LinkedIn presents I'm Rufus chrisam and this is the next big idea today David Brooks
on the art of seeing others [Music] deeply I'm here this morning with my producer
Caleb good morning Caleb good morning Rufus and the reason you asked me to be here is there's
something you want to confess indeed yes there is and this is something I've never told anyone
else Caleb I haven't told my mother I've never told anybody this wow when I was 11 years old I
stole a KitKat from a convenience store whoa
did you get caught no I I actually got away with it
which made it worse I had to live in secret shame for 40 years Caleb I know that sounds ridiculous
since we're talking about a 50 Cent Candy Bar that's that's what they cost back then yeah yeah
this was back in the 1980s Caleb when you were not with us and uh things were less expensive then
but 50 cents was a lot of money uh and seriously that memory haunts me along with a few dozen of
my other moral failures from my past you know various
times when I've made selfish decisions
or didn't take the high road and that's always how I've thought of morality these moments where
we're tested and were proven to be either made of the right moral stuff or the wrong stuff
I was intrigued to encounter a different view of morality last week when I read a new book
by David Brooks called how to know a person let me play you a clip from the audio book He's
talking here about the novelist and philosopher Iris Mur she argues that morality is
not mostly
about abstract Universal principles morality for her is mostly about how you pay attention to
others it means that a good person tries to look at everyone with a patient and Discerning
regard that was a revelation for me this view that the critical moral choice we each make is
actually just in our daily interactions with each other that if we choose to treat everyone the
individuals around us with patience and empathy and curiosity everything else that matters flows
from that H
and so before you you thought that morality was about the choices we make just during
climactic moments and that was kind of it yeah I I did I mean I had this sense that that moment
of weakness when I slipped the Kit Kat into my pocket that was an immoral act the universe was
testing my moral compass Caleb and it turned out mine was defective and I I I felt the sense of
of a crack in my in my morality and so now 40 odd years later with help from Iris and David have
you adopted this new view
of morality has this really changed how you approach the world and and
how closely you pay attention to other people well I I mean I I would say that I certainly prefer
this idea to a world in which the line between the moral and immoral individuals is those who
have stolen kitkats versus those who have not for obvious reasons right but there's just a line
at the Pearly Gates in St Peter's like kick cat Steelers over here please exactly right no exactly
no I'm prepared for this I this this
is what I see coming but what I would say is I think there's
something appealing about this idea that what really matters is is this often subtle distinction
between whether we make an extra effort to see the people around us to really listen to them
treat them with dignity and that little distin results in all these Downstream effects about
how we treat others that has a profound larger impact on the world but it's not an easy thing
to do I think in the end and this is something David Bro
oks found out in his journey writing
this book and and trying to evolve as a human that resetting our thinking takes real effort
yeah so on the show today he's going to teach us some of the skills that go into seeing others
understanding others and making other people feel respected and valued well since we're confessing
I think there's something I should own up to oh wonderful yes I'd love to hear it you know going
into this interview I have to say I was not the biggest David Brooks fan yo
u know I I read his
columns in the New York Times and he's a great writer but I just had kind of written him off as
a little bit of a sppy kind of oldfashioned conern conservative but as I listen to the two of you
talk as I got to know him a little bit in that process of hearing someone come alive through
conversation I realized like wow this is a guy who is Soulful he's empathetic he's surprisingly
humble for someone who's had the success that he's had and I think for me the biggest Revela
tion
this is someone who I actually have a lot in common with so it was a real about face for
me listening to this it was was kind of it was kind of magical actually you might have had
that feeling Caleb because he described himself as a man of average intelligence with better
than average communication skills was that did that resonate for you it really did I felt like he
had I felt like he had peered into my soul there I think I have gotten away with slightly above
average communication
skills that have masked some some intellectual uh weaknesses within
me well your reframing of David Brooks Caleb MH is exactly the kind of the kind of reframing
that David encourages in his book how to know a person inter he says you know we all have a
tendency to diminish other people to quickly kind of stereotype them and I don't think it's
radical to say that this is a real problem in our country right now you you can see it in
the dismissive language we use to talk about each other we t
alk about you know rednecks and
Coastal Elites the woke mob and Bible Thumpers I don't think David is so naive to believe that
empathy and curiosity about other people are enough to resolve the prejudices and Discord
we battle in the US but he does believe that in this age of creeping dehumanization anything
we can do that's humanizing anytime we can cast Justin loving attention as Iris Murdoch calls
it on other people that's got to be a good thing hi I'm kwami Christian CEO of the American
negotiation Institute and I have a quick question for you when was the last time
you had a difficult conversation these conversations happen all the time and that's
exactly why you should listen to negotiate anything the number one negotiation podcast
in the world we produce episodes every single day to help you lead persuade and resolve
conflicts both at work and at home so level up your negotiation skills by making
negotiate anything part of your daily routine David Brooks welcome to th
e next big idea
podcast thank you I've brought whatever Big Ideas I have I've brought them with me perfect Perfect
you'll you'll need them so you've been an opinion columnist in news commentator with a focus on
politics for as long as I can remember and in the last decade you've written books like the road
to character and the second mountain and now your latest how to know a person that are more focused
on human connection emotion character development meaning purpose to what extent is thi
s shift about
losing interest in politics or or maybe losing the team the moderate conservatives with which you
were Affiliated or perhaps about climbing a second Mountain a shift in your priorities in this phase
of your life or perhaps about working on your own personal objectives in public yeah so all of the
above but uh let's start with uh you know my own personal problems so you know there's a saying
we writers work out our stuff in public and so one of the things I've tried to do over
the last
10 years is just becoming a more open human being and so I say in the book that if you ever watch
that movie Fiddler on the Roof you know how Huggy and emotional and warm Jewish families can be
