David Brooks America Has A Moral Problem Not A Political One Prof G Conversations

TITLE: David Brooks: America Has a Moral Problem, Not a Political One | Prof G Conversations CHANNEL: The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway DATE: 2026-04-23 ---TRANSCRIPT--- And so when I think about what’s about to happen in the 2028 election, I think America is going to say enough. I don’t care if you like Trump or don’t like Trump, but this walk through carnage and contention and bitterness and corruption, enough. We want the exact opposite. And I think what America’s going to hunger for is not only a policy opposite of Trump, but the moral opposite of Trump and the social opposite of Trump and the emotional opposite of Trump. David, where does this podcast find you?

I am at the University of Michigan. I’m uh at an office. They stuck me in a few steps away from the president’s office. So, if you need me to get any student into the University of Michigan, I can just pop over and talk to him. So, I need that in writing cuz I have a 15-year-old, David, who who is good, but I’m not sure he’s Michigan material, so I need well-connected people. Um, does he happen to play basketball by any chance? Have you seen me? Yeah. No, that’s uh I I don’t weird thing. I just had a physical. I used to be 6’3. Now I’m 6’2. I’m shrinking, which happens when you get older, which is really exciting. Anyways, uh let’s let’s bust right into it. Earlier this year, you announced your departure from the New York Times after 22 years. You’ve sort of you you’ve kind of to a certain extent, you kind of identify or mark the Times on a lot of levels. Um you said leaving felt like St. Peter leave leaving the Vatican that you were uh raised to think working there was the pinnacle and you never contemplated leaving. What finally convinced you to leave and join the Atlantic? Well, first of all, I’ve been there 22 years and I’m 64. I figure I’ve got about 10 or 11 years of work, full-time work left in me and I thought I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t change. I do think changing environments, changing situations is a good way to change your thinking. So, even though I was perfectly happy there, I thought I would change. Uh second, uh I think America’s problems are less political and more subpolitical these days that we’ve sort of lost our humanistic core. Uh a sense of a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning. People are filled with resentment, spiritual crisis. 58% of college students don’t have a sense they their life has purpose. And so I thought to really address the issues at the level that I think they really exist at a I I would like to write longer. So at the Atlantic I can write 5,000 words even 10,000 words. And at Yale at any great university dealing with reviving the humanist core is supposed to be what the project is all about. And so I thought I’d put myself more on a college campus where I could begin to think about, you know, what makes our soul sing? How do we find things to fall in love with? uh how do we uh s have a sense of resilience? How do we how do we just fall in love? I I gave a talk at Yale recently called how to be ambitious without being a jerk. And I think those subjects have become central to my concerns uh more so than following Donald Trump every day, though I still do that too. So talk about some of the subjects that require 5,000 words versus, you know, a,000 or 1500. Has have you changed topics or you just expanding on them? Well, you know, I’m doing uh a piece today about uh about resentment uh and about I I think we live ultimately in a a a culture of resentment. And resentment is funny. It starts with a sense you can’t have something. You lack something or somebody else achieves something that you don’t have and you feel a loss of social standing. Somebody doesn’t see you and you want to be respected by this person but they don’t even know you exist. And so it starts with a feeling of impotence but then it goes on and becomes a transv valueue of values. And by that I mean the person feeling resentful doesn’t only uh wish he had what he didn’t have. He decides that what he doesn’t have is not worth having. And so eventually the resentful person says all that stuff that seems noble that’s all a fake. So kindness that seems like weakness. generosity. That’s all for performance. And Donald Trump is the the essence of a resentful person. I remember in the 1980s and there was an entire magazine called Spy Magazine that was dedicated to ridiculing Donald Trump. And a lot of the Manhattan real estate people look down on this schmuck from Queens. But he exemplifies uh resentment in that he does not acknowledge the higher registers of human nature. If you remember in his first term he went to Normandy and he was like the war dead are just suckers. Why would anybody risk their life for country? It just didn’t make any sense to him. Uh because he had cut off the higher registers of human nature. John McCain his heroism did not make any sense to him. Even this week attacking the pope Catholic social teaching just would not make any sense to Trump because the resentful person assumes that which is lower is more real. that selfishness, venality, the lust for power, those things are real. And the things at the upper register of human nature, those things don’t exist. So I asked myself, how do we get out of a resentful age? And that’s that’s the kind of subject that takes, you know, 6,000 words to to get into and out of. I find on the left that we’re constantly trying to demonstrate empathy for the right and the president and understand him better. And I just think it’s depravity on display. And I think we need to stop making excuses for it. But then the question becomes, all right, let’s reverse engineer it. He was elected. He was democratically elected. So his values uh people consciously chosen a democratic society to promote his values. So when you try and reverse order or reverse engineer it further downstream, is it the economy and people feeling left behind? Is it a a lack of critical thinking? Is it poorly poorly educated youth coming of age? And is it big tech making us more angry? Is it our political system that’s so starch that people were ready for something authentic