Think Better with David Brooks

Nicholas Epley: 

Good evening everybody. Thank you so much for coming tonight, for braving the April showers that will ultimately bring us May flowers. We've got a nice crowd here tonight. This is wonderful and welcome also to all the folks on Zoom who are not enjoying the April showers tonight, wisely sitting in their living room wherever they happen to be. Thank you so much for being here for this Think Better event tonight with our special guest David Brooks. My name is Nick Epley. I'm a professor of behavioral science at the Booth School of Business, and I'm the faculty director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research. This talk series tonight, this Think Better series is just one of many things we do in the Roman Family CDR to try to promote and facilitate behavioral science research here across our entire University of Chicago community. This talk series in particular is one where we try to focus on the ways in which behavioral science is reaching out into the world and impacting society, impacting education, impacting business, and also improving or trying to improve the way we live our lives.

Tonight's guest, David, is a bit of a departure from the norm for us, but one I'm extremely excited about. Typically, we invite academics, researchers who are down in the weeds of the thing that we are doing to talk about their research. David is not a behavioral scientist per se, but he hovers like around every possible perspective of the field as far as I can tell, and probably half a dozen other fields as well. He seems to know so much. If you've read his writing or seen his speaking over the years or read any of his books, he seems to know more than would fit into a normal-sized human brain. I'd expect his head to be bigger, but it's perfectly normal size, as I've learned. But he knows just a shocking amount, and he's got a really interesting perspective on the field. And for me as a researcher, the value of this is really profound, because often folks like David who look at the research from the outside see things that we don't see on the inside. I think that's going to become clear this evening.

David's breadth of interest and depth of knowledge should come as no surprise to anybody in this room, because David is, after all, one of us. He came from the University of Chicago a handful of years ago. He is a Bachelor of Arts here with a history degree in 1983, and he has fond memories of his time here at the university. He said, "My school did form me. One of the things Chicago did was taught me what to want. It made me fall in love with books, and it told me what was worth wanting." And the book you wrote that we're going to talk about tonight, How to Know a Person, is certainly a book about what's worth wanting, I think. He's a columnist for the New York Times and author of a number of books, some that we'll talk about in addition to the one we're focusing on tonight.

In addition to his work at the New York Times, Brooks has also been a reporter and op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal, senior editor of the Weekly Standard, contributing editor at Newsweek and Atlantic, and a commentator on NPR and PBS NewsHour. NewsHour for many years now, including every week on Fridays he continues to do it there. So please, let's welcome our guest here tonight, David Brooks. So this is so much fun for me. Thank you for being here. This is wonderful. And I want to start our conversation tonight by talking about how you got here, and here in two senses of the term. One is here today. It turns out you are in Hyde Park now for a stretch living here day to day with Anne, your wife. Why are you here? What are you doing?

David Brooks: 

First, I want to thank you for welcoming me. I assigned myself this task to write a book called How to Know a Person, on the Art of Seeing Others Deeply. And very early in my research, I realized somebody already wrote this book. And Nick was very generous to me through the researching. And I should also say that sometimes when somebody, a journalist, traipses into an academic field, the researcher gets very territorial because they know I'm going to dumb down, but you've been nothing but generous. So I'm very pleased.
First, how I got here to Chicago. Well, I was looking for any excuse to get back here. And so when I was seven, I read a book called Paddington the Bear and decided I want to become a writer at that moment. And really writing was the center of my value system. It's a joke I tell in the book, and it's true. In high school, I wanted to date a woman named Bernice, and she didn't want to date me. She wanted date some other guy. And I remember thinking, "What is she thinking? I write way better than that guy." So those were my values. But I was not an exceptional student. And so when I was 18, something very lucky happened to me, which was the admissions officers at Columbia, Wesleyan, and Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago. And so I got rejected.

Nicholas Epley:
Did you mention the piece about your writing and your essay, because I think that would've gotten you in?

David Brooks:

Yeah, and so back in those days, Chicago admitted over 70% of applicants. So we were self-selective. And then I came here and I fit right in. I had a double major in history and celibacy while I was here. And with the one thing we did as a freshman, which showed how much we were going to fit in, my college, I lived at a place called Shoreland, which is on the lakefront. And my freshman roommate, we entered him into Golden Gloves competition, which is a boxing competition. He never boxed a day in his life, but we prepared the Chicago way. We gave him a nickname, the Kosher Killer, and then we practiced in the Chicago method. We didn't practice boxing, but we read a lot of books about boxing. And his illustrious boxing career lasted 29 seconds.

And I didn't have a lot of fun here. I mean, I had four beers over the course of my four years here. And then... But I feel more connected to the place than I did ever before. The longer the time goes by, the more the resources I had here have really played a greater and greater role in my life. And partly, just when I was here, and it's still true, I still run across professors, they seemed so impressively learned to me, and I knew I wasn't going to be like that. But once you've tasted a fine wine, you don't want to settle for the grape juice. And they taught as if the keys to the Magic Kingdom were to be found in reading these books and thinking about them carefully and that you would know how to improve your life. So it was really a moral formation.

And so then I went often taught for 20 years at the University of Chicago of New Haven, and that had some of the fervor, but I wanted to get back to the pure stuff. And frankly, the free speech in the... Not only, not free speech, but the ability to enjoy argument has gone down in a lot of schools. And I don't think it's gone down here. There's still an argument culture, and I wanted to be back in that. And so we were offered to teach. I'm teaching at something called LSI, Leadership Society Initiative, which is for people aged 45 to 65 basically who are retiring or approaching retirement and they want to know what to do with the rest of their life. And a lot of people approach retirement with a sense of intense anxiety. You can imagine your career has been your identity and your friends are at work and you lose all that.

I ran into a guy in New York who said, "I fear two things. I fear death and retirement, but I fear retirement worse." And another person said to me, "I cried once in my adult life when my daughter got cancer, but in retirement I cry every other day." So it can be very traumatic because you don't know what you're going to do, you've lost your identity, you've lost your way. You have to really rethink about your life and you have to change your whole consciousness. And so we're doing a semi Great Books course and asking the big questions, what do I want? Who am I? What's my identity? What is history calling upon me to do? And it's been a UFC immersion, so it's been fun.