uh I come from the other kind of Jewish family so we were super cerebral and then I went to the
University of Chicago which is a great school I'm very proud of it but it's super intellectual and
so I was trained to like live in my head but I learned if you cut yourself off from emotion uh
a
nd from real connection with people you've cut yourself off from maybe some pain and discomfort
but you've also cut yourself off from life itself uh and so I've just tried to take a 10-e Journey
just to be more open and to be better at emotional connection and better at being a friend so
start that but then on top as I've tried to become a more Humane person our society has become
less Humane in my job as a journalist I just see an epidemic of blindness I see people just feel
invisible and
unheard and that's like black people feeling their daily life is not understood by
whites rural people in the midwest feeling Coastal Elites don't see them lonely young people feeling
nobody sees them Republicans and Democrats looking at each other in blind incomprehension so not only
for my own sake but for society's sake it's just important that we get a lot better at the skills
of building relationships and understanding other people and unfortunately we're we're not
necessarily great at
this I I was a little disconcerted to learn in the early pages of your
book that as you put it I'm probably not as good as I think I am at reading people none of us are
which is some con and you share that the social psychologist William IES found that strangers
in the midst of a first conversation read each other accurately only about 20% of the time and
close friends and family members do so only about 35% of the time why are we so bad at this yeah
um well first of all that 20% number th
at's an average so some people are 0% and some people are
pretty good they're 55% so we very very widely in this skill and I'd say the the reason we're not
so good a is natural egotism we're not thinking about somebody else we're just trying to broadcast
ourselves sometimes it's anxiety you know you got so much noise in your own head you have trouble
thinking about others sometimes we're locked into our own Viewpoint and we can't see from the other
people's Viewpoint and so there's a story
of a guy who's on one side of the river and there's a woman
on the other side of the river and she screams at him how do I get to the other side of the river
and he screams back at her you are on the other side of the river like he can't put himself in
her shoes and so I I just think we're naturally a bit self-centered and you know I notice I I
come home from party sometimes and I'll notice that that whole time nobody asked me a question M
and I've now started paying attention to this and I
figure like 30% of people are question askers
like when you're in conversation with them they ask you a lot of questions the other 70% are are
perfectly nice people they're just not question askers and so as a result they don't really know
much about other people and you know you don't need academic research to tell you this how many
times have you felt somebody didn't get you or you're misheard misunderstood uh stereotyped and
it just happens all the time and there's nothing crueler than
being indifferent to another person
I fear that I have on occasion been the person at the party not asking the question I mean I've I've
like you I I'm making progress on this front but you can get better I think that's the key point
and and in the book one of the key distinctions or dualisms I make is between diminishers and what
I call illuminators yes and so the diminishers are those people who who stereotype ignore they're not
curious they make you feel small but illuminators are those
people who are just curious about you
they're bright about you they Shine the beam of attention upon you and they make you feel great
they make you feel lit up and so part of the job of the book is to try to help people become
illuminators and not diminishers one of the things that I walk away from having read the book
with is that being an Illuminator is not only a public service releasing a kind of contagion
of affection into the world but it's also a lot more fun you have this wonderful
description of
a conversation you were having with a 93-year-old woman named Mrs laru dorsy and the way that your
mutual friend Jimmy derell greeted her and this this really stuck with me as like something to
strive for you want to share that story yeah sure so I'm down in Waco Texas and I'm at a diner
with this 93y old lady named laru dorsy and she's like presenting herself to me as like this strict
disciplinarian and so I was a little intimidated by her and into the diner walks a mutual f
riend
of ours named Jimmy derell who's a pastor down there he pastors to the homeless and he sees
us and he comes over to our table and he grabs Mrs dorsy by the shoulders and shakes her way
harder than you should shake a 93-year-old and he looks into her face and he says Mrs dorsy Mrs
dorsy you're the best you're the best I love you I love you and that Stern disciplinarian that I'd
been talking to turns into this bright ey shining 9-year-old girl and so it's Illustrated to me the
power of
attention that whenever you encounter someone they're secretly or unconsciously asking
themselves a series of questions am I a priority to you am I a person to you and the answers to
those questions will be answered by Your Eyes by your gaze before they'll be answered by your
words and the most profound thing about that little anecdote is that Jimmy's a pastor so he's
a Christian yeah and so when he looks at somebody he thinks he's looking into the face of God when
he's looking at somebody
absolutely anybody he thinks he's looking at somebody made in the image
of God and so I don't care if you're a Christian Muslim Jew atheist agnostic approaching each
person you meet with that level of reverence and respect is an absolute precondition for seeing
them well and so that's the first step in getting getting to know someone is that initial gaze
and it turns out to be just very powerful as you were describing that scene there's a sense
that you were looking with a bit of amazement
and and maybe an aspirational quality of a student
trying to learn a language you don't speak at this ability Jimmy had to take this woman who was who
was kind of intimidating you a little bit right and just and just completely transform her her
state of mind I mean obviously you've been on a on a journey of learning have do you feel that you
you've spent time in your life as both diminisher and Illuminator I'm kind of a reticent aloof guy
that's just my natural personality setting but I f
ind if you treat attention as an onoff switch
not a dimmer it helps so if I'm going to be with you I'm going to be 100% with you I'm not going
to be 60% with you and I was really drawn to a philosopher named Iris Murdock who was a novelist
and philosopher and she died probably like couple a decade or two ago and she says attention is
the primary moral act we normally see other people in self-serving ways how can this person
help me but if we can cast what she calls a just and loving attenti
on on everybody we meet then
we'll be better and we'll make them feel better and she says we can grow by looking attention is
the first moral act before we decide to be honest or dishonest be loving or unloving first it's a
quality of attention and if I look to you with critical eyes I'm going to find flaws and if I
look at you with generous eyes I'm going to find a person struggling to do the best they can the way