even if authenticity was conflated with coarseness? Try and reverse engineer to the seeds of this depravity. Yeah. I I make a pretty sharp distinction between Trump and Trump supporters. And so I think Trump is a monstrous human being. But I think most Trump supporters that I know had good reasons for supporting him. I ran to a guy years ago in South Dakota uh who said I I had my best day of my life was when I was 35 and I was foreman of a section of a plant that made casings for refrigeration units. And they laid me off because I they had updated the equipment. I was no longer qualified. And he I said I you know I thought I’d disappear uh quietly. So, I packed up my stuff in my little office. I put them in a box and I carried it out. And when I opened my office door, there were 3,600 people. All the employees of the plant had formed a double line between his office through the plant across the parking lot to his car door. And he walked through that line as they all applauded him to show him what a good guy he was. That was 35 years ago. Every job I’ve had since then has been worse with less pay, uh, less reliable hours. I can barely go outside because my mother-in-law lives with us. She’s 99. She’s really sick. And so that he said, “That guy Trump may be a jackass, but I need a change.” And so I don’t agree with him, but I get where he’s coming from. And so my oneliner about Trump, he’s the wrong answer to the right question, but that doesn’t totally absolve the situation because then you ask, well, how did 77 million Americans take a look at Trump and see nothing morally objectionable or at least nothing morally disqualifying? And I think that is a very deep story and I I go to a philosopher Malister McIntyre who died about a year ago within last year and he basically said up until a certain time in world history people had their morality was shaped by their social roles. I’m a tailor. I’m a soldier. I’m a teacher. I’m a whatever a farmer. And my morality the way I behave myself the standards of decency are defined by how well I fulfill my moral role. And he says, ‘When we took all that away and we privatized morality. We said it’s up to each person to come up with their own morality. Uh well, most people can’t do that. If your name is Aristotle, you can maybe come up with a morality. The rest of us can’t do it. And secondly, we have no sense of a shared moral order. If we’re going to trust each other, we have to agree in right and wrong. And so we left successive generations morally inarticulate and confused. And there was a book by a guy named Christian Smith who’s a sociologist at Notre Dame when he would he went to college campuses and asked young people when’s the last time you faced a moral dilemma? And most of the young people couldn’t name what a moral dilemma. They didn’t know what it was. A moral dilemma is when two values you cherished clash. But they would say things like, you know, I I piled in a parking space in many quarters. And you would say, well, that’s a problem. It’s not really a moral dilemma. And he found that many of the young people had just never thought about how to talk about morality. Fast forward a couple years, a woman named Christine Emba writes a book called Rethinking Sex, and she’s talking to young adults about their sex lives, and she talks to young women who say, “You know, I I felt icky after a hookup, but I couldn’t I couldn’t tell you why.” And then the saddest story in her book was she had interviewed a woman who’d been raped, and the young woman said, “I somehow know rape is worse than a nosebleleed, but I couldn’t tell you why.” And so we’ve rendered generations left, right, and center morally inarticulate. And so they just don’t have the language to process why electing a guy like Trump, why that might be wrong, why that might be a foolish thing to do, or even to process their own moral formation if you don’t have words like sin, redemption, grace, it’s really hard to understand your own inner environment. And it’s very hard to make moral judgments about others. And so I think there’s been a loss of moral knowledge. And that explains why people look at Trump and think, uh, whatever. So, a loss in moral judgment. Do you think that’s because um, attendance to religious institutions is at an all-time low that we’ve been divided from our neighbors by big tech algorithms? Like, what what are the underpinnings of that that loss of an ability to articulate morality? Well, our our founding fathers took a look at human beings and said, “These people are kind of amazing and wonderful, but they’re really selfish a lot of the time. And if we’re going to build a democracy out of these people, we have to do moral formation. And moral formation is a fancy word for a scene I once saw in the first season of Ted Lasso. He’s asked, um, “What’s your goal for your football team, FC Richmond?” And he says, “I don’t need to win champions. I just want to help these young people become better versions of themselves on and off the field.” That’s a good definition of moral formation. And it used to be every school including public high schools, colleges, uh they thought our primary job is to turn out morally formed people. Uh I read about a school master who said our job is to turn out graduates who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. The kind of people you can count on when times are done. And one of my heroes was a woman named Francis Perkins who was Mount Holio class of 1905. and her worst subject was biology. So, they made her major in biology. They said, “It’ll be good for your character if you major in your worst subject.” And then they had the phrase there, “Do what no one wants to do. Go where no one wants to go.” And Francis Perkins spent her life traveling around serving the poor and became Secretary of Labor. And now colleges, we’ve sort of gotten out of the morality business in part because we decided, well, people are naturally good, they don’t need morality. In part because we are a diverse society. people don’t know what to say, but we’ve left people naked and alone. And if you got a world where 58% of college students don’t know have any sense of purpose and meaning in their life, they’re lacking something pretty core. And we’ve also got out of the business