Looking Every Day. And so you see how quickly culture can shift. And it shifted again in the 80s with the Reagan and all that. And so when I think about what's about to happen in the 2028 election, I think America's going to say, enough. I don't care if you like Trump or don't like Trump, but this walk through carnage and contention and bitterness and corruption enough. We want the exact opposite. So I think Gavin Newsom is being an idiot for being Trump-like on the left. And I think what America's going to hunger for is not only a policy opposite of Trump, but the moral opposite of Trump and the social opposite of Trump and the emotional opposite of Trump. And so I don't know if it's Buttigieg. I don't know if it's Cory Booker, but Cory Booker exemplifies the kind of upbeat, positive, loving spirituality that I think is the opposite. I don't live in my home city of New York. If I did, I would vote against Soren Rundamini all day because I disagree with him on every issue. But I really have warm feelings toward the guy because he smiles when he talks. He's having a good time. He's an upbeat kind of guy. And that's the emotional tone that will be opposite of a guy like Trump who rarely smiles unless it's for a fake smile and never laughs because he can't trust himself to have a spontaneous emotion. So I think the cultural shift is going to be head spinning in 28. I hardly ever watch TV, but one of the few things I do watch, but I watched it on YouTube, is Brooks and Capehart. I really enjoy your commentary and your colleague there. And also, I think the moderator does an outstanding job of guiding the two of you. You said recently on NewsHour that the media's business model has become just bashing Trump and that outlets keep doing it without always having something new or interesting to say. Well, one, I want you to expand on that. And how much of that has to do with the state of media versus Trump himself? Is it just that there's money in it? Or because it does feel, you know, my sense is the Democratic Party at some point has to transition from indignance to ideas. And give us your sort of state of play in terms of media and this Trump bashing industrial complex. Yeah, well, it's so easy. Like we all know that we don't we shouldn't write to the ratings. Like, everybody in media these days knows how many page views. Or you can, it's very easy to find out. Or how many people, you know, watched a podcast. So you can you put metrics in front of people they will follow them And candidly when I was a columnist I would write some columns that wouldn get you know they were columns that meant a lot to me And sometimes during the Obama years I would write a column toward one person toward Obama and they wouldn necessarily get big readerships. But if I read a few in a row, which are not like super popular, I feel a little antsy, like, oh, I want to be up there on the leaderboard. And so I would write one that I would know would do well with audience. And that's just, that's a corruption. We're all in businesses, where there's the right thing to do, and then there's what the incentive structure wants you to do. And we all have to navigate those kinds of differences. And so I think that's been a problem. And then for some reason, there's a lot of people out there who just want to hear that Donald Trump is a schmuck. And they want to hear that. They started wanting to hear that in 2015, and it's now 11 years later, and they still want to hear that. I don't quite get it. I get a little bored with it, but the audience is out there for that. And so I think that's one of the failings of the media. And I should say, you know, it was a total honor to work at the New York Times. It's a total honor to work at the Atlantic. There are so many great journalists that were awe-inspiring. I was so proud to be associated with them. But the other two flaws, I think, in the media that are not the flaws of a moment, but are the flaws of decades, is that when I started as a police reporter in Chicago, a lot of the reporters, the older guys I was working under, had never gone to college. And they were high school. Being a reporter was a working class profession. It was not necessarily a college person's profession. And now it's very much a college person's profession. But even more so, somebody did a study of the editorial staff at The Times, The Post, The Journal, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN. and 55% of the employees went to the same 32 elite colleges. And that's not only true in the media, that's true in Hollywood, that's true in law, that's true in corporations. So we have become a ridiculously unrepresentative sample of the country and in all sorts of elite professions. And that's a problem. And then related to that is we do not have enough Trump supporters on our staffs. And that's not necessarily because we want to, But it's very hard to find Trump supporters who follow the professional standards we demand. Because a lot of Trump supporters said, screw you, elite. And not only that, screw you, the whole epistemological theory you walked in on. I don't play by your rules. And so we can't have them on because they don't play by the normal rules of honest journalism. And so it's hard to find Trump supporters who can follow the standards that we insist on. And I think in those ways, we become off kilter. And it's ways are my profession can reform