you attend to the world is the way you become in the world I love the Simpli
city and humility of
this point of view that that Iris expresses you know because we think of we we tend to think of
morality as these kinds of pivotal decisions we make at certain moments in our lives do we take
this action or or or that action but in fact this view is is like no it's it's these little
choices we're making all day long about how and if we see people fully and um you write evil happens
describing Murdoch's view when people are unseeing when people don't recognize the person
hood in
other human beings so so essentially if we if we make this decision to to try to fully appreciate
and see everyone in front of us that has uh effects down the line of of really meaningfully
changing how people interact yeah and at the most extreme case unseeing leads to horrible massacres
and murders and and I have a quote in the book from another book called machete season from
a French journalist and the French journalist was interviewing people who committed the Rwandan
Genocide
and he's talking to a guy who happened to take a machete to his neighbor a guy he' lived
next to for 25 years and the guy says in the middle of when I picked up the machete I looked
into his face I did not see the face I had known all those years it was just kind of blurry and so
in that moment of genocidal rage he is literally not seeing the face of another person and so
it's that's the act of dehumanization of not seeing other people's faces and to me any Act
of humanism is trying to see
the other's face trying to see the world a little from their point
of view when I was in high school in Washington DC where you are now my father would sometimes
ask me to pick up the dry cleaning or or or go get the car from the shop and I I I would go and
say hey I'm you know I'm rufus's son I'm here to pick up the the dry cleaning and the guy would say
how is your father please tell him that Jimmy said hi will you tell him that will you tell him that
I said hi and I said well sure yeah
and know and then pick up the car boy I I love your I love
your dad will you tell him that that Lou said hi and so I came home and I EV finally said dad
what are you saying to all these people he said well I just asked them about their lives and the
notion that such a small thing could have such a a momentous impact really really kind of stuck
with me I'll throw out too that my father is a is a passionately religious guy he tried his
very best to raise me as an Episcopalian it didn't take u
h I couldn't quite Square religion
with my you know scientific understanding of the world and I I think I've always seen religious
belief as both a positive and negative force in the world but when I think about the positives I
do think about individuals I've known who who who radiate love and Goodwill and I wonder whether
you know you you talk we talking earlier about the importance of sort of seeing the soul in the
eyes of people do you think that is a necessary part of the equation or or
is it just additive
from your perspective I don't think you have to be religious to see people well I mean religious
people I happen to be a person of faith we talk a lot about being good good and all that but our
actual behavior is not that much better than anybody else's so it doesn't really take a lot of
the time but there are extraordinary examples of people who who feel like they've been lit up and
so like I know a guy named ponar gues Who's down in Houston and he used to run somethin
g called The
Living wheelchair Association and they would take men who'd been Paralyzed by construction accidents
mostly the Teno immigrants and they'd give them uh Wheelchairs and diapers and catheters so they
could Le ified lives Poncho is a wonderful guy and I once said to him you know you radiate Holiness
and he says to me no I reflect Holiness that it's not me it's it's God's love coming through me so
there are beautiful individuals but I know people I have a friend who um he when you
he walks into a
diner he immediately makes friends with everybody in the diner and or in the coffee shop and then
the second time he visits the coffee shop they all think he's their best friend and then the third
time he visits the coffee shop they all ask him to officiate their weddings the guy just ready it's
exactly like your dad that kind of curiosity yeah and in the book I mentioned this guy Dan McAdams
who studies um short how people tell their life story and so he calls them in and h
e has 4our
sessions he asks them tell me about your high moments your low moments your turning moments and
then at the end he gives them a check for their time and a lot of the people just push back the
check and say I'm not taking money for this this has been one of the best afternoons of my life no
one has ever asked me about my life story I've and people just get so much satisfaction just telling
a little about their life story it's like better than money and and so if you give them a ch
ance to
do that you're giving them a gift and then on your own end it's just interesting because you know
I read a lot of psychology books and history and biography each individual life I encounter is more
interesting than the generalizations that Scholars make about uh these things I I met a woman years
ago now who was a trump supporter uh but she was a a biker and a lesbian and converted to Sufi Islam
after surviving a plane crash and I was like what stereotype do you fit into and and mos
t people
are like that we're just more complicated than our stereotypes from my own Vantage I I've often
felt that uh life is even more precious because it's temporary in the absence of an immortal
Soul we have limited time so the urgency of celebrating each moment each life is maybe even
great at least that that's been the way for for me there hasn't been a diminishment in in in sort
of rapture with my loss of Faith at the age of 12 but I you know what has really struck me is this
opportu
nity to learn from the the Jimmy derell of the world and how that changes the world that
we experience you know so I I think about like you write some people walk into a room in a way
that is warm and embracing others walk in looking cool and closed up and and I think there's a case
to be made that those two people are walking into two different rooms right you know I mean that the
I think of it almost as like you think of the the Heisenberg uncertainty principle you know to look
at really
small subatomic particles you have to shine a light on them and it changes them uh and I
think we could almost think about an interpersonal uncertainty principle that when you the active
radi warmth and genuine interest and Care changes the room that you walk into right I think it's
absolutely right and you know I I you know we all get in different conversations and even little
micro encounters at a store over a cash register yeah it's amazing how quickly we pick up on social
cues and you k
now you know one of the things I emphasized in my earlier books were mammals
like we we're smelling unconsciously so much is going on we're smelling each other pheromones
and things like this and somebody who who you know every conversation takes place on two levels
it's the nominal subject we're talking about but the real conversation is the flow of emotions
going on underneath us underneath that am I with every comment I'm making you feel more embraced
or more threatened and unconsciously
we're super aware of that even if consciously we we may not