of training people to be considerate to each other in the concrete circumstances of life. I had a student who said, “I have had four boyfriends in my life and they all ghosted me at the end.” Nobody taught those young men that they have to have a breakup conversation. And probably nobody taught them how to break up with someone without crushing their heart. These are just basic social skills like how do you criticize somebody at work in a way that’s respectful? I mean, how do you sit with someone who’s depressed? Uh how do you sit with someone who’s grieving? Morality is not mostly about what you think about abortion. Morality is mostly are you considerate to people in the concrete circumstance of life. Nobody ever taught me how to get out of a conversation. gracefully. I remember I was at my fifth high school reunion and my only move to get out of a conversation in a cocktail party like setting was to say I’m going to go to the bar and have a drink and 20 minutes in my reunion I’m so drunk I have to leave the reunion cuz I had like six drinks in 20 minutes cuz I would just say I got to go get a drink. But see there so aside from the big moral issues just a loss of social skills. My friend George Han went to a Catholic boy school in Cleveland St. Ignatius and uh above emlazed or carved into the archway at the entrance is it says preparing men for others and I love that. I think that’s a decent mandate for fathers and for for I don’t know for trying to help young men um and talking about talking about service. What were we doing before that resulted in a greater sense of service and kindness that we’re not doing now? I’m trying to get to some sense of I’ll put forward some thesis around fault lines. Um an absence of male involvement in young men’s lives that I do think boys need men. And um optimizing for um service as opposed to attention and we have an economy that just tells everyone get attention regardless of how you get attention. And I do think big tech plays a role in elevating content algorithmically that divides us and rewards coarseness and cruelty. So I’ll just start there and I’m sure you have others. But how do we get to a sense of repair? What is the neosporin for this decay if you will? Uh first a revival of humanistic ideals. Humanism is based on the idea that we’re partially sinful, partially wonderful, but we have the we can be cultivated to repress our selfish sides and to strengthen our our more altruistic desires, our desire for love, for respect, and for other things. Uh, and so the way you do that is first you hold up exemplars. uh you you read about Pericles, you read about Shakespeare, you read about Martin Luther King, you read about uh you know Francis Perkins or George Marshall and you think okay I can be a little like that. There was an educator in ancient Sparta who said my job is to make excellence admirable to young people and so exemplars are powerful. What I got in my college at the University of Chicago was I said, “Hey, you’re a peon probably not capable of coming up with a moral philosophy which was accurate, but you are the lucky inheritor of a whole series of moral systems, moral traditions. And so we’re going to teach you about those moral traditions and you see what fits you.” And those are things like stoicism, Epicurianism, Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, rationalism. And so find the the sort of leaders you want to the sort of moral philosophers you want to follow and then the basic skill building uh and then the cultivation of the heart. I think one of the things that’s happened in our society is we have become so rationalist that we we sort people by IQ uh at age 15 to 17 and or really even sooner the young people an 8-year-old who’s been tested in third grade either knows the system thinks I’m smart or the system thinks I’m dumb and the system thinks I’m smart they go off into the the crazy stratosphere I listened to your interview with Ted Dentress the other day and he talks about how we put these these children through the most boring sortings process impo possible. But then the kids who take these tests in third or fourth grade who realize, oh, I’m dumb, they check out. And so you get apathy out of that. Uh, and so there’s just been this loss of of avenues. One of my best moments at at Yale, where I’ve teach and off, um, is I was teaching a young man, very brilliant young man. It was about your inner life. It was how to develop character. And at the end of the class and he was he was going to go off to a road scholarship. Really smart kid. He said, “Professor Brooks, I want you to know um your class has made me a lot sadder.” I was like, “Yes, this is a total win.” Cuz he had was good at playing the game, but working on his internal life, he had nobody had demanded that of of him. And so he went off to Oxford and he studied how character is formed and and moral philosophy and moral development. and I I assume he’s, you know, a better person for it. Support for the show comes from Built Rewards. If you’re like the majority of Americans, you know what it’s like to kiss a huge chunk of your paycheck goodbye every month. Before you even see a dollar of it, it goes off to pay for your rent or mortgage. 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You’re the father to three children. Is that correct? That is correct. Yes. I mean how do you try and actualize this at home with your kids and how if you were to do it again? Uh you know having had a life of introspection and you know you think very deeply about these issues. you know, what would you do if and what would you do differently if all of a sudden you locked and loaded again and had three more kids? How do you try to how do you try to affect this actualize it at home as a dad? And if and what would you do differently now if you had children? One of my favorite things from the psychology is from a guy named John Bulby who was a attachment theorist in the 20th century. Uh and he says all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. So we all need that secure base and that’s uh emotional security, your attachment with your parent, but it’s also moral security, a sense that you have a sense of what’s right and wrong. It’s a sense of spiritual security, financial security. You