Chicago Booth Review Podcast David Brooks on How to Make Others Feel Valued

Hal Weitzman: New York Times columnist David Brooks has written a host of books on topics such as bourgeois bohemians, how Americans think more in the future tense, and the urge to merge our sense of loneliness and our need to belong. In his latest book, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, Brooks writes about our ability to know others and to make them feel valued and understood. As the title suggests, the book is about how best to do that. At Chicago Booth, there's perhaps no one better to engage with that question than Nick Epley, a behavioral scientist whose research is all about how to deepen human connection. Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you ground-breaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman.

Chicago Booth's Roman Family Center for Decision Research recently staged a conversation between David Brooks and Nick Epley as part of its Think Better series. Brooks talked about how seemingly small everyday interactions can significantly shape our lives, and he discussed the difference between illuminators who enhance understanding and connection and make others feel valued and diminishers who stereotype and disregard other people's complexities. Their discussion also offered practical advice on how to build meaningful relationships. The first voice you'll hear will be Nick Epley's,

Nicholas Epley: This usual, the speaker series, usually we focus on how behavioral science is being used kind of 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 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, and intuitions and that so long as those sentiments are rightly trained, so 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, Amos Tversky stuff, the two systems, and I've just found it revelatory on how decisions are made in Jonathan Heidt's words. 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 disproportion-ately 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.

But 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 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 focused 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: 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.

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. So 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 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 are polluters and 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 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 the news hour 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 would 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.

But through that he created a moral ecology, a layer way of doing things, a news hour 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 talked 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. There can be fetching, because they're so powerful.

I had a book, [inaudible 00:09:02] 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 after you about you after you're dead, whether you're kind, honorable and courageous. And that dualism like rip 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 Ian 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's 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 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 putting, 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 Diminisher's 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 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 four 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 am just talking to somebody. Then I can be really there at 11 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 an offer of 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 Durrell 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, and 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 on the adjacent table is standing there in the hallway. And 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 learn 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 read in mind-wise, 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. 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 the [inaudible 00:15:53] are great I tell the 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. And 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 kid's 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? Does your kids know?" They're boom, boom.

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

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: Mm-hmm. How has this changed how you approach people? I remember when, 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 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 in." But then in the book, and since you've described that, you think you do things a little bit differently.

David Brooks: Yeah, I absolutely do. So now, thanks to your research, I'm much more 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, if I can tell... I generally start with their childhood. Where did you grow up? And I travel a lot, so there's a good chance I know where they grow 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 kids' 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 are thrilled. And there's some research that people enjoy telling their life story more than money. And I tell this Dan McAdams story or colleague at Northwestern, that he asked 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.

And so I talked [inaudible 00:19:23], met a Trump guy on a plane, and he was coming back from his... He had come over to hear 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 different 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: 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 it to be too prying. I was at a round a campfire with a fellow journalist and she started prying. It was not reciprocal at all. It was just like, question, question, all my guards went up. 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. I'm 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 we went to his office, packed his stuff in the box, open 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, 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.

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago podcast network show you should check out. It's called Big Brains. Big Brains brings you the stories behind the pivotal scientific breakthroughs and research that are reshaping our world. Change how you see the world and keep up with the latest academic thinking with Big Brains, part of the University of Chicago podcast network.

Nicholas Epley: 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 is 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. You were offering up an invitation to engage and showing your interest, and then they responded. One of the, 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 come down. He looked around with me for a little bit and then he said, "It's very interesting first Biden signs that seem 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-Fifteen 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. It 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, the great conversation in my life, I mean 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 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 or 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 comic, which is a Muslim population in Soviet Union. She's exiled by Brezhnev. And so every bad thing that happened to 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? It was crazy.

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

David Brooks: And she ended with, 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, Bonsi had a question that I was interested in hearing your perspective on. He ask, "Given the importance of social connection, shouldn't 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're walked 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: I 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 that 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 were awesome.

David Brooks: Yeah. 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, they don't know what to say. And then Frederick Meekner, 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 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, wonderful connection and love, but they can also be sources of pain too. And that's a hard thing to get. So you note that many people do seem to have a hard time seeing other people not so great at conversations. You'd note you're sitting at a bar one time doing your journalism clearly, and there's a guy sitting there who is 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, you 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 like an insane way to sort society. And if you ask people, why are you fired from your job? When they do studies, why do you 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: You'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 the name Tony Kronman at Yale, who said the university's 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, of course, at Yale, like the one I'm doing now for older people, which, well, 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 is your big 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 of 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 to 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, right? 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 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 well, we could do it 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. If there's nobody sitting next to you, maybe 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 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 talking 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're 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 through?

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 done what his suggestion. All 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? Go. Go. Let's get another show of hands here about how many of you felt this went better than you thought it would? Did 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 good. Feels really good.

David Brooks: Yeah.

Nicholas Epley: It's just 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 Marks, who you dedicate the book to him 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 are 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 say, 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 along many decades. But he suffered from the 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 say, you used to go on these service trips where you do surgeries in Vietnam. You found it so rewarding when you do that, it'll lift your spirits. And I learned when you're giving somebody ideas about how to get a depression, you're just showing you don't understand. Because it's not ideas that 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 a Man's Search For Meaning the Victor 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 says, "It ends in love 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 find 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 saying at the podium, and they're like, who's going to win the 22 more elections, 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: So 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: I end with one happy story, so-

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 the 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 what 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 the 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, then you might guess you would. And it tends to go better than you'd think because 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.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.