Nicholas Epley:
Wow. Well, now I have to say, I feel a little bad for making you come here 15 minutes early out of your class to be at this talk tonight. So anybody who's in David's class, I'm very sorry for making him be here at 6:00 tonight and missing those last 15 minutes. I want to also talk about how you got here in terms of this book. If you look over the course of your writing, just at your books, it feels like you've been circling around this book for about two decades. So if you go back to On Paradise Drive, this is a book that's really about how you can kind of explain America and some of our oddities by just noting that Americans tend to be really intensely focused on the future and some idealism down the road, some paradise, rather than on the present and here and now and on folks who are around them.

The Social Animal was all about how the context, the social situations or social lives so profoundly and deeply affect us. And then your two more recent books before this one were about really turn to the self, about how to be a good person and what's the path to being a good person look like and what does a moral character look like? And this one is How to Know a Person has really kind of brought these all together, it seemed to me, which is that a good person is about really knowing and seeing and understanding others. A good person is one who elevates others. Am I making that arc up, or is that-

David Brooks:
The big trajectory in my life is from aloofness towards intimacy, from shallowness toward a little depth. And so my natural posture in the world, the way I was wired, was to be standoffish. My nursery school teacher told my parents, "David doesn't always play with other kids. He just observes them," which was a good career for a career in journalism. I tell journalism students, "If you're at a football game and everybody else is doing the wave and you just sit there and watch them, you have the right kind of aloof personality style to be a journalist." Because we just watch people. And then also, I remember when I was like 35, I looked at my friends who were suffering, and I would think, "I'm so glad I'm shallow, I'm much happier than those people are."

But there's this writer I'm a fan of named Frederick Buechner, and his dad killed himself when Buechner was nine. And he repressed, he just repressed all emotion until middle age. Then he realized that if you cut yourself off from the pain and depth of life, you're cutting yourself off from the holy sources of life itself. And so I went through a very tough time around 2013 when I really wanted to... It was a period of suffering and divorce. My kids were going off to college and all this. And there's a theologian named Paul Tillich who was around in the '50s and '60s, and he says, "Moments of suffering interrupt your life and remind you you're not the person you thought you were." He says, "They carve through what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul, and they reveal a cavity below, and they carve through that and reveal a cavity below."

So in those bad moments, you see further depths into yourself than you ever saw before, and you realize that only spiritual and emotional food will fill those depths. And so I just wanted to fill the depths. So if you look at the course of my life, it's trying to go deeper each time. So my first book was called Bobos in Paradise, which was about how bourgeois bohemians, people with '60s values and '90s money, how they furnish their kitchen, like sub-zero refrigerator because zero itself wouldn't be cold enough. You got to have a sub-zero, and an aga stove that looks like a nickel-plated nuclear reactor, and you want to have nubby fabrics. And so it was about consumption and how we demonstrate status with the consumption.

Then On Paradise Drive was really about real estate. It was about how people move to find a better version of themselves. And then The Social Animal, where I really ran into your field, was really, it was about the unconscious. It was about all the different ways our unconsciouses affect our lives. And then Road to Character is about moral formation. And I learned writing that book that actually writing a book on character doesn't give you good character. And even reading a book on character doesn't give you good character. But buying a book on character does give you good character.

Nicholas Epley:
Available outside.

David Brooks:
Outside. And then The Second Mountain was really about my dark times, about recovering. So it was a little deeper sort of how to handle hard times. And then this book was really about a recalibration of what morality is. And so I had thought of morality as the big epical moments of life, and I think like Immanuel Kant. And then I come to believe, and I'm really influenced by Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher who looks at some of the great moral philosophers and she realizes, A, they were mostly guys, they were mostly single, they were mostly childless. And she thinks maybe they're missing something here. And she makes the point they're blind to the systems of care all around them and that she says morality, it can be the big ethical choices we make, but it also is trying to be considerate to each other in the complex circumstances of life.

And she says our goal is... We normally see the world with a self-centered eye, and our goal is to cast a just and loving attention on others and grow by looking. And so to me, the morality, we have these big culture wars, but trusting each other or just being considerate to each other in the concrete circumstances of life seems to be the basis of morality. And I wanted to know how to do that. And I wanted to get over my own aloofness. All writers are working out their stuff in public. And one of my favorite things about writing is we're beggars who tell other beggars where we found bread. Find something useful, just pass it along.

And then I'm a journalist too, and we happen to be at a moment of weird social, emotional, and relational breakdown. And so the rising depression, rising suicide, the number of people who say they have no close personal friends is up by four. The number of people without a romantic partner is up by three times since 2000. The number of Americans who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category is up by 50% since 2000. And so there's some sort of relational breakdown that we have lost the ability to really make connections one with another, and it's led to the social distrust that fuels a lot of the dysfunction in our politics. So it's both personal reasons and also societal reasons that I wanted to know, if I meet you, how do I act? How do I be considerate toward you?

Nicholas Epley:
Yeah. The other part of this definition of morality is that often that it shows up in a lot of the quiet times, a lot of the passive times. So if you think about morality in terms of just the big decisions you make, those are a handful of things. But of course you affect people when you're walking around all the time, moment to moment and not seeing them in those moments.

David Brooks:
I think about maybe somebody in the field, small emotions. I don't know if anybody does... Those small moments. I tell the story in the book, I walk people through the process of getting to know someone. The first process is the gaze, is that first little moment when you're meeting somebody and they're asking the question that we all ask ourselves unconsciously, which is, is this person going to be nice to me? Am I a person to this person? Am I going to be a priority to this person? And my theory is that the answers to those questions are answered with your eyes and not with your gaze. And I think you've said something to me the other day over lunch, people judge. We think we're being judged on our competence, but we're being judged on warmth.