need that secure base. And so that I think what uh my I did reasonably well and what their mom did reasonably well was to provide that secure base. Trivial example, my kids happen to gravitate despite my gene pool. They were all good athletes and they um they gravitated toward positions that were maximally humiliating. So my two boys were pitchers and when you’re a pitcher and the other team is scoring runs, you’re just alone out there on the mound. And in my daughter was ice hockey and she played defense. So you’re standing there and they just scored a goal, gone around you and scored a goal. And so my role was the world may be criticizing my kid for this or that, but that will not be me. I’m just there to support. I’m just there to support. And one of the nice things I did, we we didn’t really push them, pressure them into this meritocratic madness. We let them have their own lives. Uh and so I, you know, and I see this in my students, I’d say 20% of them, uh, when they do something that mom and dad think is right and will lead to a prestigious career, the beam of love gets strong. And when they do something off course that mom and dad think will not lead to success, the beam of love is withdrawn. And so that’s called conditional love. the most important relationships of their life are conditional and those students are fearful and risk averse because they don’t have that secure base. The thing I would do differently, it’s taken me really my adulthood to get out of my head and into my heart uh and to be a little less cognitive and a little more emotional and emotionally expressive. And that was not how I was raised. You know, I was not I had I think we had a loving home, but we never said I love you to each other. That would never have happened in my home. And I did say that with my kids and we I remember once my mom looked at me playing with my kids and she said, “Have you raised your kids in the opposite way you were raised?” And my thought was, “Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much.” But I I should have been more emotionally open uh to them and more more emotionally expressive. That’s taken me a lifetime. And I think with age, you get a little more emotionally vulnerable. And even today, it’s hard for me to be as emotionally expressive as I feel uh with them because, you know, once you get a relationship, you you lock in a certain um mode of communication. It’s hard to break out of the way you’re traditionally relating to each other. I think a lot of men relate to that and that is and I’m trying to understand why and I think it’s more than just the way you’re the household you were raised in. It’s society teaches you to be a man and part of being a man is to be stoic and that somehow if you’re emotive it makes you weaker. that that emotional expression quite frankly is sometimes conflated with being um uh you know being homosexual at least that’s how I was raised. The very sensitive guys were likely probably not sleeping with women and less masculine and that you you conflated being expressive and emotional with what at the time was something perceived as negative. And I I’d like to think that’s changing a little bit, but I still very much struggle. And I like what Cindy Gallop says that the most the greatest wasted resource in the world is good intentions that you don’t articulate. Do you think that men still have Do you think things are getting better? Yeah, vastly. I think so. If you if you go back to the 1940s, it had good sides and bad sides. The men there was it was very hard for men to express their love for their kids or even to demonstrate it. and they didn’t feel a particular need. The positive side of that is there were a lot there was a lot more self- aacing behavior. There was less ego. There was less display, less performance. I had a friend who wrote speeches for George HW Bush, the elder who was raised in that World War II era. And the speech writers would write these paragraphs on how asking George W. Bush HW to talk about himself, how what a great guy he was and how he was going to make a great president. And he would cross out those paragraphs. He said, “I’m not going to brag about myself.” They said, “You’re running for president. You have to tell the country how good you are.” And he finally did it. He read the paragraph. And his mom called him up the next day and said, “George, you’re talking about yourself.” And so there was a sense you don’t talk about yourself. Joe Deaggio, when he hit a home run, he did not do a bat flip. So there was that emotional reticence had an upside. I thought it was it was elegant, the gentleman league, but it had a ferocious downside. And I think it’s changed in part because women are more powerful in the culture and they demanded it. But it’s also changed in part um because of what we’ve learned about the brain. There was a prejudice which stretches all the way back to Plato that reason is reliable and wise and the passions are these wild horses that run out of control. And your job as a rational person is to suppress the passions. The last 30 or 40 years of cognitive sciences have taught us that’s complete nonsense. that if you people who suffer lesions where they can’t process emotion they’re not super smart Mr. box like on Star Trek, they can’t make decisions because your emotions assign value to things. And if you can’t assign a value, you can’t decide what you like. And your desires, your conation, that pushes you in the direction where you want to go. And so if you want to be a wise person, it’s not enough to be a rational person. You have to be wise about reading your own emotions. Uh and I think that the shift in that science has made emotional processing seem more relevant, but also more important. And it it we we’re little less prejudiced that the emotions are these primitive stupid things. Your emotions are very smart. They’re they put the mind in a frame of reference. Uh so you know how to think about things. Uh and so tr learning how to read your body turns out to be just tremendously important. Knowing when your heart is racing, when your anxiety, knowing knowing a thing called emotional granularity, which is the ability to tell the difference between adjacent emotions, between frustration, anxiety, angst, uh anger, and