be aware and so we're creating the context uh in which people shine and if you look at people like
you know I for the book I literally would watch Oprah people M yeah and she is a loud listener
her eyes are grow when something exciting is happening she's encouraging when something funny
is happening and she goes into these silences when something sad is being discussed to invite more
conversation and she's really with her just her
little gestures she's really leading people
down the road and I think if if you're you know sometimes people get a chance to moderate
a panel discussion or something the moderator is the most important person in that room cuz they
set the emotional tone for everything else yeah I love this kind of midsection of the book where
you really get into the nuts and bolts of of how to have a great conversation of what methodologies
we can all use yeah and that's one one of the most fun parts of re
searching the book was talking
all these conversation experts and just saying give me practical tips I just want very practical
life hacks of how to do this so for example one of them uh was keep the gem statement in the center
if we're disagreeing there's probably something deep down we agree about if if my brother and
I are disagreeing with how to take care of our our Dad's health care we deep down we both want
what's best for our dad that's the gem statement if we keep bringing that up t
hen we'll preserve
the relationship amid the disagreement or don't be a Topper if you start telling me about the
problems you're having with your teenager and I I say oh yeah I know what you mean I'm having
the same problems with my teenager it sounds like I'm trying to relate to you but what I'm actually
doing is Shifting the conversation from talking about you to talking about me so topping is bad
uh another thing is uh do the looping we we're not as clear as we think we are and we're not
as good listeners as we think we are so if you say something important to me then I should try
to paraphrase it back to you so you can clarify to make sure we really do understand each other uh
so do the looping I find especially with teenagers you got to do a lot of looping oh interesting I
yeah that's why I need that advice I have three of them right now congrat good luck with that yes
yes congratulations commiserations are in order yeah um but uh so the don't be a Topper was one
that I
I found particularly disheartening because those have been moments in conversations where
I thought I was doing the right thing right and and I guess I would push back a little bit on the
topper thing because I think sometimes saying like oh wow I completely relate with what you're
saying I've I've been experiencing something similar recently I I I mean it strikes me that
it's somewhat of a question of how of how you do it right yeah and I guess I would say I would say
yes I'm having troub
le with my Tommy or whatever and then I ask you another question about your
situation and I find when you get people who are great listeners they ask different versions of
the same question three times in a row and so they'll say interesting how do you do this oh
no really and then tell me more about that or what am I missing here and so they get you to go
deeper than you expect to go in a conversation and the new things come out in that third answer
and another one that I love is is don't
fear the pause we all have this tendency to stop listening
partway through somebody else's statement because we're busy formulating our response we're using
the same parts of our brain to formulate our response that we would properly use if we were
attentively listening and so I love this advice of waiting a few seconds if necessary raising
your hand to sort of signal I'm I'm digesting and processing what you said and then formulate
your response that that's so powerful yeah I but apparentl
y the Japanese culture is more
comfortable with those pauses that I I read I think in a book called Kate Murphy's book you're
not listening to me um that their a Japanese is comfortable with 8-second pauses uh and you don't
want to do that all the time but I have a friend not in Japan but in Tulsa Oklahoma and when you
talk to him he raises the hands and he he honors you yeah with with that pause now sometimes if
we're having like a witty conversation we don't want to be a pause we just wan
t to like leap in
on top of each other but but if it's something serious then that pause is a sign of respect and a
sign I'm really taking this seriously I'm thinking this through I'm really listening all the way 100%
to you yeah what what I really love is this notion of um helping to co-author a new idea you know
this sense of of being kind of deeply engaged in a a collaborative exercise to just explore
ideas and you had this wonderful description of of this early 20th century British Stat
esman
Arthur balur I think it was right who he was was known as a great conversationalist and you wrote
that he would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and discover in it unexpected possibilities
he would probe it and expand it until its author felt that he had really made some contribution
to human wisdom and and he would leave walking on air right that that's a that's that's a a
wonderful thing to be able to do yeah and we we think of people great conversations as people
who say wi
tty things or profound things but really there are people who have the ability to receive
you and then lead us all on a a joint exploration there's another story I have in the book which
as I say in the book is could be apocryphal but it's still instructive and that's the story of
Jenny Jerome who later would become the mother of Winston Churchill but when she was a young
woman in the late 19th century she was invited at a dinner party and was seated next to William
Gladstone who was prime
minister oh yeah and she left that dinner party thinking that Gladstone was
the cleverest person in England Eng land and then a couple weeks later she happens to be seated next
to Benjamin Disraeli Gladstone's great rival and she left that dinner with Disraeli thinking that
she was the cleverest person in England yeah so it's good to be gladon it's better to be Israeli
to if people leave the party thinking wow I'm so interesting uh then you you've done something nice
for somebody and you've
probably learned a lot well and then and then one other uh recommendation
you make is to ask big questions and you suggest questions like what crossroads are you at uh if
you died tonight what would you regret not doing maybe sometimes we feel that asking these kinds of
large questions is off-putting or but in practice people respond pretty well you found yeah and I
think we're too shy rather than too invasive in conversation now kids are really direct question
answers askers one of my fav
orite stories in the book is comes from a friend of mine named naobi
Wei who was teaching eighth grade boys had a do interviews for to like journalists and the first
time she does this she says to the boys okay you can ask me anything and I'll answer honestly and
the first question out of a boy's mouth is well are you married she says no second question are
you divorced she says yes third question do you still love him and she's like has her breath
sucked out of her lungs because it's such
a direct question she says yes then another student
says do does he know do your kids know like kids are phenomenal asking questions we get a little
shy about it and of course that's appropriate when you first meet somebody you want it to be a