Nicholas Epley:
Yeah.

David Brooks:
And so the story I tell in the book is I'm in Waco, Texas and I'm having breakfast with this very stern 93-year-old lady named LaRue Dorsey who had been a teacher. And she said, "I loved my students enough to discipline them." And I was very intimidated by her. She was so formidable. And into the diner walks a mutual friend of ours, a pastor who pastors to the homeless in Waco named Jimmy Dorrell. And he comes up to our table and he grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders and shakes her way harder than you should shake a 93-year-old.
And he say to her, "Mrs. Dorsey, Mrs. Dorsey, you're the best, you're the best. I love you. I love you." And that stern disciplinarian turned into a bright eye-shining 9-year-old girl. He brought out a different version of her with just that greeting. And partly it's because he's a warm personality, Jimmy, but part of it, he's a pastor. And so every person he meets, he thinks, "Well, that person's made an image of God. I'm staring into the face of God. I'm staring at somebody with a soul of infinite value of dignity, somebody who's so important Jesus was willing to die for that person." And you can be atheist, Jewish, Muslim, whatever, but greeting each person you meet with that level of reverence and respect is the first moral act that's the precondition for seeing someone well.

Nicholas Epley:
What's interesting is that when you see somebody who really does that well, you also recognize how rare that actually is. So my daughter, Lindsay, who's eight years old, she has Down syndrome, and she is perhaps the most popular child in her school, I think, in part because she has no filter on her hello. And she is the most fun person to go grocery shopping with ever, because you're walking down the grocery grocery aisle and she's tugging on everybody's shirt, "Hello, hello, hello, hello, hi, hello, hello." And people just light up. My wife, we were standing in the kitchen the other night, and Jen tells me she went grocery shopping with her. She just wouldn't believe the reaction she gets. All these people who have their kind of resting bitch face on in the grocery store, just pretty darn bitchy when you're looking for whatever's on your list. Just that little hello, it's just like flipping a switch on their back. They just come to life.

David Brooks:
Yeah.

Nicholas Epley:
It's so powerful.

David Brooks:
I was just reading a biography of Warren Buffett. His wife Susie is like, boom, the people person. I got to know a little Yo-Yo Ma. And I once asked him, what's your identity? And he said, "I'm a connector of people." And I said, "No, you're a cellist, right? That's who." And he said, "No, the cello is just a way to get to people." And so when you see the guy, he meets a person, he thinks, "This is the most amazing creature I've ever met. And there's another one of them and there's another." And he just radiates this joy and wonder, because each person he meets is just astounding.

And then the one thing that I'm even surprised by is how few people not only are warm and glowing like your daughter, but how few people are curious and how few people, when you go to a party, ask you a question. And I've come to believe, maybe there's somebody who's done data on this, that only a third of humanity are question askers. The rest seem nice, but they're just not curious about you. Following your lead, we can talk about this later, when I'm talking to strangers on a train, thanks to your work, often they're Trump supporters. And I'm asking about their life and what do you do? Where do... And then I'm always a little afraid they'll turn to me and say, "And where do you work?" And that has never happened. So they're just not that curious. And so I don't have to have the New York Times conversation.

Nicholas Epley:
They know you already.

David Brooks:
No, they don't. Talk about segmentation, I'll just say one thing quickly about that. When I go to the Democratic National Convention, everyone says, "Hi, nice to see you." When I go to the Republican National Convention, I'm anonymous. It's a testimony of how polarized we've become in our media consumption.

Nicholas Epley:
Yeah, it sure is. So the speaker series, usually we focus on how behavioral science is being used out in the world. And I'm curious, you are such a broad thinker and reader. I mean, your book just goes through so many different fields and thinkers and writers. What from the field, what from behavioral science, what from the academic research really stuck with you while you were writing this book? What really formed your thinking?

David Brooks:
Well, one of the reasons I've become a fan of behavioral science and follow it is because I try to understand people at depth. And I found even more than philosophy sometimes that behavioral scientists, Tim Wilson at UVA or you or Jonathan Hyde at NYU, they're writing a lot about unconscious processes and a lot about the full depth of our humanity. And so one of my core beliefs through my whole life, even though I went here, is that the power of reason is relatively weak, but we have sentiments and intuitions that are trustworthy. And so there was the religious war, I'm going to give a very Chicago answer, but I'll make it brief.

Religious wars in 16th, 17th century, people decide, screw that, we're done with religious fighting. And so in France, they have the French Enlightenment, we're going to get rid of religion and cure everything through reason. And then in Scotland and England and Wales, they have what we call the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. And they say the power of reason is weak. Edmund Burke, my hero, said, "We don't trust each person to rest on their own bank of reason, because we think that bank is small, but we put more faith in the power of sentiments," what they call sentiments, which we would call emotions, I guess.

Nicholas Epley:
Intuition.

David Brooks:
And intuitions. And that so long as those sentiments are rightly trained, so as long as we educate our emotions in the right culture. And they said sentiments are more trustworthy. And I found that the behavioral sciences get you into that intuition, sentiments that aren't the core of decision-making, all the Danny Kahneman, Tversky stuff, the two systems. And I've just found it revelatory on how decisions are made and Jonathan Haidt's work, well, we talked about this, the unconscious is a elephant and the conscious mind is a little baby or a little boy on top. And so it revealed to me the depths of who we are.

And then it went through this replication crisis, and now I'm trying to figure out what I can trust or not, like priming, is that a thing or not? And we talked about this. One of my favorite studies found that people named Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, and people named Lawrence become lawyers disproportionately. By a small percent, it's not a big effect. But I named my daughter President of the United States Brooks for that reason. So you feel like you're seeing the depth of human nature. The one thing, and this I'd ask you about in a shortcoming with mostly academic stuff, and germane to what we write about is that social science data helps you understand populations. But when you want to understand the unique and never to be repeated individual right in front of you, it gives you some categories to think in. But sometimes I find it can almost be misleading, because nobody's a population. I don't know if that's talked about in the field.