stress. And if you can tell the difference between your different emotional states, you’re just a lot wiser about how to operate in the world. Do you think there are any hacks other than being more expressive about your emotions? Do you think there’s a practice around being more um I have someone very close to me who has been struggling with panic attacks and the first session this person the psychologist said you’re not in touch with your emotions and that’s easy to say but how do you are there hacks or practices for for make for reestablishing those connections? Yeah, I would advise or recommend a book by a guy Mark Brackett who’s at Yale uh uh called Permission to Feel and he says uh you should check your out your mood meter what he calls it’s a opportunity to reflect you you’re probably either high pleasure or low pleasure high energy or low energy. So if you’re low pleasure high energy that’s anxiety. Uh and so you you if you just pause in the course of a day say where am I where do I put myself on the mood meter which is basically a a chart with four quadrants and you can say I’m feeling uh I’m feeling good but low energy and that’s tranquility and then you the process of naming your emotion giving a label to it is a tremendously powerful tool because you want your emotions to be your adviser and not your master uh to tell you you know here’s what you’re feeling. Here’s what your emotions are measuring. Are you moving toward your goals or away from your goals? And so, you want to know that information, but you don’t want your emotions dictating where you go, cuz then they’ll sp spiral out of control. So, the mood meter is a good one. Reading literature is one. If you’ve got young people, there’s a the activity they can do in school that is most likely to increase their emotional awareness is drama. is uh playing a role in theater and that really has these big effects cuz you have to put yourself into not only the mind of another person but into the heart and soul of another person and that that’s a revoly experience for a lot of people. You have a new podcast uh about the moral and philosophical underpinnings of human decency. curious how you so far distinguish or the differences you’ve observed between trying to communicate I mean your your your your superpower is that you make people feel things you you articulate ideas that resonate with people and you make them feel something and you’ve I’ll say this I think you’ve mastered that in the written word I think it’s different I I I write things and I do stuff things on podcasts and I find that the ability to resonate with people emotionally is a different skill across those mediums. U one have you observed that and how if and how have you changed your approach and what do you find is working or different about the medium of podcasting versus the written word? Well, I’m I’m still hiring my team so we haven’t actually launched the podcast though. It’ll launch hopefully in in this later in the spring. So, but I I it’s a very interesting observation which I frankly had not thought about. I will say I I do a fair bit of public speaking and I would say what I’ve done I’ve I’ve made my writing to be more like my speaking and my rule of speaking is first of all uh I try to begin every speech with some jokes because when the audience is sitting there when they first get there they’re they’re unconsciously asking themselves this question is this guy going to suck and if you can tell a bunch of jokes five minutes yeah then they can relax and they can say okay he’s not going to suck um But then I I watched Brian Stevenson who um I hope everybody knows who Brian Stevenson is and he he frees people from falsely accused uh death penalties. Um I watched him give a speech and I learned it’s impossible to put too many stories in a speech. So it’s story point story point story point. Parker Palmer is an educator said my job is to find little stories that make big points. And so the way I think of a speech and I don’t know if you think of a podcast this way. and thought about it this way is like I’m a big Bruce Springsteen fan. So I model my speeches on Springsteen concerts. When does he do a happy song? When does he do a sad song? When does he build to a crescendo? And so a speech like a concert is a series of 3 to 5 minute emotional moments. And so how you structure those emotional moments determines whether you’re giving a good speech or a bad speech. Now a podcast is a little different because it’s a conversation. But I find one of the things great podcasters do is that they set an emotional tone. Uh that it’s so powerful to do different people’s podcast cuz they totally different emotional tones and some people it’s a warm some people in some podcasts were were the students were we’re learning with each other and some were the arguers who were debating each other and some were just sharing each other’s lives. I a friend named Kate Bowler is a great podcaster and she’s just like she went through really and she’s going through rough cancer and so it’s just sharing of a life. Uh not to name drop but uh the second most uh famous person who interviewed me this week was Oprah. Um you you’re the first obviously yeah me and Oprah I get that a lot and but you know she sets she exudes a kind of warmth that um that that’s so I I think the it’s really more the host who probably sets the emotional tone than the guest support for the show comes from LinkedIn ads. There’s no worse feeling than making a major investment in something only to realize it didn’t exactly live up to the hype, such as buying a nice piece of tech that ends up in storage collecting dust, or taking a business workshop where your main takeaway was little more than a few motivational words. If you work in marketing, this can happen with ads. You optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach, and reactions. 