shallow conversation like I'll ask people where you from uh because I get I learn a lot from
where people grow up or where'd you get your name that gets people talking about their families
but after you've established trust and people are comfortable
with each other then you can ask those
bigger questions um if this 5 years is a chapter in your life um what's the chapter about or um
um uh you know what what's a commitment you've made that you no longer really believe in can
you be yourself where you are and still fit in and so like I was at a dinner party um well two
dinner two different dinner parties one with this retiring academic he was 80 and he's he was still
in good health he said what should I do with the rest of my career that
was a big question and we
had a great conversation about his interests but also about what old age should look like uh and
how you want to finish off your life uh it was a great conversation another time uh we're at a
dinner party and I ask people a wife a question my wife always makes fun of me for asking uh how
do your ancestors show up in your life and around that dinner table there was a Dutch family I think
there was an African-American couple there were people from all sorts of differ
ent backgrounds
and we all got to talk about our heritage our grandparents our ancestors cuz we've all have
been shaped by all those things that happened for centuries leading up to our own birth and so
it was fun for each of us us to like none of us had a clear answer but we could explore in your
journey as a as a conversationalist one sense one gets reading the book is that you go to a lot
of dinner parties which I think is wonderful uh it's my hobby I used to play golf and now I like
to
hang out with people yeah no that's wonderful I I it's what we should do and when you reflect
on your journey as a conversationalists do you practice all the that which You Preach in the book
when it comes to how to how to have conversations I wish like I learned all these things and some
of the times I really do it but sometimes I'll be out with people at a bar or something and I'll
have a drink a glass of wine suddenly I'm I'm I'm on broadcast mode I'm telling I'm telling stories
more th
an I should I'm talking more than I should I'm asking less than I should so I I I struggle I
I think I'm better and you know I I started out in my 20s or in my 30s as someone who was extremely
good at avoiding intimacy and if you made some confession to me about something in your life
I like would a verb my eyes and quickly make an appointment with my dry cleaner I'd like get the
hell out of there and but now I'm I'm a lot better like wanting to stay in that moment wanting to
appreciate it
and be more emotionally open I was at a a conference a couple years ago and it was
sort of a Loosey Goosey conference and we're in a group of people and they hand us out these lyric
sheets and they say turn to a stranger around you you and sing this song into that person's eyes and
if you had asked me to do that when I was 30 my head would have exploded I like there's no way I'm
staring into the eyes of some stranger and singing a love song yeah but I did it uh so that was a
a mark of I was
a merit badge for David Brook's personal growth and and you're you're you survived
the experience and you're you're here survive I wouldn't want to do it too often do you think
that we should be in some more organized fashion teaching these kinds of interpersonal skills yeah
I I think we should teach it at school almost like our schools are prepare us for career but if you
want to know what's going to make you happy in life like your the quality of your marriage will
be four times more imp
ortant than your career the quality of friendships will be four times more
important in your career so we should train people to be good spouses to be good friends to be good
neighbors uh and somehow uh we just don't do it I saw a study just last couple weeks and they were
looking at there were a lot of guys who've never had a a date they've never had a date they've
never had a romantic relationship uh with a man or a woman and they looked at they figured out
why and the number one answer w
as poor flirtation skills and so we don't think like flirtation is
a skill we're going to teach at school but it actually turns out to be important that if you're
if you're good at being flirtatious you're going to probably have more romantic relationships than
you would otherwise and I just I don't know if we ever taught these skills I sort of think we did
we were in and meshed in communities where these sorts of things just were in the water but maybe
they got outdated or maybe uh our soc
iety just got too complicated you know we evolved to be in bands
of 150 people more or less like ourselves and now we're in these wonderful diverse big communities
and maybe our social skills are inadequate for that diversity and so I you know my book is
an attempt to try to teach these skills but I would love to see somebody develop a high school
curriculum just so young boys and girls don't have to go through this it's going to be awkward the
adolescence is going to be awkward but maybe i
t could be less awkward if they knew how to flirt
yeah well if if the art of flirting was one of the sections of the of the interpersonal skills
course I'm sure that it would be popular although it's less popular I found when it comes from your
father I have three teenage sons and I I'd said to them okay if you want to flirt with girls for
starters it helps to talk with them one of the blessings and curses of being in New York is that
you are at restaurants and the tables are so close toget
her you overhear the other conversations
and the number of times I've been at a table with somebody and then the next table over is
clearly a first date and usually it's the guy doing 90% of the talking and I just want to take
a fork and yam it into his neck and say ask her a question just one question but he's like thinking
he's going to impress her by talking and talking and talking about himself um it's it's so there's
more flirtation skills that need to be [Music] taught hi I'm Jonathan
Fields tune in
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out follow raising Health wherever you get your [Music] podcasts you have a wonde
rful section
about the importance of learning how to tell the story of Our Lives you want to share share that
well this is another skill they should teach at school like yeah how do you tell your story you
can't know who you are unless you know what your story is and you can't know what to do unless you
know what story you're a part of and so it's just very important to know how to tell the story of
your life and when stories go wrong people go to therapy because therapists are basically st
ory
editors their stories isn't working anymore and often it's cuz they get causation wrong they
think they're to blame for things that are not their fault and they think the things they really
are their fault they blame others and so you got to iron out their story to get the causation
right and so when I'm listening to people tell their story the first thing I'm listening for
is their tone of voice like are they sassy are they ironic are they cruel are they loud and so
the tone of voice
uh it it says a lot about the Persona of the person how confident are they in
themselves do they think the world is absurd or do they think it's inspiring and you can tell a
lot from the tone of voice then the second thing I'm looking for is the plot we each pick a plot