itself. What's your media diet? When you wake up in the morning, what are your go to sources? My first read is something I've become addicted to called News Items by John Ellis, which is an agglomeration site by a guy who was a longtime TV producer. and basically he does no Trump bashing. He does the substantive issues of the day. So for in times like this, there was a new report on AI. So he had like five items on what we're learning about AI. Then he'll do war reporting, how the Chinese are doing in their own AI efforts. And then it's all linking to pieces in like the FT, the New York Times, Washington Post, but also Eurostat News, these Middle Eastern specialty sites. academic reports. And so I really feel I'm getting the substance. And I've really become a fan of news items by John Ellis. It's not much. It's like 10 bucks a month. It's a sub stack. So I do that. And of course, I do look at the mainstream, the Times, the Post, the Journal. I think the Journal is doing very well, by the way. I can say that I don't work for the Times, just that they'd had a story, for example, the other day on comparing millennial incomes to boomer incomes. And in many ways, even though we think millennial and Gen Z are doing much worse, in some ways they are, in a lot of ways they're not. So I really gravitate towards stories that'll give me those kind of big social picture. And then I read a lot of sub stacks. I mean, I read some of the most common ones. Noah Pinion, a guy named Noah Smith, Matt Iglesias, people like that. There's a guy named Damon Linker, who I like. And so a lot of my reading is off the normal media diet and two people I really have come to like, like Noah Smith or Damon Linker, Andrew Sullivan, people like that. What are your thoughts on how social media and AI have impacted media consumption and generally, you know, this notion of decency and humanity? I, my views on AI are partly colored by the fact that I just so enjoy it. I've had so many good conversations with Claude over the last couple months. I had one yesterday I'm writing about resentment, and it introduced me to a thinker I'd never— I prompt it with, who are the major lines of thought on this subject? And then it gives me them, and I say, please summarize these people's thoughts. I never ask it to think for itself. I just want to tell me what other people have been thinking. And then I ask, what books should I be reading to really understand? And then it gives me the books. And I learned so much. I learned about philosophers I've never heard of. I learned the lines of thought I've never heard of. It's really good at drawing from 3,000 years of intellectual history and saying, you should look at this. This person is connected to that person. That person is connected to this. And it's fantastic. My main concern is that, let's say 20% of humanity have what they call the high need for cognition. They like to think. And if you're on a train or a bus and you look over and somebody's doing a really hard puzzle, that person likes to think. They like hard mental challenges. And I think that 20% will use AI to think a lot more, and their mental and cognitive capacity and productivity will be astounding. I think 80% of humans, I'm just guessing, don't like to think. They're what the psychologists call cognitive misers. So they'd rather not. And so they can use AI to substitute for their thinking. and some of the new research that has just come out in the last couple days suggests that the decline in motivation to think among people who use AI is massive. That people just do not, not only do they not want to think, they lose the capacity to think hard. And I relate to this. Sometimes I'm on a road trip and I'm taking a whole bunch of turns, left turn, right turn, this exit, that highway, this highway. And I think I used to have to do this using a map, a paper map. And that would, I think that's impossible. How did I ever do that? And I am 100% confident I am incapable of using a map to do a complicated trip today. I've lost that ability. And you extrapolate that out to all sorts of cognitive tasks. And what you get is a massive loss of cognitive ability. And what you get, wind up with, which is a, we have a caste system in economics and education, but a caste system where you have 20% are cognitive superstars and 80% are cognitive backward, you've got problems. My son did something that really impressed me. He's 18 and he asked me, we live in London the other day, he asked me, he said, I'm meeting a friend on Kensington High Street, do you know a good coffee shop there? And I said, no, just ask AI. and he said no I don't ask AI for simple stuff I'm worried I'm not going to be able to do this on my own and it just struck me I'm like maybe there is hope you know I've just gotten so lazy and now my ability to discern through simple questions is that part of your brain you know if you don't if you don't use it you lose it what is your approach to social media do you use social media to spread stuff to learn or do you not use it at all? I did a lot. I said some stupid stuff, which got me in trouble. So I scaled back after that. And then once Elon took over, it sort of all fractured. And so I'll follow Twitter and I'll especially follow, I do political Twitter. I force myself to have half my people are blue, half are red. And some of the MAGA people really annoy me, but it's important that I encounter