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Get more with Northwestregistered agent at northwestregistered.com/profgree. in our I want to talk a little bit about politics. In our in our presidential elections, America, I think, has a very healthy tendency to to go the other way. We’re like, “Okay, we we tried this. Now, let’s try this.” And we’re we’re like, “Okay, we had Thai food. Let’s I’m up for Mexican.” You know, we just don’t do two two meals in a row. So, based on that, do you think there’s an opportunity? I, as I said to you when we were off mic, I just interviewed Senator Chris Murphy and he he talked about I asked him to differentiate himself from the rest of the Democratic field if he were to run for president and he talked about common good capitalism and he you and he share some some I don’t know an approach to decency and putting decency and humanity at kind of the center and then working outward in terms of public policy and do you think that there’s a If if there’s the same pattern that we might end up with someone who goes the other way and is just very caring caring, demonstrates more what I call traditional feminine qualities, very sensitive. Uh do you think that’s a real possibility in terms of who ends up occupying Pennsylvania Avenue the next time? I think it’s an intense likelihood that you know one of the great one of the things that we’re in a rough period. We’re in a period of the last especially what Trump said about Iran, about the pope, all that is I found it it has produced in me and as an American just shame, moral injury and shame. It’s felt brutal. Uh and yet the good thing is culture changes really fast. So you think of the 1950s, it was a time of conformity. It was a time of crew cuts. And I’m now sitting at the University of Michigan. In 1962, a bunch of kids from the University of Michigan went to Port Euron, Michigan, and issued something called the Port Euron statement. And that began the ’60s shift in the culture. Said, “To hell with that. We’re going to have personal liberation. We’re going to have individual freedom. We’re going to get rid, reduce sexism. We’re going to shift the culture.” And so the shift in culture from the 1950s to the 1960s was epic. If you looked at the high school yearbooks in 1965, all the guys had crew cuts. In ’ 68, half the guys had crew cuts, half had long hair. By 75, they all had long hair. So, it’s a shift from a group collective culture to a very individualistic culture. When I was a kid, I loved the New York Jets and Super Bowl 3 was a competition between That’s Well, now I’ve switched. I’m an opportunist. Um, but Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny crew cut 1950s guy on my team. Joe Nameoth, Broadway Joe, Playboy, swinger. He wrote a memoir called I can’t wait until tomorrow because I get better looking every day. And so you see how quickly culture can shift and it shifted again in the 80s with the Reagan and all that. And so when I think about what’s about to happen in the 2028 election, I think America’s going to say enough. I don’t care if you like Trump or don’t like Trump, but this walk through carnage and contention and bitterness and corruption, enough. We want the exact opposite. So, I think Gavin Newsome is being an idiot for being Trumpike on the left. And I think what America’s going to hunger for is not only a policy opposite of Trump, but the moral opposite of Trump and the social opposite of Trump and the emotional opposite of Trump. And so, I don’t know if it’s Buddha Judge, I don’t know if it’s um Cy Booker, but Cy Booker exemplifies the kind of upbeat, positive, loving spirituality that I think is the opposite. If I I don’t live in my home city of New York. If I did, I would vote against Saurin Mandomy all day because I disagree with him on every issue, but I really have warm feelings toward the guy cuz he smiles when he talks. Like he he is a he’s having a good time. He’s an upbeat kind of guy. And that that’s that’s the emotional tone that will be opposite of a guy like Trump who rarely smiles unless it’s for a fake smile and never laughs because he can’t trust himself to have a spontaneous emotion. So I think the the cultural shift is going to be head spinning in 28. I hardly ever watch TV, but one of the few things I do watch, but I watch it on YouTube is uh Brooks and Kart. I really enjoy your uh commentary and your your colleague there and also I think the moderator does an outstanding job of guiding the two of you. Uh you said recently on NewsHour that the media’s business model has become just bashing Trump and that outlets keep doing it without h having something new or interesting to say. Um if what would your well one I want you to expand on that and how much of that has to do with the state of media versus Trump himself? Is it just that there’s money in it or because it does feel you know my my sense is the de Democratic party at some point has to transition from indignance to ideas and give us your sort of state of play in terms of media and this Trump bashing uh industrial complex. Yeah. Well, it’s so easy like we all know that we don’t we shouldn’t write to the ratings like everybody in media these days knows how many page views or you can it’s very easy to find out or what how many people you know watched a podcast so you can you put much in front of people they will follow them and candidly when I was a columnist I would write some columns that wouldn’t get you know they were columns that meant a lot to me and sometimes during the Obama years I would write a column toward one person toward Obama and they wouldn’t necessarily get big readerships. But if I wrote a few in a row which are not like super popular, I feel a little antsy like, “Oh, I want to be up there on the leaderboard.” And so I would write one that I would know would do well with audience. And and that’s just um that’s a corruption. We’re all in businesses where there’s the right thing to do and then there’s what the incentive structure wants you to do. And we all have to navigate those kinds of differences. And so I think that’s been a problem. And then for some reason there’s a lot of people out there who just want to hear that Donald Trump is a schmuck and they want to hear that. They started wanting to hear that in 2015 and it’s now 11 years later and they still want to hear that. I don’t quite get it. I get a little bored with it but but the audience is out there for that. Um and so I think that’s one of the failings of the media. Uh and I should say I you know it was a total honor to work at the New York Times. It’s a total honor to work at the Atlantic. There are so many great journalists that were