for our lives and some people you meet them their plot is Rags to Riches they start out poor and
they've made it and they want to tell you that story some people their plot is overcoming the
monster they had an abusive paren
t or maybe they suffered from alcoholism and their story is I had
this Challenge and I overcame the monster and the most common plot is redemption that I was cruising
along in my life something bad happened to me and I came back better and that's sort of the story I
guess I would tell in my life but I've always want to know what's what story are they're telling
and then the final thing I want to know when I'm listening to somebody's stories is what role
are they playing and so I was reading
for example this great Memoir by the actress Viola Davis
and she's the fighter like she she grew up in extreme poverty and she writes in there and scene
after scene where my sisters and I walked down the street as a troop we were a unit you were not
going to mess with us so she's like the fighter other people are like the Healer yeah some people
are the scholar and even though I'm a journalist I think my role is teacher my great pleasure comes
from learning smart stuff from other people an
d then sharing it with people so I'm I'm always
listening for stories and I'm trying to get my conversations to be story conversations so there's
this psychologist Jerome Bruner who says we think in two different modes we think in paradigmatic
mode which is like an argument or a PowerPoint deck or a presentation or strategy memo and then
the narrative mode and if we want to study science or something we want to be in paradigmatic mode
if we want to write a newspaper column probably paradigm
atic mode but if we want to know about a
person we want them to tell stories and so even as a journalist I no longer ask people what do you
think about this I ask them how did you come to believe this then they start telling me it's
some experience or some person who gave them their values and it's just way more interesting if
I can get them into story mode this shift between paradigmatic mode and narrative mode this sounds
like something that has been a change for you that you basically de
cided that narrative mode is more
important for understanding the world which is to say more specifically understanding the people
around you right and that you you're you're choosing to spend more more time in narrative mode
right and less time in this in this analytical mode uh and that's a and that's a choice but I
think I try to do a little balance of both so for example I have a chapter in there on personality
types you know just as a geologist they can study a rock face better because
they know the different
kinds of rock if I know the different kinds of personality types I'm going to know something
about you if I know you're conscientious then I know you're very self-disciplined I know you're
probably good at exercise regimes you're good at losing losing weight but maybe you're a little
rigid and so have that template in my head it helps me see you the way you fit the template
and way you don't and so I'm going to want to know a lot about the general patterns of human
nature but then I'm going to apply it to you the unique person you are you know you've mentioned
science a few times I go into this only a little in the book but I spent a lot of time talking
to neuroscientists about perception yeah uh and you know the the way perception works is
not the way I thought it worked I thought we open our eyes and you know data floods in but
if we tried to do that there would be too much data our brain couldn't handle it so the mind it
turns out is sending out p
redictions or models of what expects to see and then checking
with the eyes to make sure the models are right yeah so it's prediction correction or as
a Neil Seth a great neuroscientist said it's a controlled hallucination yes we're hallucinating
the world and then we're trying to make sure our Hallucination is roughly accurate yeah and so
with that in mind when we see another person we have to understand they're creating their own
world with their own models and it's a miracle at all we se
e the same world but we should certainly
not presume it's going to be automatic that the way you see things is going to be the way I
see things in fact it's very unlikely and so that's why conversation is so important I just
have to ask you over and over again well how do you see things and here's how I see things and
how interesting it's different I'm curious to know you were we're talking earlier about about
storytelling and you mentioned that you tell the story of your own life as a stor
y of Redemption
how would you tell the story of your own life you know I tell the story of my life as trying to go
deeper throughout my life I was always an average person with above average communication skills in
11th grade English the teacher Mrs do snap said to me David you're trying to get by on glibness stop
it and on the one hand I was humiliated cuz she called me out in front of the whole room on the
other hand I thought wow she really knows me well I'm I'm honored but so I I had th
is phenomenally
lucky career my career has been way above any expectations where I had a few lucky breaks I met
William F Buckley at the right moment he gave me a job out of some miracle connection and then I got
it I just it was a more successful career than I ever thought but I found the Career Success fails
to satisfy which most everybody finds and then about 10 years ago I went through a really hard
season uh for divorce and sadness and paying the price for not having these social value
s and and
so there was a lot of loneliness and an absence of really good friends who I could hang out with
on the weekends so I went through this Valley and I wrote this book the second Mountain about this
period in life and I said you know you go in the first Mountain which you think is your career
you're going to build your identity you get knocked off the mountain you're in the valley
and I quoted a theologian Paul tilik who said that suffering interrupts your life and reminds
you you'r
e not the person you thought you were it carves through what you thought was the floor
of the basement of your soul and reveals a cavity below and then carves through that and reveals a
cavity below so in those tough moments you you see a lot deeper into yourself than ever before and
you realize that only sort of relational food or moral food is going to fill those deep spaces so
in 2013 I went through a lot of a very sad period 2014 listened to a lot of very sad Irish music
like chenade o
Conor was just about the happiest thing on my playlist so you know um but then I
grew and you you know you can either be broken by Misfortune or broken open and I hope I was
broken open I became more vulnerable more open and so that's the little tale I tell of myself
it's a journey of a guy trying to become more human well on the topic of isolation and periods
of challenge I think it's fair to say that that that our nation is going through a period of of
challenge uh in term psychologically
right it's kind of a fraught moment in history when you look
at levels of of depression of of a collapse of trust do you want to share some of the statistics
about where we are as a country right now yeah it's just weird that we're going through this sort
of Social and relational crisis and it shows up in a million statistics the rising mental health
problems Rising depression rates Rising suicide suicides up by about a third since 200000 among