Nicholas Epley:
Very much so. I mean, I would say all behavioral scientists are trying to come to some psychology of the person, a whole personology. And we're just not quite close to that, because individual subfields focus different aspects of it, and we're buffeted around by all sorts of things. Sometimes the context is powerful in one way or another, but you've got individual habits and traits that also matter, and piecing all these things together, particularly in contexts that can't be replicated. So you'll never have the same conversation two times.

David Brooks:
Yeah. And moral philosophers are not more moral than the rest of us, but I hope behavioral scientists are more socially adept than the rest of us are.

Nicholas Epley:
Well, it certainly has affected me, and it sounds like it's affected you as well. We'll get to that in a little bit, I suppose. I mentioned at the beginning that one of the great things about the outsider's perspective on the field is that you see stuff that we don't see when we're down in the weeds. And I thought the really powerful thing you kind of revealed for us in this book was this distinction that kind of undergirds the whole book between illuminators and diminishers. And psychologists, social psychologists in particular have looked at the effect of the situation on the person and the person within the situation. But this is a different perspective that the field has not studied so systematically, particularly in terms of well-being or meaning or satisfaction with life or moral outcomes that we care about. And that is the person as situation, and that I leave traces on you that might be reliable across contexts are certainly powerful.
And it's not that we don't study influence, social influence, we certainly do. But this notion that you have stable effects on other people and that my behavior affects your well-being and happiness, it's just not something that's been really gone after intentionally, because it's a hard thing to study. Hard to get two people together and measure those things. But I thought this was just a really brilliant insight that we're polluters. Sometimes we're air fresheners and sometimes we fart, and sometimes we lighten people up, we're illuminators, and sometimes we darken them. So I'd love to hear how you kind of came to that observation. Where did you see that?

David Brooks:
Yeah, as you're speaking, I hadn't really phrased it that way, but when I was a junior pundit and I started at the NewsHour 20 years ago, and the guy who was the host of the program was a guy named Jim Lehrer. And on the air, Jim was reticent, because he didn't want to be the story. He thought the story should be the story. But off the air he was incredibly voluble. His face lit up, he cursed and drank like this Marine he was. And so when I was talking, I would try to... And I said something he thought was smart, his eyes with crinkle with pleasure. And when I said something he thought was crass or stupid, I would see his mouth downturn with displeasure. And so for 10 years I just tried to get the eye crinkle and avoid the mouth turn. But through that, he created a moral ecology, a Lehrer way of doing things, a NewHour way of doing things.

And he never talked to me about how to do my job, but he just created those subtle signals that said, "This is our standard." And he not only taught it to me, taught everybody. So Jim has been dead for a number of years, but we still are in his moral ecology. And it's a great thing to create a moral ecology that people then live within. And so I give myself every 10 years permission to create a dualism. Can be fetching because they're so powerful. I had a book, wrote a character book. I had the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues, and the resume virtues are what make you good at your job, the eulogy virtues are the things they say about you after you're dead, whether you're kind, honorable, and courageous. And that dualism ripped people. And so I thought, "I can't do it every book," but I gave myself permission.

So illuminators are people... Well, diminishers are people who stereotype you, who ignore, who don't ask you questions. They do a thing called stacking, where I learn one fact about you and then I make a whole series of assumptions who you must be. And then illuminators make you feel lit up and they really get you. And the couple of the stories I tell, one is about a novelist named E.M. Forster, British novelist wrote about 120 years ago, I guess, and his biographer said of him, "To be with him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma. It was to be listened to with such intensity, you had to be your sharpest, best, most honest self." I thought how great it would be to listen that well. And then I tell a story, which may be apocryphal, but it gets the point across about Jenny Jerome, who was a woman who would later become Winston Churchill's mom.

But when she's a young woman, she was seated at dinner next to William Gladstone, the British Prime Minister, and she left dinner thinking Gladstone was the cleverest person in England. Then sometime later she was seated at another dinner next to Gladstone's rival, Benjamin Disraeli, and she leaves that dinner thinking that she's the cleverest person in England. So it's great to be Disraeli. And so those are just people that are other-centered. They're curious about you, and they just make you feel great. He's been disgraced now because of me too, but I used to do a show called the Charlie Rose Show, and when you did that show, you felt like you were the smartest person on earth, because he seemed so entranced by you. And now it's all gone sour a bit, but some people just have that ability.

Nicholas Epley:
Yeah. When you first write about it in the book, you do this dualism, and naming these things sort of makes it sound like a trait. There are these kinds of people, but the Charlie Rose example and many others, of course, highlights that there's inconsistency. The traits are sort of a loser in many ways. Or at least when I was reading through it, I kept thinking that probably all of us to some extent have both of these capacities. There are moments where we can be illuminators, where we're paying attention and we're noticing people and we're lifting people up. And then there are other times when we're just at our worst, and we're overlooking people, we're sizing them up, as you describe diminishers doing in the book. And so I was thinking about it, and you write about it this way through the whole rest of the book, more as a set of skills, and that's what you focus on, that these are things that we can learn to do better, right? Hopefully.

David Brooks:
Yeah, I think with the exception, narcissists I don't think can be illuminators. I will make the Trump exception to this, just because I think it's hard for them to focus on other people. But you're right, I agree. At 4:00 in the afternoon, I'm relaxed. I've done my writing, I'm hanging around, you would call it hanging around a bar. I call it reporting, and I'm just talking to somebody. Then I can be really there. At 11:00 at night on the four-hour plane ride, I'm like... I put the headphones in.

But I really came to appreciate that it really is a set of skills, that fundamentally being a decent person involves a set of concrete skills as learnable as tennis or carpentry or economics. How do you ask for and offer forgiveness? How do you host a dinner party so everybody feels included? How do you break up with somebody without crushing their heart? These are just skills you can learn, and we're all born with some native ability, like athletic ability, but nobody's good without practice, and everybody can get a lot better by learning the skills. So like you, I focus very much on the concrete practical skills of being a decent person.