all inspiring. I was so proud to be associated with them. Um, but the other two flaws I think in the media that are not the flaws of a moment but are the flaws of decades is that when I started as a police reporter in Chicago, a lot of the reporters, the older guys I was working under had never gone to college. Uh, and they were high school being a reporter was a working-class profession. It was not necessarily a college person’s profession. uh and now it’s very much a college person’s profession but even more so there somebody did a study of the editorial staff at the times the post the journal MSNBC NBC CBS ABCN and uh 55% of the employees went to the same 32 elite colleges and that’s not only true in the media that’s true in Hollywood that’s true in law that’s true in corporations so we have become a ridiculously unrepresentative sample of the country and in all sorts of elite professions and that’s a problem. And then related to that is we do not have enough Trump supporters on our staffs. And that’s not necessarily because we want to, but it’s very hard to find Trump supporters who follow the professional standards we demand. And because a lot of Trump supporters said, “Screw you, elite.” And not only that, screw you the whole uh epistemological mod theory you walked in on. I’m not I don’t play by your rules. And so we can’t have them on because they don’t play by the the normal rules of honest journalism. And so it’s hard to find Trump supporters who can follow the standards that we insist on. And I think in those ways we become offkilter. And um it’s it’s ways our my profession uh can reform itself. What’s your media diet? When you wake up in the morning, what are your go-to sources? You know, my my first read is something I’ve become addicted to uh called News Items by John Ellis uh which is an elomeration site uh by a guy who was a longtime TV producer and basically he does no Trump bashing. He does the substantive issues of the day. So for in times like this there he there’s there was a new report on AI. So he had like five items on what we’re learning about AI. Then he’ll do war reporting, uh, how the Chinese are doing in their own AI efforts. And then it’s all linking to pieces in like the FT, the Time, New York Times, Washington Post, but also Euroat News, these Middle Eastern specialty sites, academic reports. And so I really feel I’m getting this substance and I’ve really become a fan of of news items by Jean Ellis. It it’s not much. It’s like 10 bucks a month. It’s a Substack. So I do that. And of course I do look at the mainstream, the times, the post, the journal. I think the journal is doing very well by the way. I could say that now that I don’t work for the times just that they had a story, for example, the other day on comparing millennial incomes to boomer incomes. And in many ways, even though we think millennial and Gen Z are doing much worse, in many in some ways they are, in a lot of ways they’re not. So I I really gravitate towards stories that’ll give me those kind of big social picture. Uh and then I read a lot of substacks. I mean I read some of the most common ones. Um, no opinion, a guy named Noah Smith, Matt Glacius, people like that. There’s a guy named Damon Linker who I like. And so a lot of my sub a lot of my reading is off the normal media diet. And two people I really have come to like like Noah Smith or Damon Linker, Andrew Sullivan, people like that. What are your thoughts on how social media and AI have impacted u media consumption and generally uh you know this notion of decency and humanity? I um my views on AI are partly colored by the fact that I just so enjoy it. I’ve had so many good conversations with Claude over the last couple months. Uh I had one yesterday. I’m writing about resentment and um it introduced me to a thinker I’d never what I I prompt it with who are the major lines of thought on this subject and then it gives me them and I say please summarize these people’s thoughts. I never ask it to think for itself. I just want to think tell me what other people have been thinking and then I ask what books should I be reading to really understand and then it gives me the books and I learn so much. I learn about philosophers I’ve never heard of. I learned some lines of thought I’ve never heard of. It’s really good at drawing from 3,000 year years of intellectual history and saying you should look at this. This person is connected to that person and that person is connected to this and it’s fantastic. My main concern is that let’s say 20% of humanity are uh will have what they call the high need for cognition. Uh they like to think and if if you’re on a train or a bus and you look over and somebody’s doing a really hard puzzle, that person likes to think. They like hard mental challenges and they think that 20% will use AI to think a lot more and their mental and cognitive capacity and productivity will be astounding. I think 80% of humans I’m just guessing don’t like to think. They’re what the psychologists call cognitive misers. So they’d rather not. And so they’re they can use AI to substitute for their thinking. And some of the new research that has just come out in the last couple days suggests that the decline in motivation to think among people who use AI is massive. That people just do not uh not only do they not want to think, they lose the capacity to think hard. And I I relate to this. I um sometimes I’m on a road trip and I’m taking a whole bunch of turns, left turn, right turn, this exit, that highway, this highway, and I think I used to have to do this using a map, a paper map. And that would to I think that’s impossible. How did I ever do that? And I am 100% confident I am incapable of using a map to do a a complicated trip today. I have lost that ability. And you extrapolate that out to all sorts of cognitive tasks and what you get is a massive loss of cognitive ability. And what you get wind up with which is a we we have a cast system in economics and education. But a cast system where you have 20% are cognitive superstars and 80% are cognitive backward. You’ve got problems. My son did something that really impressed me. He’s 18 and he asked me, we live in London the other day. asked me, he said, “I’m meeting a friend on Kensington High