teenagers it's up much higher but then there
are weirder ones like the number of people who say
they have no close personal friends has gone up by four times since 2000 the number of people
who say they have less than five friends has gone up since 2000 the number of people who are
not in a romantic relationship has gone up by a third since that time two generations ago if
you ask people do you trust your neighbors 60% say they trust their neighbors now it's down
to 30% and 19% of Millennials the younger you are the more distrustful y
ou are cuz society's
been untrustworthy and so in statistic after statistic you just see a country that's sad and
when people feel unseen unrecognized unfriended they regard it as an injustice which it is and
they lash out yeah and so periods of sadness leads to periods of meanness and along with all
the St sad statistics I could s you a bunch of mean statistics hate crimes going up gun violence
indiscipline in school and so it's just a social breakdown and learned over the these years
you
can't have a healthy democracy on top of a sick and rotten society and so I started you
know nominally as a political columnist as you mentioned earlier yeah and I realized our key
problems are in politics but they're Downstream from a deeper set of problems in our society and
the book is meant to be a little Ray of of Hope like here's how we can actually treat each other
better and build trust you if we can't build trust you can't build trust with somebody who doesn't
understand you and s
o this skill of seeing others and being deeply seen is the precondition for
rebuilding trust and if your Society doesn't have trust it it doesn't have a lot yeah and and
when a when a when a population when a collection of people is isolated and dispirited it opens up
opportunities for demagogues doesn't it is how does this relate to what you call the politics of
recognition yeah well when you feel invisible you want somebody who will recognize you yeah and
if you're say in the midwest in a
former steel town and you feel you've been left behind by
the economy but not only that the people who run the media the people who run the universities
the people who run Hollywood they're all from a class that has nothing to do with you and they
seem to look down on you you're going to lash out and you're going to find somebody who can make
you feel seen and demagogues do that and then what happens is everything becomes politicized because
politics gives the illusion that you're going to
get what you want it gives you the illusion of a
moral landscape there's the good guys and the bad guys it gives you the illusion of community I'm
on my Republican team or my Democratic team but these are all Illusions politics doesn't give
you real Community you're not like hanging out with each other you're just hating the same thing
you're not really doing moral action like sitting with the widow or feeding the hungry you're
just like getting indignant on Twitter and so politics is a fa
lse form of social therapy that
people have leapt into but now our late night comedy is politicized our sports are politicized
everything's politicized and we've become over politicized and under moralized as a society we
we talk about politics too much and relationships and being considerate too little one of the things
I learned from this philosopher Max honth is his name that every society has a recognition order
what he calls a recognition order and in a fair Society everybody's recogni
zed in our society
only a few people are given a lot of recognition mostly the highly educated highly affluent highly
good-look and so we have a scarcity of respect or a maldistribution of respect and part of the
book is to try to redistribute respect more broadly than it is right now do you think that
we can kind of interaction by interaction dinner party by dinner party block party by block party
is there a pathway towards really fundamentally changing the Dynamics in our country we just
what
do you think I'd see it in my own life that I'm my relationships are just richer because I my way of
being in the world is richer yeah with most people in the world you can begin to develop a stronger
understanding of each other and I really think there's an ideology going around that you can
never really understand another and of course you can't all the way we can't understand ourselves
all the way but I've read books of History where the historian is writing about people who
lived
in very different technological era say the Middle Ages very different cultural era and
yet you really feel an identity with the people she's writing about Zade Smith is a great novelist
yeah and she had a passage in an essay she wrote recently she she was calling her own girlhood and
she said when I was playing at my friend's house I would try to imagine what it would be like to
never leave what it would be like to grow up in this house whether they were Ganan or Bangladesh
or from from Ir
eland whatever and she said I was an equal opportunity Voyer and I thought what a
great way a to prepare yourself to be a novelist like imagining all these other lives but what
a great way to prepare yourself to be a good student of other human beings and I just have to
think in a a world that's getting more dehumanized that anything we can do that's humanizing that
tries to see the world from another point of view that's got to be a good I don't know if it'll
change the world but it's got
to be a good thing to do on its own and which is to say that that the
humanities themselves are humanizing I think there can be a point of view that fiction is frivolous
but these exercises in in understanding people understanding other human Minds it's really what
all of art is about on some level and and and it's important and it's a it seems to be a force for
good yeah I know a guy who when he gets cranky his wife asks him do you have a novel going and
if he doesn't just say please read
a novel it it makes you a little happier and calmer and but
I do think you know people students of mine will say I can't make ma in the liberal arts there to
impractical and I said liberal arts are the most practical things you can major in because they
teach you about other people yeah and if you don't know about other people you'll be miserable
and you'll make them miserable uh and it's rarely frankly the students it's I I just once I want a
student come up to me and say you know I really
want to major in accounting but my parents are
forcing me to major in French poetry that'll never happen cuz the parents are the ones who are
putting the pressure on the students to major in something that they think is professional but
AI is going to swallow up a lot of those skills anyway so you might as well be get really good
at understanding people that's right there's an irony about this notion that the extraordinary
work of some very sophisticated coders over time has resulted in a
kind of emerging technological
capability which is pushing us towards focusing on more human skills uh which are perhaps better
informed by the humanity like prompt engineering which is how we we're interacting with llms large
language models AI is is I think people tend to be better at prompt engineering if they have more
experience with playing with language right um so it could be that that Council coming from parents
to their children will change in the next 5 to 10 years with this in m
ind right it could be but
you know the llms are really good at at obviously synthesizing massive amounts of data to create