them. And then I do AI Twitter and I do New York Mets Twitter, which is my baseball team. So I do that. I don't do, I haven't been on Facebook in years. I've never been on Instagram. I'm not on TikTok. I find it too addictive. And so my social media is down. And I find like your son, a lot of young people understand what's happening. They don't need Jonathan Haidt for, God bless him for what he's doing, but they don't need him to explain what's happening. And I visit a lot of high schools every And I've never met a student that's not happy with the phone vans. They love the phone vans. And your son is right to be suspicious of AI using it as a cognitive crutch because it really is going to be damaging. What box has not been checked for David Brooks, personally and professionally? What if I mentor some young men and I say, figure out where you want to be in 10 years and then reverse engineer. Actually, I say five years. And then reverse engineer back the series of actions that you need to take to get there and start. And reverse engineer them to the most kind of trivial, easy things and just start on them. What box is left for you to check? Yeah, in that circumstance, I always say, asking what do I want to do with my life is too big a question. My question is, if the next five years is a chapter in your life, what's the chapter about? And then I always tell young people in particular, three adventures a decade. Try three new things a decade. Like I have a son who was in the military. He taught a little kindergarten in Nairobi. He worked at a sports camp. He did a little business. And then he became a fourth grade teacher, which is, I think, what he'll spend his career on. And so he had at least three adventures through his 20s. And so if you have children in your 20s, chill out and let them have their adventures. Life is long. They're probably going to be working until they're 75. So let them have their adventures so they figure out what they really want to do. so that that's my one piece of advice you know my um i another professor who said what distinguishes people is not their opinions it's not their iq it's not their ethnicity it's the ruling passion of their soul and so it's really important for us all to know what is at this moment in my life what's the ruling passion of my soul and what i love most right now you know i'm like i don't know if you're like this but i tell young people remember when you were 13 and horniness came into your life? Well, when you get to be about 55, there's a new form of horniness will come into your life, which is called generativity, which is hard to leave a legacy, to give back, to contribute something to society. And so that's kicked in. And my little form of trying to do something good for the world is to figure out how to modernize our thoughts about moral formation and how do you find your purpose and how you think about your own desires. And so I love taking amorphous subjects, like how do you think about your desires? That's a very amorphous subject. And I love reading and studying and researching. So I get it down to something concrete that I can communicate through stories. And then if I say it to a group of people, I see people writing it down because they find it useful. One of my favorite saying is about writers, is writers are beggars who tell other beggars where they found bread. And I'm just working on my shit in public. And if what I'm going through is what other people are going through and I have the time because I don't have a real job, I can find something useful that they find useful too, that's rewarding to me. And so I love doing that. And that's what I hope to do for the next five or ten years. And then on my podcast, there are a lot of great researchers who we all interview in the media. There are a lot of great teachers who never get interviewed. And these are the people who are great in the classroom, men and women who just know how to talk to young people. They know how to communicate great truths. And I'd love to spend a large part of my podcast talking to them and seeing what they have to offer us. David Brooks is a writer at The Atlantic and a commentator on PBS NewsHour. He's the author of several books, including How to Know a Person, The Second Mountain, and The Road to Character. I always learn something from you, and I try to write it down, and I write it several times as a means of trying to cement it in my brain. And the thing I'm taking away from this podcast today is I think a lot about being a dad. And one of my shortcomings is I just know I fall into the trap of trying to put them on this path to what is seen as traditional success. I'm too obsessed with getting them into an elite college. I'm too obsessed with creating what I call SLOPA, and that is connecting small acts of discipline every day to success. Data study. I know you can do better on the ACT. I just can't help it. And the thing you said that I wrote down five times is let them have their adventures. I'm going to try and remember that. So anyways, thank you. Thank you for that, David. Thank you. And I'm a big fan and follower of the show. So always, whether I'm speaking or just out there listening, I'm part of your conversation. I appreciate that. Thanks, David. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Genere. Cami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from Prop G Media. Thank you.