Nicholas Epley:
So let's talk about some of those. What are some of the skills of the illuminator?

David Brooks:
Well, one of them is I mentioned what Jimmy Dorrell does, the gaze, that first gaze. The second is accompaniment, just showing up for people in the right way. And I had a student at Yale who lost her dad to pancreatic cancer, and they discussed at the time that he would miss her wedding and things like that. And she was invited to be bridesmaid at a friend's wedding, and she watches the dad give a toast to the bride. Then it comes time for the father-daughter dance. And she says, "I just can't do this." So she goes to the restroom to have a cry. And when she gets out, everybody at her table and the adjacent table is standing there in the hallway. She wrote a paper about this experience for me, which she gave me permission to quote in the book, which was nobody said a word.

They didn't try to validate my grief or get into my business. They each just lined up, gave me a hug, went back to the table, and she said it was exactly what I needed. So it was just the art of presence. Somebody at one of those tables had the presence to say, "Let's go out and be with Jillian in the hallway." And so that's something you learned by being sensitive. And then some of the traits are much more shallow and doable. So I asked conversation experts, and this is really your field, how do you become a better conversationalist? And one of the lessons I got or little tips was be a loud listener. So I have a friend when you're talking to him, it's like talking to a charismatic church. He's like, "Aha, yes, yes, yes, amen. Preach that." And just love talking to that guy.

Another tip I got was don't be a topper. If you say to me, "I had this terrible flight, we were on the tarmac for two hours." I say to you, "Oh, I know what you're going through. I was on a flight, I was on the tarmac for six hours." And it sounds like I'm trying to relate, but really I'm saying, "Let's not focus on your inferior experiences. Let's focus on my superior one." So I still do that all the time. I know exactly, and let me tell you about my life. So those are some of the tips. And then the biggest one is really the quality of your conversations. And I learned this from you, that you wrote in Mindwise, that if I want to know what's going on in your head, I can't imagine it. It doesn't work. I learned that from you. You have to ask.
And so being a really good questioner is so powerful. And I know that everybody in this room was once a really good questioner, because you're all former children and are great. I tell this story of a friend of mine named Naomi Wei who she's a... I guess she's a psychologist at NYU, but she also teaches seventh graders how to become journalists, which is a little too emotionally mature for my field.

Nicholas Epley:
They start at the bar.

David Brooks:
So her first day at class, she says, "Okay, I'm going to sit in the front of the class, ask me any question, I'll answer it honestly." And the kids' first question was, are you married? She says, no. Another boy, "Are you divorced?" "Yes." Third question, do you still love him? She's like, "Whoa." She starts crying and says yes. And then they say, "Does he know? Do your kids know?" They're boom, boom, boom.

Nicholas Epley:
That's for real. Preach it. Yeah.

David Brooks:
Yeah. So being a really good questioner is like a skill. And so I think that's one of the things you learn how to... I asked a question at a dinner party a couple months ago, how do your ancestors show up in your life? And we've all been formed by our heritage. And it's a good question, because it's, one, nobody has a clear answer for you. You got to think about it. And so at this dinner party, there was a Dutch couple, they talked about Dutch heritage, there was a Black couple, they talked about African American heritage. I talked about 5,000 years of Jewish history and how it shaped us. And so we learned about each other and ourselves just because a big question.

Nicholas Epley:
How has this changed how you approach people? I remember you mentioned, we talked while you were putting this together, which was great fun. And I was talking about some of our research about how surprisingly positive it can be talking to strangers. You said, "That sounds great," and you were wrote the column. And at the end of it you said, "This all sounded great and plausible, and yet when I was on the plane, I still put my headphones on."

David Brooks:
Yeah.

Nicholas Epley:
Right? But then in the book, and since, you've described that you do things a little bit differently.

David Brooks:
Yeah. I absolutely didn't. So now that thanks to your research, I'm much less likely to put the headphones in, and it depends how long the flight is.

Nicholas Epley:
Sure, sure.

David Brooks:
And so if it's a four-hour flight, I wait until an hour left, because I don't want to... I'm still not socially adept enough to say, "Nice chatting with you. Let me go back to my laptop." So I'll wait and then start asking. And usually I start with... I can tell... I generally start with their childhood. Where'd you grow up? And I travel a lot, so there's a good chance I know where they grew up. And so that gets them going. I try to start with what they're proud of. If they got a sports jersey on or their kid's soccer team, ask about that. And people love to talk about their childhood. And the one thing I've learned, and you can confirm if my job is to ask people questions.

And so you might think how often, and one of the reasons we don't ask these questions, we think we're prying. And so how often does somebody say to me, "That's none of your damn business"? And in my experience, and you do this too, the answer is zero. I've never had anybody say, "None of your damn business." They often say... They often are thrilled. And there's some research that people enjoy telling their life story more than money. And I tell this Dan McAdams story, your colleague at Northwestern, that he asks people about their life stories and then sometimes gives them compensation to compensate them for their time. And they push the money back and said, "I don't need money for this. This has been one of the best afternoons of my life."

And that's been my universal experience. So I talked, I met a Trump guy on a plane, and he was coming back from his... He had come over to here from Russia. He started sweeping floors, then started exporting used t-shirts to less wealthy parts of the world and made a ton of money. And he was on a vacation and he had more divorces than I could count. And he was on a vacation. He showed me him on a yacht with about 20 extremely attractive 20-year-olds of all genders. And I was like, "How'd you get on that boat? You're 85." But it was fun. I learned a lot about the guy. He was not my cup of tea, but it was just fun to peer into another life.

Nicholas Epley:
That's interesting. How long does it take you to get to that stuff, the deep stuff?

David Brooks:
I find, well, I've learned this from your research too, that people want to go deep a lot faster than you think they do. And if you ask them with respect, you don't want to be too prying. I was around a campfire with a fellow journalist and she started prying. It was not reciprocal at all. It was just like question, question, and all my guards were up.