a generalization about things but to know one particular human being yes uh that's something
that we're better and I I do think one of I'm more Pro optimistic about AI than the average
American I think we've introduced a a new form of intelligence into the world and we're going to be
able to use it to a lot do a lot of great things but um I do think it's going to reveal
Who We Are
by what it can't do and I do think there certain skills and I spent a lot of time talking to
neuroscientists about this that um it just won't be able to do it it's phenomenal at some things
but you know sometimes I'll hear an AI researcher say we're going to uh make machines that think
like people do and I'll go to a neuroscientist and I ask them what do they think and they say well
that would be a nice trick because we don't know how people think so uh the human mind is way mor
e
complicated than even a a large language model in my view yes no I think that's true although this
may be where the difference of faith kicks in because though I think it's true that large
language models today the way they're built are not in the process of becoming conscious or
becoming we're developing human level intelligence if one believes that human intelligence and
Consciousness is something that's an emerging property that came with with a scale of the the
size of the brains tha
t we have with yes some specialization but not widely different from the
brains of all other animals though there may be some new forms of AI that will be necessary it may
take decades not years it does seem like there's a there there's a pathway towards that which is
which is humbling we'll see but you know I don't think I we don't know how Consciousness emerges
so true but I it could be because it just emerges from the scale but I'm not sure of that and you
know I think I see humans doing
a lot of things that AI so far doesn't really seem to be doing
like understanding or having motivations and desires I the AI is great at mimicking a lot
of human things but it's not great at actually being a human and so I I still think it's an it
and not a not an entity not an animal [Music] yet you know I think it could be useful to
take a step back and tell you a little bit more about why we do what we do at the next
big idea club we do it because our lives have been transformed by book
s fresh ideas from the
world's great thinkers we find both fascinating and useful and yet we know that books can be
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now [Music] well I want to pose to you one of the big questions you offer in your how to have
good conversation section if the next five years is a chapter in your life what is that chapter
about yeah so I've had a good run professionally and
I I used to about 10 years ago had really
have good local community and so I had like I was lucky enough to have a column in the New York
Times and and and I appear on the PBS NewsHour so that was all wonderful but I was absent really
the local um Deep Roots and then I got in and and about 10 years ago we joined congregation
joined um this extended family of of DC kids uh but over Co all that blew up there the kids aged
out they grew up and moved away and so I'm without a a the kind of loca
lly rooted community that I
think would be a good balance for the stuff I do at work so I think my wife and I are both very
intent we we need to find a a a chosen family we need to find a local community that's rooted in a
place that we can really plug into and so I think the next 5 years aside from doing all the work
I do in public will be trying to find the kind of rooted Community we experienced before yeah i'
I've had a bit of a view that that the way that we live today as Homo sapiens
everyone in their
own white box you know sort of separated maybe suboptimal like there's some countries where where
they're building a half dozen Apartments the chair Central Kitchen where they alternative this is a
real interest for me in the second half of my life is is how can we rethink how we actually design
how humans you know live live together yeah and I'm glad that um now uh when the home builders
ask people would you like a senior Suite in your the home we're going to build for yo
u 40% of
people want a senior Suite they want Grandma and Grandpa to move in to help raise the kids so
we're seeing more three generation households than before if I could just tell One More Story based
on what what you said so this is a story that I I read a couple years ago and it was about
the 18th century colonies American colonies and so the European civiliz settlers are on the
east coast and occasionally somebody they would one of them would get kidnapped by the Indian by
the natives
and uh they would try to rescue them from being kidnapped and the Europeans would
hide they didn't want to get rescued and there was this big population flow from the European
settlers to go live with the natives but there was no population flow of natives who wanted to
go live with the settlers and the Europeans like Benjamin Franklin was very bothered by this we're
the better civilization and yet it it was because in the native communities they had Community yeah
and they were they felt
embraced by the whole tribe or whatever and so it it makes you think our
whole civilization is is Mal that we have we're not like answering some basic human truths and the
reverse was also true that when Native Americans were raised in with the colonists the first chance
they had they would run back to their tribes and never return if people were voting with their
feet in very clear ways yeah that's something to learn from that well thank you so much David
is there anything else uh that we
didn't cover that that that you'd like to share no I enjoyed
it I think we've covered the Waterfront I can't think of anything vital that we didn't touch
amazing well thank you David for taking time to be with us today I I I really enjoyed that
conversation yeah thank you thanks for reading the book and I appreciate your attention and I
enjoyed being [Music] together David Brooks is an opinion columnist for the New York Times an
author of The Social Animal the second Mountain the road to ch
aracter and most recently how to
know a person the art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen he's also partnered with
the Aspen Institute to start something called weave the social fabric project that aims to
tackle the problem of broken trust that has left Americans divided lonely and in Social gridlock
you can learn more about it by following the link in the episode notes if you enjoyed this podcast
you can do the usual thing and leave us a rating and a review on Apple podcast Spo
tify and so on or
you could do something even better follow me Rufus grisim on LinkedIn sign up for my newsletter it's
called the next big idea and leave a comment on my post about this episode I'd love to know what
you think of David's work has it inspired you to get to know someone more deeply does this
resonate for you do you think we can really improve things dinner party by dinner party block
party by block party it'd certainly be fun to try I'd love to hear your thoughts please don't
be shy today's episode was written edited and produced by Caleb bisinger sound designed by
The effortlessly Talented Mike TOA the entire team at the LinkedIn podcast Network looks at
us with just and loving attention whenever we see them on Microsoft teams I'm Rufus chrisam
and I'll see you really see you next [Music] week
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