Street. Do you know a good coffee shop there?” And I said, “No, just ask AI.” And he said, “No, I don’t ask AI uh for simple stuff. I’m worried I’m not going to be able to do this on my own.” And it just struck me. I’m like, maybe there is hope. You know, I’m I’ve just gotten so lazy and now my ability to discern through simple questions is that part of your brain, you know, if you don’t if you don’t use it, you lose it. What is your approach to social media? Do you use social media to spread stuff to learn or do you not use it at all? I did a lot. Um I said I said some stupid stuff which got me in trouble. So I scaled back after that and then once Elon took over it sort of all fractured. And so I’ll I’ll follow Twitter and I’ll especially follow I do political Twitter. I force myself to have half my people are blue, half are red and some of the MAGA people really annoy me but it’s important that I I encounter them. Um, and then I do AI Twitter and I do New York Mets Twitter, which is my baseball team. So, I do that. I don’t do I haven’t been on Facebook in years. I’ve never been at Instagram. I’m not on TikTok. I find it too addictive. And so, my social media is down. And I find like your son, a lot of young people understand what’s happening. They they don’t need Jonathan Height for God bless him for what he’s doing, but they don’t need him to explain what’s happening. And I visit a lot of high schools every year and I’ve never met a student that’s not happy with the phone bands. They love the phone bands. And your son is right to be suspicious of AI using it as a cognitive crutch because it really is dam it’s going to be damaging. What box has not been checked for David Brooks personally and professionally? What what if I mentor some young men and I say figure out where you want to be in 10 years and then reverse engineer actually I say 5 years but and then reverse engineer back the series of actions that you need to take to get there and and start and they you know and reverse engineer them to the most kind of trivial easy things and just start on them what box is left for you to check yeah in that circumstance I always say don’t asking what do I want to do with my life is too big a question my question is if the if the next five years is a chapter in your life, what’s the chapter about? And then I always tell young people in particular, three adventures a decade. Try three new things a decade. Like I have a son who was in the military. He taught a little kindergarten in Nairobi. He worked at a sports camp. He did a little business. And then he became a fourth grade teacher, which is I think what he’ll spend his career on. And so he had three ad at least three adventures through his 20s. And so if you have children in your 20s, chill out and let them have their adventures. Life is long. they’re probably going to be working till they’re 75. So, let them have their adventure so they figure out what they really want to do. Uh, so that that’s my one piece of advice. You know, my um I professor who said what dinguishes people is not their opinions, it’s not their IQ, it’s not their ethnicity, it’s the ruling passion of their soul. And so, it’s really important for us all to know what is at this moment in my life, what’s the ruling passion of my soul? And what I love most right now, you know, I’m like, I don’t know if you’re like this, but I tell young people, remember when you were 13 and horniness came into your life? Well, when you get to be about 55, there’s a new form of horniness will come into your life, which is called generativity, which is it’s hard to leave a legacy, to give back, to contribute something to society. Uh, and so that’s kicked in. And my little form of trying to do something good for the world is to like figure out how to modernize our thoughts about moral formation and how do you find your purpose and how you think about your own desires. And so I love taking amorphous subjects like how do you think about your desires? That’s an a very amorphous subject. And I love reading and studying and researching. So I get it down to some something concrete that I can communicate through stories. And then if I say it to a group of people, I see people writing it down because they find it useful. One of my favorite saying about writers is writers are beggars who tell other beggars where they found bread. And I’m just working out my in public. And if I if what I’m going through is what other people are going through and I can have I have the time because I don’t have a real job. I can find something useful that they find useful too, that’s my that’s rewarding to me. Uh and so I love doing that and that’s you know what I’m hope to do for the next five or 10 years of and then on my podcast there are a lot of great researchers who we all interview in the media. There are a lot of great teachers who never get interviewed and these are the people who are great in the classroom. men and women who just know how to talk to young people. They know how to communicate great truths. And I’d love to spend my a large part of my podcast talking to them and seeing what they have to offer us. David Brooks is a writer at The Atlantic and a commentator on PBS NewsHour. He’s the author of several books including How to Know a Person, The Second Mountain, and The Road to Character. I always learn something from you and I’m I try to write it down and I re I I I write it several times as a means of trying to cement it in my brain. And the thing I’m taking away from this podcast today is I think a lot about being a dad. And one of my shortcomings is I just know I fall into the trap of trying to put them on this path to what is seen as traditional success. I’m too obsessed with the getting them into an elite college. I’m too obsessed with creating what I call slopa and that is connecting small acts of discipline every day to success. Got to study. Uh you I know you can do better on the act. I just can’t help it. And the thing you said that I wrote down five times is let them have their adventures. I’m going to try and remember that. So anyways, thank you. Thank you for that, David. Thank you. And it’s I’m a big fan and follower of the show. So always whether I’m speaking or just out there listening, I’m part of your conversation.