Nicholas Epley:
Yeah.

David Brooks:
So you don't want to do that, but if you start on safe ground, and people will, like this guy talked about his divorces. And I can't remember if I put this story in the book. Talking to a guy in South Dakota, and he's also a Trump supporter, and he says, "Let me tell you about the best day of my life." He was 70 then. "I'm 35, I'm the foreman at a plant and they get new equipment and they lay me off because I'm no longer qualified to lead workers with this new equipment." So he said, "I thought I'd just leave quietly."

So he went to his office, put his stuff in a box, opened the door, and there's a double line of 3,600 people, everybody who works in the plant, leading from his office door through the plants, out in the parking lot to his car door. And he walks through that double line as they applaud him. And he says, "That was the best day of my life." And every job since then has been worse, and my life has gone downhill for the last 35 years. And so that guy may be a jackass, but I need a change. And he just volunteered that story to me. I didn't know how to ask. So you may not agree with his voting choices, but you see where they come from.

Nicholas Epley:
Yeah. One of the, I think, important contrasts that you highlighted there between the campfire story where your hackles were up and this story where his weren't, the big difference between those two, it strikes me as the first one, somebody's interrogating you. They're demanding, they're mandating that you give them a response. In the other case, you were inviting, right?

David Brooks:
Yeah.

Nicholas Epley:
You were offering up an invitation to engage and showing your interest. And then they responded. When you talk to a lot of people, you can share lots of these stories about the most memorable time you did something. One of the more memorable conversations I've had with also a Trump supporter was standing at the end of my driveway, this guy was carrying a gun and wearing a bulletproof vest. And I had called him because somebody had driven over the very innocuous Biden signs I had in the ditch and then come back later and stolen them. And I thought I should call the sheriff and tell the sheriff just what had happened, because I guess this is what you do. And he came, said, "I'm just down the road. I can come down." He looked around with me for a little bit and then he said, "It's very interesting, first Biden signs I'd see vandalized before. They've all been Trump signs otherwise. What is it about Trump you don't like?" We're standing at the end of my driveway. He's got an AR-15 in the car and wearing a bulletproof vest.

And again, all right, I guess we're doing this. But it was one of the best conversations I've ever had across disagreement, because he was inviting in a way that was just really powerful. And so we shared, and he told me about the challenges of being a police officer after the George Floyd killing and the protests. But he was inviting. He was opening, which is what it strikes me an illuminator does, welcomes you into this engagement.

David Brooks:
Yeah. One of the great stories of my life, a great conversation in my life, I'm in Moscow, it's 1991, the Soviets are collapsing, but they stage a coup against Boris Yeltsin and the Democratic Russia. And I meet a 93-year-old lady. And she had grown up in the household of the Tsar. She was nearly killed in the Civil War right after the Russian Revolution, she was nearly put on a firing line and executed. Then she loses her husband in the '30s and off to the Gulag. She loses her two sons in the Battle of Stalingrad, are beaten to death by the Nazis. She loses her second husband also to the Gulag, sent to Siberia and never comes back. And she is Kalmyk, which is a Muslim population in Soviet Union. She's exiled by Brezhnev. And so every bad thing that happened in the Soviet history happened to her. And it was just like living history. My question, and then what happened? And then what happened? And then what happened?

Nicholas Epley:
Yeah.

David Brooks:
It was crazy.

Nicholas Epley:
Powerful, and open too. She was willing to share.

David Brooks:
And she ended, she's handing out sandwiches to the democratic protesters, so she thinks she's seeing a new Russia. It was great.

Nicholas Epley:
Wow. So one of our guests over Zoom tonight, Fernando Durante Bansi, had a question that I was interested in hearing your perspective on. He asked, "Given the importance of social connection, shouldn't be it be encoded in our genes through natural selection?" The importance of social connection. "Why is it so hard?"

David Brooks:
That's a very good question.

Nicholas Epley:
Which is really... This is what we do, this is why we're here, is to connect with each other. And yet people don't talk to you.

David Brooks:
That's a very good question.

Nicholas Epley:
When they do talk to you, they're terrible at it, sometimes, not always, but often they can be.

David Brooks:
And I was terrible at it.

Nicholas Epley:
And we'll walk by people, we overlook them. Simple things like just walking around, smiling and saying hello, super powerful. You don't do that. You don't do that very much.

David Brooks:
Yeah.

Nicholas Epley:
Why?

David Brooks:
Just off the top of my head, first, we are great at cooperation. Jonathan Haidt says, "We're the giraffes of cooperation." Giraffes have a long neck, that's their survival thing. We're good at cooperating.

Nicholas Epley:
Compared to other species.

David Brooks:
Compared to other species.

Nicholas Epley:
Compared to chimpanzees we're awesome.

David Brooks:
Chimpanzees. On the other hand, we have these dual drives to fit in, but also to stand out. And so there's status competitions going on, and then there's the natural social awkwardness, I don't know what to say. This is true for people who are dying of cancer that people just don't talk to them because they don't know what to say. And then Frederick Buechner, the novelist I mentioned earlier, he said, "What we want most is to be seen in our fullness. What we fear most is to be seen in our fullness." And so there's the ancient fear that if you really saw me, you wouldn't like me. But then there's, I'd have to confront myself. And so getting the depths of another person is hard enough for us to do ourselves.

And I've learned from you and other behavioral psychologists to be a little less impressed by introspection, that I think you have in your book a sentence which really shocked me and sent me off to a column which I wrote quoting you, that when psychologists ask people why did they do something, they're just looking for stories because we don't know the why. And I remember Amos Tversky, I saw an interview with him, he had given, and he said, "I don't know why I became a psychologist. The big decisions in our life, sometimes we don't know where they come from." And here's a man who spent his life studying decision theory. And so he can get the minor ones, but the big ones, where'd that come from? And so we're trying to... Yeah, it's hard.

Nicholas Epley:
Yeah. I mean, it's also the case other people are risky, or at least we think they're risky. Others can be sources of wonderful connection and love, but they can also be sources of pain too. And that's a hard thing to get right. So you note that many people do seem to have a hard time seeing other people, not so great at conversations. You note you're sitting at a bar one time doing your journalism clearly, and there's a guy sitting there who is dating. You're clearly on a date with another woman and just talking monologuing nonstop, and you're dying for that guy to ask a question, for crying out loud. Why can't he figure that out? You note then when it comes to your own ability, say, "I'm probably like everybody else. I think I'm better than I am. In my defense, it's not my fault," you say, "we should explicitly teach people from a young age how to be good conversationalists, but we don't." Why don't we?

David Brooks:
Well, I think some people grow up in homes where questions are not asked, and so nobody's modeling for it. And frankly, I think our whole educational system has a vastly overly cognitive version of the human person. And so to get into places like this, you have to be able to have good SAT scores, sort of rough measurement of IQ, and the ability to please teachers between the ages of 15 and 25. That's an insane way to sort society. And if you ask people, why are you fired from your job? When they do studies, why do people get fired? Lack of intelligence or technical abilities is only the cause of firing 11% of the time. Most of the time they're not team players, they're not coachable, they're not good people.

Nicholas Epley:
They're a diminisher.

David Brooks:
Or they just don't fit in. And so we don't focus enough on that, because I think that we think that we define merit, we define talent, we define ability overly much as IQ and reason. And especially, frankly, in Chicago, when most of our wisdom is found in our emotions and most of our abilities are social abilities. And so we think that stuff is going to get taken care of. And I'm a fan of a guy I used to teach with named Tony Kronman at Yale who said the universities used to be about the humanistic ideal. The primary job of the university was turning out people of character. There was a guy at a prep school called the Stowe School in England. He said, "Our job here at this school is to turn out graduates who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck." And so somebody could count on when the chips are down. But then Kronman says we shifted the university to the research ideal, which is we advanced knowledge. That's our job here.

And so that led to super specialization. And he writes that when we got super specialized, we stopped asking the big questions, what is the good life? And in fact, those questions began to seem unprofessional. And so I was teaching a course at Yale, like the one I'm doing now for older people, which while my students call it therapy with Brooks. And so we just spilled our guts to each other. But mostly it was asking the biggest possible questions. What does your best life look like?

And for a lot of college students and graduate students, over the next 15 years of your life, you're going to make four big decisions, four big commitments, life-altering commitments, probably to a vocation, to a community where you're going to live, to a philosophy or faith, and to probably some sort of spouse or inner circle ring of friends. And the course was designed to teach you how to make the big moral commitments of your life. And I tell college presidents, when I get the chance, the data, as I understand it, shows that the success of your marriage is immensely more determinative of your happiness than the strength of your career.

Nicholas Epley:
Oh, yeah, for sure.

David Brooks:
That if you have a great career and a crappy marriage, you'll be unhappy. But if you have great marriage and a crappy career, you'll be happy. And so I tell the college presidents, every course you teach here should be about how to pick a good marriage partner and how to be a good spouse, should be the neuroscience of marriage, the sociology of marriage. Everybody should be forced to read Jane Austen, George Eliot, learn from the masters. But people have skewed priorities, and they don't do what I tell them to do.

Nicholas Epley:
Yeah. All right. All right. All right. Well, we're going to do a little bit of what you tell people to do right now. So we're going to spend a little bit of time here actually doing some practicing here. So we're not back in school, but sort of in school, a little school with David Brooks here now. So one of the researchers you talk about a lot in the book is Dan McAdams. And you describe his method of interviewing people sort of as a narrative and as a life story. And I thought it would be nice for us to practice this just tonight, okay? Not you and I. Well, we can do it in just a minute, but everybody out there. So what I want you to do, and if you're home over Zoom, turn to whoever happens to be sitting next to you. If there's nobody sitting next to you, maybe you can call somebody quick on the phone and find somebody you don't know sitting around you somewhere.

And what you're going to do, we're going to spend about 10 minutes here, five minutes for each of you. I want you to share your life story with that person. All right? Five minutes, that's what you got. Okay? And when you're listening to this, try to illuminate that story, okay? And I want you to talk about three things. I want you to talk about where you started, where'd you start before you got here? I want you to talk about a success. What's something in your life you're really proud of? And also talk about a struggle. What's a struggle in your life and how did you make it through? Okay? Before you turn to that stranger sitting next to you, I want you to spend a minute and just consult how you're feeling about this for a minute. How many of you are a little nervous about how this is going to go? Just give me a show of hands here. Yeah, that's a lot of hands. All right. Okay. All right, now go.

David Brooks:
Wait, can I tell one quick story?

Nicholas Epley:
Yeah. Okay.

David Brooks:
So I'm at a conference in Nantucket, and the speaker hands out lyric sheets, piece of paper to all of us in the audience, which is about the size of this audience, and it has a love song on it. And he said, "Find a stranger, stare into their eyes and sing the love song at them." And I did it. So if I can do it, you can do it.

Nicholas Epley:
It could be worse. We could have gone with his suggestion. All right? Three questions, the three things I want you to share with your new friend, where'd you start in life? Give me a success, something you're proud of, and a struggle and how you made it through. All right?

David Brooks:
Go, go.

Nicholas Epley:
Let's get another show of hands here about how this went. How many of you felt this went better than you thought it would? Can we just end with that?

David Brooks:
That's crazy.

Nicholas Epley:
That's just such a robust effect. That's just such a robust effect. You talk about seeing other people as a moral virtue, and it is. I think you're right on that, but it also feels damn good, feels really good. For the illuminator, it's a positive experience as well. It's always struck me that becoming better at social interaction or becoming an illuminator should be a downhill battle for us. Once you try that and once you note that element of surprise, it ought to be easier to try it again.

Now, not all conversations are easy. And I want to end here tonight with a chapter in your book that was a reprint of one of your columns that was particularly powerful about your dear friend Peter Marx, who you dedicate the book to as well. And Peter took his own life from suicide. And sometimes when we're seeing people, it's hard. They don't believe the same thing we do. Or they're in a place, as we had many people, many questions from the audience tonight asked, how do I see somebody whose position I'm not in? You were not Peter's position as he was going through his mental health struggles. Give us some wisdom about how to do that better.

David Brooks:
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm reasonably well-educated. I should have known how to walk with somebody suffering from depression. And I learned that I didn't even know what depression was. And that another friend of mine who had depression said, "Depression is a malfunction in the instrument we use to perceive reality." And so it's not sadness, it's not related to sadness, it's not on that scale. And so Peter had these lying voices in his head that would say, "You're worthless. Nobody would miss you if you're gone." So he was perceiving reality through the prism of these voices that were fundamentally lying to him. And so we had three years. We had a friendship of, I don't know, we met when we were 11, so we had a friendship of a long many decades, but he suffered from severe depression the last three years of his life.

And so I made mistakes, which I've since learned are common mistakes. The first was to give him ideas on how to get out of depression. So I'd say he was an eye surgeon. And so I'd say, "You used to go on these service trips where you do surgeries in Vietnam. You found it so rewarding. Why don't you do that? It'll lift your spirits." And I learned when you're giving somebody ideas about how to get out of depression, you're just showing you don't understand, because it's not ideas, it's not like they haven't thought about this. The second thing I tried to do something called positive reframing, which was, "Well, look at all the great things in your life. Your marriage is great, your kids are wonderful, you've got a great career." And I learned if you're doing that, you're just reminding them... You're making it worse by reminding them they're not enjoying the things that are palpably enjoyable.

And so I think I learned over the time, A, the impotence of words in these situations. But B, one, acknowledge the reality of the situation. This sucks. How does it feel? How does it feel? Just so the person doesn't feel so alone, that there's somebody else who acknowledges the reality. Second, a burst of goodwill, I want more for you. It won't do any good, but just I want more for you. Third, constant touches. I wish I had done more constant touches, which is just text, just thinking of you. Because a lot of Pete's fears were that he's such a drag to be around, he'd lose all his friends. And so just like, "I'm not going anywhere."

And then finally, I read Man's Search for Meaning, the Viktor Frankl book I hope everybody's read, where he would say to those contemplating suicide in the Nazi death camps, "Life has not stopped expecting things of you, and that you still have a role to play in the world. And in fact, your suffering gives you credibility with those who are also suffering." And there's a great Thornton Wilder quote I put in the book, but it ends with, "In love's service, only the wounded soldiers can serve because they have credibility." And so I don't think anything I could have said or not said would've changed the outcome. The monster was bigger than any of us, but I could have walked with him more gracefully.

And I found now I'm around, I was giving a talk in Oklahoma City, and it's one of those talks where the questions come on index cards, and I'm standing at the podium. And they're like, who's going to win the '24 election and stuff like that. And then what do you do if you no longer want to be alive? And like, "Oh, what do I say?" And this was before I went through the thing with Pete. And to my shame, I flipped over. I did not answer that, because I didn't know what to say and I didn't know anything about the person. I felt irresponsible. But I wish I'd said, at least, "I just admire you for being so strong that you're still here." And so there are things you can learn to say to accompany someone a little better.

Nicholas Epley:
I found your book to be a blessing in that it provided words for thinking about things we've been sometimes hard to articulate at the level of the individual, but also highlighted things that I think even in the midst of the field we don't see. And that's a great blessing to us as people, but also as researchers too. So I'm very, very grateful for that.

David Brooks:
Can I end with one happy story?

Nicholas Epley:
Yes, yes, yes.

David Brooks:
First, thank you. I mean, you're aware I'm a journalist. I report on what people like you find, so I'm always grateful for the sources that really are the originators of this knowledge. And I just steal it at a mass level. There's a great... One of my favorite novels is a Wallace Stegner novel called Crossing to Safety, and it's about a lifelong friendship between a literature professor and a novelist. And the novelist at one point in the book says, "You have to understand when you read, you read to appreciate. I read to steal." But just one good story, because many of the joyous moments of my life have been in seeing others and just how fun it is.

But it's also fun to be the one seeing, to be the seer. It's not only great to have someone hear you. And the story I tell in the book was I was sitting at my dining room table reading a boring book, which I'm paid to do three years ago. And my wife comes in the door and she stands in the doorway, and the summer sun is coming in behind her. And she just pauses there on the threshold, which you can see from the dining room table. And she doesn't notice I'm there, because the kind of charisma I have. And I have this thought go through my consciousness, "I really know her so well. I know her through and through." And if you had asked me what I knew about her at that moment, it was not like her personality traits or her career trajectory or any of the words I'd used to describe her. It was like the whole ebb and flow of her being, like the harmonies of her music, just the way she is.

And it was almost like I was not just seeing her, I was seeing out from her. And I think to really know somebody, even a little, to see the world the way they see it. And the only word in English language I could use to describe how I was looking at her at that moment was beholding. I wasn't inspecting her. I wasn't observing her. I was just beholding her, which is like this appreciative receptivity. And it was just a wonderful feeling of human connection. And I told the story a couple of weeks after it happened to an older couple, and they said, "Yeah, that's what we do with our grandkids. We just behold." And it was just a beautiful experience of what these set of skills.

Nicholas Epley:
When it's at its best.

David Brooks:
When you have those moments.

Nicholas Epley:
Absolutely. I think the most encouraging thing about the writing and the work on this that you've done, and that comes out of the research as well, is that this is stuff we can do. So there's a great optimism here in many ways too, at least at the personal level. We're worried about the state of the world and whatnot, but you've got a lot more power to connect positively with people, to lift them up, to be an illuminator than you might guess you would. And it tends to go better than you'd think, as we saw here tonight. So let's leave on that encouraging note. We can all go out and do a little better. Have fun illuminating, everybody. Thanks so much for being here with us tonight.